Before writing this article, a question really hit me – How many parents of school age kids will really read my article enthusiastically? It could be actually a million dollar question when it comes to parenting. The answer to this question is premised on the fact that parents of many areas of Nepal need well-planned parenting education so that the young ones develop well in many aspects in their walks of life – physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, artistically and at least ideologically.
Another question overlaps with the main question. Rather demanding specific ideas, one might ask – “parenting education? who provides?”. To answer the question, we should not be smart enough to specify the agencies or institutions, but dumb enough to say that parenting education is the overall outcome of real-life situations when the parents learn to do something creative or well expected for better outcomes of their kids. They can learn while talking with other parents, talking with a school teacher, from own life experiences, talking with school / locality nurses (wait, do we really have school / locality nurses in Nepal?), discussing with counselors and so on.
We should not limit ourselves to get parenting education from conventional agencies and institutions. A private sector can come up with innovative ideas. Researchers on child psychology, child development and cognitive neuroscience can be more funded by private agencies, government agencies and academic research centers. We could read the outcomes from them as publications that might come up in a local newspaper or national daily.
Similar thing happened to me, rather differently. I was exploring a national level classifieds website where these entrepreneurs who call themselves Gaju Products had posted an advert that drew my interest. It was about the culture jigsaw puzzles for school age kids which is made in Nepal and included the pictures of Lakhe (perhaps a Hindu god who scares evil away), Swayambhunath Stupa, Nyatapole, and Krishna Mandir. I immediately decided to get those for my kids and ordered a pack of 4 puzzles. My kids liked those definitely.
The advantages of getting kids involved in solving such puzzles, as explained in South Mountain Memory Care are: exercising left brain and right brain simultaneously, improving short-term memory, improving visual-spatial reasoning, connecting with family and friends, being attentive towards accomplishment and quality time-passing. Moreover, the visual content in the puzzles help in enhancing detailed knowledge of the visible outlook of any kind of object. It can have cultural, natural or any kind of significance.
