Middle class households in Mumbai are in a state of shock following the high profile suicide of chartered accountant Nidhi Gupta, who jumped off the 19th floor of her residential high-rise in Malad together with her children aged eight and six on March 8, and the suicide by hanging of 11-year-old Sayoni Chatterjee, a class VI student of Holy Family Convent School, Ulhasnagar in suburban Mumbai on March 14.
Although Nidhi Gupta’s death is being reported as a standard case of dowry harassment by her in-laws, Sayoni Chatterjee’s tragic suicide is more comp-licated and has aroused widespread fears of breakdown of communication between presumably educated middle class parents in urban India and their children.
A few days earlier while clearing her cupboard, Sayoni’s mother stumbled upon her pre-teen daughter’s personal diary. In it, she read about her puppy love for a fellow boy student. Curiously despite her daughter’s entreaties, the child’s mother Shampa, a homemaker and wife of Subhash Chatterjee, an executive in a chemicals company, insisted upon complaining to principal Sister Blossom, against the boy and lack of supervision in class. When she returned home, she found her daughter hanging from the ceiling fan.
Informed academics in the country’s commercial capital are shocked by the mother’s over-reaction to puppy love which in the contemporary age of cable television and the internet, tends to manifest itself earlier than in the teenage years. “It’s not unusual these days for pre-teens to experience romantic feelings and parents need to learn to empathise with the confused senti-ments of their children,” says Dr. Vandana Lulla, principal of Mumbai’s well-known IBO (Geneva)-affiliated Poddar International School. “The mother should not have gone to complain about this private matter to the principal. She should have had a heart-to-heart talk with Sayoni and been sensitive to her perhaps premature feelings.”
With professional counselling services seldom available in state board affiliated schools such as the class I-X Holy Family Convent where sex educa-tion is a taboo subject, the consensus of informed opinion suggests that parents themselves need to provide counselling and sex education to children. “Nowadays, children mature and attain puberty much before they get into their teens and it is normal for them to develop crushes,” says Arogya Mary, programme coordinator of Yuva, a Mumbai-based NGO with a child helpline. “Parents need to understand this and empathise with their hormonal development and the peer pressures confronting children.”
But Sonal Sheth, a city-based psychotherapist and counsellor, is forthright in blaming Shampa Chatterjee for inducing guilt in her child. “It’s high time Indian parents begin to learn the duties and responsibilities of parent-hood. Given the paucity of literature on this subject, I strongly advise parents to take heed of six parental pledges recommended by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt, who have written nine books on parenting, viz, understand your child’s feelings through purposeful dialogue; provide the safety and support of an emotional anchor; deal with issues that come in the way of being a good parent; meet all your child’s needs as she evolves through different stages of childhood; stay positively connected with her; keep faith in parent and child, as ‘we’ grow together,” says Sheth.
Tragically, it’s taken the death of an innocent 11-year-old child to highlight the need for parental education.
Rinky Marwaha (Mumbai)