Discussions

My friend, Esha was telling me how she and her parents had a disagreement. The disagreement happened because of her decision to switch her industry and join a new company. Esha had made the decision without consulting with her parents. Parents supported her decision, yet their concern was that she should have at least informed them before making such a big decision about her career. My friend was upset because she felt their behaviour to be intrusive. According to her she was mature enough to make the decision for herself, it was her decision, and she did not require any guidance from her parents. She had come to me to seek my advice whether she did the right thing by responding to her parents. I asked her a simple question "do you discuss in your family?" She was surprised with the questions and said that the discussions towards anything do not take place in the family, every person makes their own decision informs the others and sometimes do not even inform at all.

Nowadays in the nuclear families I believe this becomes very common. Every person has different schedules based on the job that they do. The time that is spent with the family gets restricted because of the difficult lifestyle that we are living. Also nowadays the jobs are not 9 to 5 as the used to be earlier. In the tiresome life it is definitely difficult to give time for the family and have healthy discussion. When the conversation do not take place in the families, then there could be surprises just how it happened in my friend's case.

I completely understand that nowadays we do not get sufficient time with our family as the generations before us had. Yet I believe that conversation with family is extremely important. Discussions within the family are important and they should be continued. The discussions may include seeking advice. Nobody should think that the discussion that take place in the family should not take place because they are grown enough. Sometime people in our family may give us a perspective that we have not even thought about. This perspective can come from the elders as well as children in the family. When we are thinking as per our situations sometimes we miss to see certain details which could only be seen as a person who was completely Independent and viewing this situation as someone who had not be involved in it. The perspective that comes from such people give us a different picture and also it gives us more space to think about. It may add another aspect that may require our attention. Hence in my understanding it is always best to discuss with your family so that we can get different perspective from different people of different generations and different experiences.

Another aspect is that the discussions within the family not only connect us with each other but also give us more experience towards dealing with various generation because in any field that we work in we may work with a multi generation team. Discussions within the family give us more food for a thought. At the same time it helps us to find answers to the questions we did not even know existed.

Family discussion is one of the requirements of the recent times. I believe it is the high time to start implementing this in our lives.