WHY ARE KIDS DYING?

A few decades ago, infant mortality was high due to lack of medical facilities. Now, medical facilities have improved to an extent yet young ones are dying.

Look at this, holding her baby in her arms, a woman was feeding her child in the balcony of her apartment. Suddenly, the feeding bowl slipped from her hand. As she tried to catch the bowl, her baby slipped from her arms and fell to death. Recently, a woman poisoned her kids and herself just because her mother didn’t give her gold as promised. An army officer shot dead a boy who intruded into his housing complex to steal almonds.

Deaths are rising due to negligence too. New born babies kept in incubators at hospital are roasted alive due to electrical problems. Kids develop complications after taking obsolete Polio drops. Stray dogs maul or kill babies. Innumerable kids drown in open manholes. In the last three years, about six kids have got trapped several hundred feet deep in the abandoned borewells. The cost of rescuing a kid buried in a borewell is less than closing the abandoned ones. Then, why not do it? Media gives a “live” coverage of these rescue operations but never bother to follow-up. So we don’t know whether anybody got punished for negligence.

Look at the suicides. A young boy commits suicide after watching his caretaker die the previous day. A ten year old girl commits suicide after her mother reprimands her about some writings about her boyfriend in her personal diary.

The most intriguing point is, why are kids dying? Have we become insensitive towards our future generation? Is it because of our negligence, indifference and lack of parental attention? We shower a lot of material things on our kids and expect them to be less dependent on us. Their persistent efforts to get our attention fail which is, perhaps, leaving them more traumatized.

As a father, I thought, I can make my six year old daughter’s life  better. I try to give her my maximum time and attention (which means sometimes ignoring my wife), more of love and less of material gifts, best things to eat so that she goes on to become a strong, healthy and brilliant woman. But then that does not seem to be enough. The other day I said “If you don’t finish your homework, see what I will do to you”. She, very curtly answered, “ …Then I will jump from the balcony”. Now I not only try to be  nicer to her but see that the balcony door is bolted when I have to be firm on certain things.

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