Dutch style parenting, restaurants, and India...

Recently during a workshop related to my professional work, i had an interesting discussion on parenting over lunch. A colleague who is raising a baby in Amsterdam shared an interesting view about Dutch style of parenting. He spoke about how parents imbibe the quality of exploring things in their kids by not instructing them to do or not do things all the time. As an example in a restaurant the kids are free to roam around. While parents can sit and enjoy their food, the kids may learn about what's acceptable behavior and what's not from other guests. It's about learning by experience from society. That in my colleague's view fosters the entrepreneurship culture in the minds of kids right from very young age.

I found it very interesting and read a bit more about Dutch style parenting. Learnt about more interesting facts like dutch kids are happiest, Dutch parents don't yell, it's acceptable for kids to show tantrums but not for adults and so on. Very impressive stuff.

My kids are grown up now and participate ( and dictate) in what food gets ordered in restaurants and enjoy it. But when they were younger, it used to be quite a task. They may run around everywhere and I would run behind them. They may spill a hundred things on or below the tables. Worse even they would stare at other guests or their plates!

So just thought of what might happen in India if parents allowed their kids to just roam around freely in restaurant while enjoying food themselves. There are two main hurdles that I see, one being safety of kids in question and second about societal pressure or "Log Kya kahenge!". Not many things are designed keeping safety in mind, and of course child abuse and crime against children in itself is a major deterrent for parents to leave their children out of sight most of the times. I wanted to take a shot at the second part where we as parents really dread about what everyone else will think about us or our kids all the time!

Disclaimer: please note that these thought are purely light hearted and not intended to harm anyone's sentiments.

What kind of mother she is! Eating happily without feeding her kid

Look at the parents! They just don't want to take care of their kids

Can you please take care of your kids? They are troubling us

Look at those kids, so manner less, seems their parents never bothered to teach them manners at home

Today's kids don't know even 'd' of discipline, we never behaved like this

Shhhh! This is not your home, don't make noise

Hey kids, don't go there, there are ghosts behind that door

If you can not take care if your kids, why did you produce them in the first place!

If they did not want to look after their kids, they could have got the babysitter

Look at how these kids are on their own, ours won't leave our lap at all

How can they leave kids on their own just like that!

Looks like the kids have taken the meaning of freedom very seriously
Freedom does not mean "do what you want", it comes with responsibility

Have you ever faced such situation? Would you allow your small kids to roam around freely? How would you react if you find any?

Time eaters, Timeboxing and other tips from scrum...

While doing a refresher course on agile scrum (a software development method), I came across the Parkinson's law again! The law states: "Work expands to fill time available for it".

Isn't this so true for all of us ladies! Typically we have approximately same amount of work at home to be wrapped up, be it cooking, packing the lunch box, getting kids ready for school and so on. But it takes us different amount of time to finish on different days, thanks to the time we give it. Specially the work like cleaning up rooms, tidying up things seems never ending. Those tasks to me look like time-eating monsters that are not satisfied whatever time we feed them with.

Same is the case with many a things in our work environment, like for e.g. Creating a PowerPoint deck for presentation, authoring a white paper or newsletter, even writing an important email, all seems never ending. There always appears to be a better way of doing it, always a way to improve whatever is done and so on. Then there are emails, meetings that eat up a lot of time and many other distractions at workplace.

Scrum uses some powerful tools to deal with this issue:

- Timeboxing - Put a time box around your tasks. Timeboxing indicates allocating a maximum time for a particular task. Identify clear cut items you could do towards "completing" a particular task, assign a max time and only pick up highest priority stuff that can be done in that time. It's amazing to see results of this technique at office as well as at home. I have even tried this with my kids. They seem to love it specially when we time box the study time, but hate it when their mobile gaming or tv time is timeboxed.

- Constant prioritization - nothing stops us from changing priority of things at a regular interval. Scrum proposes backlog grooming at regular intervals to also help re-prioritise items so that what we do next is of value to our stakeholders. Same is true in our personal life, our priorities keep changing, more we acknowledge and push low value stuff out of our backlog (or outsource for that matter) the happier we are!

- "just enough" documentation - scrum talks about identifying the just enough level of documentation and adhering to it, rather than going over board. While documenting many a critical things is a necessary thing from future proofing and sustaining perspective, keeping it alive is a challenge. The documentation is an enabler, but the real value is in the working software. It's worthwhile to identify the "just enough" levels in many a places in life, specially in the time eater tasks that I mentioned above. It's rewarding to divert that time saved to more value adding activities such as quality time with family, me time and so on.

I have always felt agile is a natural or common sense way of working. We can also feed in those principles into our lives to make it more sensible!