Is Your Lifestyle Affecting Your Child (Dr. Samir Dalwai)

0:00 hello and welcome and we're really excited because we have with us dr sameez belvai and everybody knows that he's he's like one of really uh reckon trusted pediatricians that we have uh obviously you've had experience of working with so many parents and so many children and today something very beautiful that you said when we were speaking about the right sort of growth that a parent means to take which is about screen time is equal to narcotics and i need you to talk a

0:28 little bit more about that because i don't think until you said it today it hit me that yes it's almost a drug that we're that we're kind of inducing or injecting in our children so how do addictions work they work because the substance that you use gives you a feeling of happiness or a joy or some kind of pleasure that is not easily available in other substances any other things that you do in life and hence when it's a happiness and that

0:57 kick that you get used to from that substance now when we have a child who's watching a screen right from a very early age and what happens is his social skills haven't developed so he is not going to have that much of enjoyment or happiness is connecting socially obviously he can't walk around so he's not going to have any other avenues to keep himself injured keep himself occupied but in such a child when you give him a screen

1:23 the amount of impact that a screen can deliver whether it's a simple nursing line but the sounds and the lights and the graphics and the cartoons it's amazing so the child is completely fixated to that because it gives him a great sense of awe and amusement and enjoyment at an age where he is difficult for him to get anything else comparative now the trouble is because he then gets hooked on to this very high dose of

1:48 happiness or satisfaction simple things like interacting with people around him may not be suddenly such a big source of joy and what's happening is if you have a three four five month old child who's getting moved on to a tablet he's going to prefer that and he's going to choose that selectively or anything else that develops his social interaction and the child doesn't have social interaction is not going to look around at people not understand their social

2:15 behaviors he's not going to pick up simple things like when do you eat food for example we're talking about nutrition yeah but you need food in a plate that you need to chew your food yes there are different kinds of food and very often i have parents who tell me that the child only eats when he's watching i mean you're just dumping nutrients inside he's not really connecting to the security value of home or enjoying the

2:37 food and food kind of connected us as children right there's so many memories that are associated with food when we were growing up right we would associate food with this would be summer food or we plucked this fruit or we grew up eating that so i think that sense of and and i think children today also take food as entitlement versus gratitude right uh and and i i often feel this that instead of food being something that they need to

3:02 be thankful for for moms and dads today it's become like a battleground i say yeah because it's protein time now with this time now it's that time there's so much of noise for the parent how do you simplify this for us i think the reason for why that noise is proving so effective unfortunately and that's because there's a insecurity driven by guilt am i doing the right thing as a mom as a parent am i spending

3:27 enough time with the child maybe yeah am i spending enough money on the child maybe that's the second question and am i doing the right thing for the right child because somehow we've convinced ourselves that we're living in a ghetto and if your child is in the top mercenary is not going to get rid in life and i think that's a very scary way of looking at stuff because that gets transferred on to your child and i think it's very important to

3:48 understand that you don't need to be a perfect parent and your perfection as a parent the child is not a report card on you yeah a child is not a validation of you i think in this race to kind of see to it that your child gets ahead whatever that means we are being too focused and we are doing things very artificially moms a couple of generations ago were absolutely perhaps not so educated unfortunately didn't have an internet so

4:13 well the internet is like a sword you need to use it yeah i agree i agree it needs to empower you know confuse you right you need to know how to use it so coming back to this when people didn't have so much access to so-called information had knowledge yeah and they didn't have information about that wisdom so a mom would immediately know what a child what is it that he or he eats that agrees with him or her and what is making that

4:38 child better even that day in terms of his mood right and that's how they avoided allergies and they knew what was the right food to give to the child and they saw the child growing i mean everything we're talking about realistic scenario we also have to accept that today i am not the mother my mom was right i i am not running i am uh shouldered with a lot more responsibility a lot more ambition a lot more of

5:05 you know a lot more of everything else that i want to do so how do you disconnect or how do you empower that woman who's a working parent is not maybe connected with her child nine to nine but still wants to go the complete mile in providing the right nurturing right play right nutrition so when you mention all the hardships that people love today not just moms or dads everybody has today you also forget the fact that they are

5:32 mixers and they're blenders and you don't have to take that chakki and piece off the attack of course so many advantages as well yeah so if there have been in increase in say the professionalism it is being supplemented by a huge technological boost which helps you do everything i mean today you get ready-made data if you want to order it from something right the point here is that while doing that the first part that you said has led to

