‘Respect your elders’ is what we are all brought up with and often, we tend to define our Indianness with this maxim. But what does this mean? Does it mean indulging them their idiosyncrasies? Or venerating them even when we have a hard time dealing with some of their foibles? Or grinning and bearing it when they pamper our children? Or remaining cheery when they insist on treating us like adolescents though we are 30-something.

If we look closely and honestly at our relationships with our parents, we will be forced to realise that we behave with them either as we did when we were children or we end up parenting them in their old age. Rarely ever do we treat them like adults...

Enhance The Dynamic
Rather than bemoan the decay of the joint family at the local cocktail party or in letters to the editor, our time would probably be better spent if we devoted some energy to enhancing the dynamics and communication patterns of the surviving vestiges of the joint family system.

Today, the average family, more often than not, comprises a married couple, their children and the husband’s parent(s), all living together in a not-always-companionable equation. For such a unit to not merely survive, but also serve as an emotional bedrock, all its members will have to co-exist in a state of mutual respect, engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship of openness, honesty, understanding, tolerance and regard for each others’ needs, boundaries and limitations. So let us not confine ourselves to the two extremes of vilification or deification. Let us start actively searching for a middle ground.

Let us learn to respect our parents as adults. It’s not as difficult as one might imagine. Here’s what the process would entail.

Dumping Our Emotional Baggage: The characteristic that distinguishes the parent-child from other relationships is that a long road has been traversed that is often littered with unresolved issues, unfulfilled expectations and emotional pain.

Let us accept that this has happened to pretty much all of us, simply because our parents are imperfect people and received no training and had access to even less inputs than we are fortunate to have when it came to honing parenting skills. Our parents had to learn on the job and often made a bit of a hash with the first-born, got a little better at it with the second one and usually spoilt the third one silly trying to undo their earlier ‘mistakes’.

It is the non-acceptance of this imperfect reality that causes most of the problems in relating with our parents. For denial results in suppressed resentment and all its attendant complications.

Which means we end up getting stuck with our baggage rather than being able to dump it. Accepting it and recognising the ubiquity of this phenomenon helps us to get away from the ‘Why Me?’ victim position and we realise that our parents did the best they could under pressing circumstances. This helps us to value the good they’ve given us and helps us relate to them as persons and as individuals.

Preventing The Accumulation Of Fresh Baggage: Sorting out the past alone is not enough. We need to make sure that our present and future is configured in such a manner that we don’t pick up fresh baggage. This would mean learning how to assert our own needs to our parents without feeling bad or guilty, getting them to respect our boundaries and private spaces even as we learn to respect theirs, and responding to them with love not amounting to adoration, respect not amounting to reverence, and interdependence not amounting to either independence or over-involvement.

Since most of our parents have not developed alternative roles to play other than the parental role, this might mean facilitating their involvement in other activities thereby enhancing their universes.

Learning To Respect our Parents’ Need For Companionship: What our parents need so badly as they grow older is the companionship of younger adults. Not constantly, but every now and again. It keeps them feeling young, keeps their minds alive and their intellects stimulated. Discuss not just the ‘necessary’ things — family events, children-related matters and the like — but also issues in other areas — their world view, for instance.

You may well be surprised that you hardly know what views your parents hold on issues (unless they are the sorts that hold forth). So this entails a process of ‘getting to know’ who your parents really are.

Learning To Respect our Parents’ Needs For Privacy: As a culture, we do not place a great premium on privacy, but all human beings do have a need every now and again to be left alone. We each signal this need differently. Some of us bury ourselves in a book; some go for long walks; some go off to the temple.

Rarely do we articulate it as a need for private time. We need to learn how to do is to tune into our parents’ signalling patterns for privacy and learn how to respect and respond to them without feeling rejected.

Learning To Respect our Parents’ Need For Independence And Autonomy: When we fall into the trap of parenting our parents, we start thinking of them as dependents and feel the need to anticipate and respond to their every need. Some parents like this, even demand it. But in my experience, most parents do not like being cosseted all the time. Every now and again is fine, but not all the time.

They feel the need for their experience to be respected and for some autonomy, particularly when it comes to personal decision making. For instance, if your parents say they would like to live independently, we should learn to accept it gracefully and not worry that we would be thought of as ungrateful children.

Work Towards The Best Balance
In short, the key to respecting our elders lies not in ‘serving’ them, but in relating to them with dignity as individuals, as companions and as one adult to another. Remember how you envied some people whose parents were their friends? Now is the time you can make this happen in your home too. Just remember the axiom: Neither a vilifier nor a deifier be.

Support, don’t steer, your parents in the winter of their lives

GOT COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? E-MAIL US AT femina@timesgroup.com WITH ‘all in the family — parenting your parents’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE