Opinion

It is not a global village!

 
Fall has many meanings from a season to giving in to gravity.

The season, fall has a time period, more or less, but when it comes to trip, miss and come in contact with ground – it is something that can happen to anyone at any time.

I have plenty of incidents where I have had mishaps just because thoughts were faster than steps, but a recent misfortune has not been too comfortable, instead has been a test of patience. The pain one has never known before can make one humble. The cry of pain is involuntary reaction to the embarrassment of others.

There is always a longing to go back to being normal but the fact is it takes time to heal, which is why it was nerve racking to see someone climb up the steps at the entrance of a building while looking at the phone, hardly conscious about where they were placing the next step.

Well texting and driving is a chargeable offence because the driver could also prove to be dangerous to others on the road in addition to causing damage to public utilities. But what if one could cause harm to oneself due to carelessness?

The suffering is not just for the individual but for the family members as well.

A fall can be due to many reasons and causes but let it be not due to texting or watching video on mobile phone.

We could apply the mathematical law of probability to understand the frequency of falls and their reasons.

Now this does not mean everyone has to live in fear of fall but the fact remains osteoporosis continues to be a major concern. According to womenshealth.gov one in three women is likely to have a fracture caused by osteoporosis. But it does not just affect women; men can also suffer from osteoporosis because the main cause of it is lack of intake of calcium throughout life, which is why health experts treat osteoporosis with calcium and vitamin D.

This is one of the reasons why youngsters should remain aware on what could face them in future if they are relying on fad diets or fall prey to eating disorders. What seems to be attractive later can turn out to be costly in the future not just monitory wise but in quality of life. At the same time overweight also seems to be a problem. Like everything else in life what requires seem to be finding the right balance of life – in thoughts and actions.

These are the days when teenagers question and challenge parents and elders no matter whether they are parents, family members or teachers. It seems it is not the case of the past where parents had to compete with peer influence but tackle the flow of information and entertainment.

Would one categorise gaming under entertainment and hobby? Then this is one area that is having parents locked out of children’s lives. It is a whole new world, with characters and terminologies parents might have never come across because they have been making a living. But that living is of a loss if it fails to provide an open conversation with their child. What seemed to happen is that both parties seemed to be passing judgment on each other.

The youth might feel it is essential to know gaming or know the latest trends in order to be accepted, but they miss out on the fact that it might be important to have the beautiful link with parents. They would need them at some point in life more than ever at the same time there are parents who take time to read and research on the latest happenings to understand where their young ones stand and where they might falter and be ready to catch them when they do.

We have also been a teenager and it might be easy to say, ‘We were not like that in our teens.’ But the teenagers today live in a world that is full of immediacy that carries an influence of not just the school campus and neighbourhood, their radius of influence is the whole wide world with a small tool called social media. It is not a global village, it is a global cosmopolitan. If you are a parent or an adult worried about the young ones in the family, time to read and find out more to reach into the teenagers’ world and then have a conversation.