5:58 guilt and i'm trying to say they shouldn't yeah that shouldn't be again no i have moved over there yeah that you are not 24 hours with your child and i often get asked in workshops what is better is it better to be a working man

6:29 yeah i think it's very important to understand this fact that things haven't really changed i mean i'd like to say this very clearly things haven't really changed whatever changed for the bad it's been more than supplemented or covered up by the huge help that we've got from technology and hence it's very important to realize that children's intestinal systems gastrointestinal tract hasn't changed their bones haven't changed their structure essentially hasn't changed we are because of this guilt we are

6:56 putting too much pressure on ourselves trying to find out that one particular mix of nutrients that's going to make your childhood einstein now that's a problem yeah and i also like what you said about the play part of it right that kids want to play because they want to play and they get joy out of it but parents want success and and progression out of it as a narrative yeah everything and today's world when you mention all that people are doing

7:21 yeah i don't want that to lead to guilt but i want that to lead to realization that all this is rat race is pushing you to be extremely competitive yeah and that competition and that competitiveness is getting converted into preparing that one particular meal for the child i don't think today's parents are any way more disadvantaged than what parents were about a generation back i don't think at all but i think we've taken up this unfortunate competitiveness that we in

7:46 society in society around us no i agree but i'm saying as a parent i am also bombarded with so much of information on deficiency of d3 or b12 or is your child having enough protein or is he growing right like how am i supposed to can i simplify this place i'll tell you i'll have to really think when is the last time i saw a child with a great deficiency of a nutrient in the city of mumbai come with me to palgar

8:13 and i'll show you the malleolus kids that's where we need to think for those moms not for our kids our kids don't have a deficiency they have an overdose of everything and why would you need to really wonder whether my child gets enough sun exposure for vitamin d that's because we don't send them out to play because like you mentioned play has become performance you want to rate whether the child is going for cricket classes is he the top of his class is he

8:38 going to be the next virat kohli if he's going for music classes he's going to be the next top musician so this is the problem and that's why everything that doesn't get us a immediate reward in terms of your child becoming the next superstar you are cutting off and hence unstructured play which you would do creatively where you would learn team spirit you would learn so many other things along with getting free exposure to vitamin d without any extra cost is

9:04 all out yeah and i think it's very important for parents to realize yes our lifestyles have changed our pressures have changed but life also is a lot more easier now you must understand because the pressure has changed don't bring in the competitiveness in the child and if you are as non-competitive you would be as your mom you would be unhappy and your kid would be left to lead a more naturalistic life i think what we are

9:30 doing today is putting our child in the pavlovian trap where he's it's like a applied behavior analysis if i may say even to a child who doesn't need it and the child is being programmed to live like a machine and i see that so often because if you have a child who's only been on apps and on being on a tablet in the first two three years of his life and then at two years he's sent to a place cool he has no clue

9:58 what other human children look like he hasn't had enough exposure to human social interaction he's going to find the other kids abnormal or he's not going to be able to deal with them and then you have the great shadow teacher being called in to assist your child for what so what i'm trying to say is that i'm not against modernization at all but there's no need for us to change our basic human values or the way we led our

10:20 life just because of this so just to give an instance when you're talking about sugar why do we need to measure sugar in food whatever is cooked at home that's good enough yeah as long as the child is not over fed and you don't force him finish off your plate clean up the plate i don't want anything left back and again like my teacher dr amnica taught us and i always like to take his name he used to teach in the workshops like

10:42 he charged the mothers when your kid was two months old what were you feeding him so obviously the mom would say breastfeeding so did what you decide how many ounces of milk your child would take as breast milk did you know at the end of the day how much milk the child has taken no but yet you know that when he cries you feed him when he is idioted he'll stop so you trusted a three-month-old to understand how much milk he wants and

11:06 when he wants but you can't trust a three-year-old yeah you understand how much he wants to eat when he wants to eat and then he should stop eating why do we at one year switch off from this natural mother to listening to what dietitians and doctors and pediatricians are doing and so let the child do it automatically and he's going to be fine yeah right so thank you so much for that and i'm really glad that you had this chat

11:30 because it's gonna really help a lot of parents and not mums alone like we always say that it's better than grandparents i find a lot of stress being put by on grandparents and very often i mean especially when it comes to these habits a lot of pressure from family and i i i don't think it's bad because it comes with a good intention you can't talk about it as a bad thing but you need to get grandparents on to the scene

11:57 you need to discuss with them you need to exchange information with them and also i think there is a little bit of logic and truth in what seniors say because there is wisdom they may absolutely absolutely it's a great mix that we need as they say takes a village absolutely totally thank you so much