The Nurturing Gap: Raising Boys & Men

Growing up, ABCD for me was A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat and D for Dev Saab. My first ever memories of childhood in our Lucknow one bedroom home are Papa calling me after dinner and asking me the same question every night: 'Picture dekhein?' (let’s watch a film?). He'd then pop in a video cassette in our VCR that he had spent all his savings on, and hit play on a Dev Anand classic. Along with CID, Taxi Driver, Kala Bazaar, Tere Ghar Ke Saamne, Jewel Thief, Prem Pujaari and my father's all-time favourite, Guide, which was, in all honesty, overwhelming for a 4 year old, I would also be subjected to Dev saab trivia as a running commentary.

When we moved from Lucknow to Delhi, my father got busier and the only bonding time in our lives as father and son, our movie nights, started becoming infrequent. When we moved to the Middle East, as a foreign posting through his job, his obsession with work in trade-finance and unhealthy eating habits took precedence, his newfound work stress led to anger issues, and both Dev Saab and I had to vie for his attention. Our movie nights went from a daily to weekly to monthly activity, until we hardly spent any time together.

Imperative Questions

If someone in my 20s had asked me what I had learnt from my father, without hesitation, I would have answered, “How NOT to be one.”

Away from home, trying to carve a niche, I barely spoke to Papa in my early 20s. Most of my happy childhood memories were clouded by the anger and distance I had experienced from my father, and I harboured a bitterness towards him for not having been around for me. When my mother could both work at home and still give time for play, why couldn't he? I decided that whenever I'd become a father myself, I'd make sure I'd be a present one.

It’s Everywhere

Two events made me a tad more empathetic:

In 2018, when I founded my company Yuvaa, I went across 35 cities of India on a roadshow and met and listened to over 15,000 students in 150 campuses. Everywhere I went, young Indians would speak of loving mothers and angry fathers, of mothers who had ample time for children, and fathers who had none. What I thought was a flaw in only my father was a systemic issue faced by most children. It made me realise how little children are actually equipped with - by their families, and by their schools - to handle the emotional weight of adulthood, let alone parenthood.

How was it that, as a country, we are raising distant fathers instead of loved children?

A Glaring Disparity

When I became a father myself last year, my wife, who works at an international bank, got 6 months of paid maternity leave, followed by a whole year of work from home. As an entrepreneur, I looked up the paternity policies in India. I discovered that paternity leave for new fathers is only 2 weeks against 6 months of maternity leave, mandated by the government. Only 14% of private companies had some sort of a formal policy, and most of them had no allocation whatsoever.

I used my privilege as the leader and first male employee of my own company to give myself 3 months of paternity leave, as I wanted nothing more than to spend time with my daughter, getting to know the wonder she is, and help my wife regain her strength after childbirth.

Post the congratulatory messages, as much as my team tried not to reach out to me, work calls and email notifications began arriving, one after the other. I would gently explain to my business associates that I'm on paternity leave, and while I did receive kind responses, I soon learnt that most people interpreted paternity leave as work from home for fathers. Whenever I tried pushing back on the timeline of an opportunity, I was told very politely that we could work together in future. I was on paternity leave but I was being left behind because of paternity, something every working mother in the world around has faced before.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

If this can happen even to someone with the privilege of choosing to take leave, what does it mean for families without that choice? A system that treats caregiving as primarily a mother's responsibility risks leaving mothers carrying the greater share of care while fathers remain tethered to work. I had already softened my feelings towards Papa in the years before, through our common love language of taking him out for movies. In a tete-a-tete with my father, I acknowledged that the world hadn’t afforded him the chance to be a present parent. He opened up a bit and promised he will be a present grandpa.

A couple of months after this chat, I lost my father to an accident. Work had kept him away from me as a child, work took him away from my daughter while she was still one.

The Imperative Conversations

Work cannot and should not be the central identity of a father. While we’ve finally begun having conversations about the right of women to choose between nurturing, providing, both or none, we have barely entertained the idea of men and boys as care givers. I truly believe that it is imperative for decision makers at the highest level of power in our country to create a mandate for at least 3 months of paternity leave to new fathers to redistribute care responsibilities at home. And, I also believe that it is the responsibility of the education system to make up for the deficit of the care that fathers are sometimes unable to provide because of the function of the society around that.

Role of Schools

Learning spaces need to create a softer, kinder, more open hearted environment for boys in schools, that allow them to recognise that the value of their lives cannot be reduced to the marks or the CTC they get, and the designation they have at work. My father wasn't taught how to be a nurturer as a young boy. I wasn't taught how to be one either. We were both expected to figure it out when adulthood arrived. And this is where schools can come in to counter the adulthood deficit of nurturing. By not only preparing boys to become successful adults, but by preparing them to be whole ones.