'They are queer, they are different. Rather, indifferent'

The next time you attend a family gathering, try and chat up the children around you. If they respond, give yourself a treat. If they laugh at your jokes, pat yourself. And if you manage to tickle their curiosity, share your success with the world. For children are becoming an impenetrable lot. Nothing seems to excite, inspire, provoke or bother them ? they are indifference personified.

Take Kushal Mitra in north Calcutta. At 11, he is armed with 33 beyblades, 57 CD games and has a TV to himself. Kushal is “tired and bored” of relatives, eating out and birthday parties. Ask him to make a wish and he stares back at you blankly. “Anything...anything,” you egg him on. Kushal sighs and mumbles, “I don’t know.”

Break into a children’s party and invite an army of nine to 10-year-olds to a special space tour. You catch no twinkle in their eyes, no flash of surprise. They don’t even bother to check out the validity of your proposal.

“Indifference among children is one of the most persisting problems today,” points out psychologist Mallika Banerjee who heads the department of psychology at Calcutta University. Banerjee, who sees patients at a clinic only once a week, is surprised at the number of cases she has been receiving. “Every month, on an average, I attend to five or six such cases.”

A government survey ? Development of Child and Adolescent Mental Health in India ? conducted across the country among government clinics and non-governmental organisations ? substantiates her point. It records an increase in childhood and adolescent problems from a mere 33 per cent in 1990 to a phenomenal 49.3 per cent in 2004. Adds consultant psychiatrist, Ashim Chatterjee, associated with Mon, a psychiatric nursing home in Calcutta, “Five years ago, this kind of a problem was prevalent among less than one per cent of the total clinical population. Today, at a busy outpatient clinic, three to five per cent of the total clinical population represent such cases. But few people realise that it is essentially societal and not biological factors that are responsible for the phenomenal rise in the percentage.”

More alarmingly, the victims are usually between nine and 15. Going by the rule book, this is the age when children are ready to explore anything within their bounds. But a random survey conducted by The Telegraph among children in the four metropolitan cities reveals a different scenario. Some 75 per cent of those surveyed in the age group of 9-15 say that they look forward to watching television every day; 55 per cent of them prefer playing computer games instead of venturing outdoors to play, while 35 per cent’s favourite pastime is toying with a mobile. That’s not all. A remarkable 57 per cent express aversion to playing mischief.

For a first-hand experience, bump into a child and you might end up feeling like a hyperactive idiot, a jabbering maniac or a defeated mother. Sharmila Thakur, who lives in south Delhi, sounds a trifle agitated when she speaks about her 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. Starting from invitation passes for the January 26 march past in the capital to a brand new bicycle ? nothing seems to surprise them. Thakur, understandably, is beginning to feel that arousing her children’s curiosity is one of the toughest tasks she’s ever been assigned. “They are queer, they are different. Rather, indifferent,” she laments.

Queer, different, indifferent... The adjectives are endless but who’s to be blamed? While sociologists attribute the indifference to working parents, a nuclear family structure and sudden affluence, psychologists blame it on over-exposure, too much of TV, ambitious parents and meeting targets before even identifying them.

Siddhant’s mother, a divorcee, is too busy to spend time with her only child. “But,” she quickly adds, “I buy him everything he would love to have. Since I can afford it, why deprive my child?” But not many agree. Calcutta-based psychotherapist Jolly Laha points out, “Immediate gratification is not a solution. Parents need to realise that in the long run, it is parental gestures and support that matter.”

Social researcher Bansari Guha has another way of defining today’s children: living from one action to another. “Switch off the TV and the child switches on the music system. Switch that off and he shifts to computer games. Constant association with non-living things alienate the child from real-life situations. This is why Harry Potter has become a craze and not an assimilative experience,” she says.

With the predominance of a plastic world, the concept of fun has also changed. The Telegraph survey found that 45 per cent of children prefer going to Pizza Hut than getting drenched in the rain. Only 23 per cent of children love doing creative things such as clay modelling, writing or solving children’s crosswords. About 68 per cent of them love toys which have a competitive edge. Beyblade is the unanimous choice. Rudra Pandey and Subhas Lal ? both 15-year-olds in Bangalore ? are avid gamers. They admit they like playing games not only because they can wield power but also because they can press escape and get out of any messy situation.

“This is where parents need to step in and guide their children through life’s core reality,” says Dipanjan Roy, a New-Delhi based medical epidemiologist. “Parents should also realise that human gestures are irreplaceable.”

A mother of two and a senior lecturer at Calcutta Girls’ College, Ruma Bhattacharyya knows that. Childhood anecdotes and adolescent faux pas are part of their intense family addas. “I feel my daughters must realise that growing up is a process rather than an instant formula. It’s both about fun and responsibility.” That is why at times she feigns tiredness so that her daughters can take over. “They have to learn to feel nice about doing things for others. These are the little abstract incentives of life.”

Bereft of similar incentives, the mind starts vegetating, warns Banerjee. “The child stops being sociable. Gradually, when he grows up, he has nothing to ask of society because there is nothing that he wants from society.”

So caught in this vicious cycle, life may not be child’s play for most children. Unless parents do something to jerk their children out of this passive trance, they may just end up mumbling, “Who cares?” “Why bother?” or “What’s the big deal?”