( Image- Courtesy the Internet)
I've thought about this very often, and much more so when my daughter was growing up. Working in a full-time job in Advertising which left me mentally and physically tired at the end of the day, I tried my best to spend 'quality' time with her, particularly our evenings in the 'Jhoola (swing) park'. But I must confess that my attention wandered and many a time work called, intruding on my personal time and space. She must have been lonely, but my daughter never really complained, at least not openly. Hats off to her and her patience!
But life has a strange way of coming up with reminders and that can happen in the most unexpected ways. Just the other day, we were sitting in a little restaurant that we frequent on the weekends and I saw a father and his two young daughters come in.
They settled down comfortably in a quiet corner and placed their orders. Some conversation was exchanged between the father and his daughters at that stage, but that was really it, for during the entire duration of that lunch all that the father did was focus on his phone-Whether he was receiving or making calls, or simply looking at photographs or playing games, it was very clear that this father paid far more attention to his phone than he did to his daughters.
As for the two little girls, they remained quite busy and happy - first taking out their little bottle of hand sanitiser to clean their hands before starting their meal, then enjoying their chicken and French fries.
All the while, they chattered with each other almost incessantly in a way that made me realize that this behaviour of their father's was probably quite routine and that they had learnt to deal with it.
But I don't know why I felt sad.
Was it a reminder of my own behaviour of a few years ago? Or was it the realization that today's children have learnt to deal with so much more than the previous generations?
Or was it quite simply the fact that the lure of this ever developing technology is making us into far more casual parents than our own? Finally of course, each person has a choice, which they alone choose to exercise, but this episode was something that I just had to write about.
(NB- This post was originally written for My Take- my column in Muscat Daily)
