I look at my daughter, Miss P and see the often absent-minded, but extremely creative, one. I also know that she is academically-minded and would do anything you ask of her and boy! She loves to learn new stuff!
So it came as a surprise to me when I heard, “I hate homework!”.
Miss P, announced as she walked into the dining room and unceremoniously dumped her school books on the table.
It was another typical day in our life. I was busy typing away furiously on the laptop, another post to write, another deadline to meet.
I looked at her in surprise and there it was! A tiny teardrop trickling down her pretty cheek and disappearing along her jaw. I pulled her closer, wrapped her in a warm hug and as we sat there resting cheek to cheek, heart to heart, she asked – “Mumma why do we need to do homework? “
(Why indeed?) “So that you can practice what you have learnt. So that you are better prepared for your future (exams). So that you can grow up to be who you want to be”, I said.
“Anyone I want to be? “ she asked and I nodded. That seemed to calm her, or probably she just decided that it was better to get her homework done, but she walked away determinedly.
Anyone I want to be? , the words were still ringing in my ears.
What did she want to be, when she grew up? One day she wanted to be a dancer because she loved the jewellery, one day she wanted to be a teacher because Miss Sushma is the best teacher in the whole wide world and one day she wanted to be a rocket scientist so she could stay on Mars!
It took me more than a minute to calm myself, though. My heart was pounding and I could hear it beating against my chest. How ready was I for my daughter’s future? Did I do my homework? Was I prepared? To help her choose what her heart desired? To give her the freedom and support to love the choices she would make?
Raising children and then giving them sound financial backing is an extremely tough and an integral part of parenthood. I just had a vague idea how much things would cost in the future, never had a handy tool to tell me the right amount. I was on the lookout for good options when I saw the #DoYourHomework campaign.
An interesting experiment was initiated with a group of parents and their children. Children were asked to draw a picture of what they would like to become in future while parents were asked to paint what they would like their children to become in future. What do you think happened? Have a look –
And what surprised me most was that almost every child had a contrasting idea from their parents about what they wanted to become in the future. That was an eye opener for sure.
Explore some more, and you’ll see that the #DoYourHomework Platform has lots of information to help us parents do our homework.
There is information about
- Education costs, career-wise across countries, both present and future
- Ideal investment to make to meet education expenses in the future with the help of an education calculator
Plus they made it fun!
They have these gorgeous books for children to enable them to explore various careers via stories, coloring books and crossword puzzles.
And a cool homework app that helps us instantly find the costs of education across courses and destinations. Besides the future value of the course, the app also shows how much investment is required to reach that goal. Isn’t that helpful? Now, it’s easy to estimate the future cost of education at an early stage and start planning towards the same by investing in mutual funds.
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind. Maintaining a home, working around the clock and raising a young family are things that leave us exhausted and we may think that we have years to go before we start to think or worry about investing. But, the fact is that life goes by quickly and it is the small steps that we take every day that come in handy in terms of us preparing for our child’s future, no matter what they choose to be.
The most important question we need to ask ourselves is, are we on the same page as our kids about their future? In today’s world, when kids have so many career choices, WE need to be prepared as parents. How? Go #DoYourHomework
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