Life skills learned from the babies university!
Recently a friend asked me, “Won’t this one year break from work affect your experience/work graph?” I spontaneously replied, “No, it won’t, I am learning important life skills that would only compliment my other skills and equip me to handle situations better when I get back to work.”
Later, upon reflecting on the question and my answer, I realize that the skills a mother acquires from managing and raising her toddler by far exceeds any management skills that can be learned from any and all the reputed management institutes put together.
With the baby, one needs to be a crisis manager, a human resource manager, a conflict manager, an event manager, and a disaster manager to name a few; also an actor, singer, dancer, comedian all rolled into one. Here is how:
1. When the baby simply refuses to open its mouth and swallow even a tiny morsel of food, one has to be really creative and invent techniques and methodologies to make the baby eat.
2. When the baby has excreted all over the place and is literally floating or playing on it with bits and pieces on its face, sometimes perilously close to its mouth, one has to execute exemplary crisis management skills to tide over the mess.
3. When the baby is howling non stop at 2 AM for no obvious reasons and often for two to there hours at a stretch, one has to exhibit crucial conflict management skills to emerge from the situation with one’s sanity intact.
4. When the baby has pushed some crazy object into its nostril, one has to be good at ‘what not’ to pull that object out without injuring the baby.
5. When the baby has urinated over some important papers, broken your precious crockery, swallowed some object and is gasping for breath and so on and forth, one has to exhibit all the above mentioned managerial skills put together to recover from the situation.
These are just basic examples. With kids, one has to constantly be excellent at multi tasking, think out of the box and be as innovative as possible. These are skills one cannot acquire at a college or at a Fortune 500 company but those that can be perfected only from being a parent, specifically a mother. Children teach us humility, patience, creativity and a lot more every moment, no wonder it is rightly said,
The child is the father of man!
