Reflections after reading about the young boy who ended his life

Many people think that the kids today live very good lives. They grow up with minimal hardship from poverty and seemingly have everything that they need and want. Malnutrition is a rare thing among children and most kids have gadgets and smartphones. They have also been to many countries for holidays since young, enriching their life & cultural experiences. I do agree that in terms of fulfilling their physical needs, children today are definitely more fortunate as compared to children 30 years ago.

However, I do not agree that children today do not face as many challenges as compared to children from previous generations. I believe that the next wave that is hitting all of us go beyond our physical needs, it is hurting our emotional and mental state. Children today start learning at a very young age (which is a good thing I feel) but competition creeps in subtly with learning. It seems that learning is not for the sake of gaining new insight and knowledge but for the sake of being better and faster than the other children. Because of increasing competition, parents fear that their child may lose out if they do not let their children learn as much as they possibly could squeeze into the children's schedule. Fear translate into stress and pressure for both parents and children. This results in unhappy children because they are unable to manage the stress heaped onto them at such a young age. Unhappy children become unmotivated, which in turn make parents panic and all these becomes part of a vicious cycle.

Work today is also getting increasingly challenging. Many working professionals are overloaded and the work they do today is more complicated and dynamic than before. Since most parents today are working, they are part of the same group of stressed up working professionals. So, before we drill down to how to raise happy children, we must look at the root of the problem, which is the parents. Are the parents managing all the negative emotions (stress, pressure, frustration, fatigue) at work and in life well? It is difficult to expect the parents to groom happy children when they themselves are feeling very negative about life. It is likely that the negative energy of stress, worries, unhappiness, fears, frustrations will somehow be transferred to their children and thus affecting them and making them feel negative and unhappy as well.

How can we save ourselves and our children from this social pandemic? I believe we need 4 critical elements and they are:

1. Courage
2. Hope
3. Kindness
4. Positive Energy

We must have courage to face the unknown or the worst that could happen and courage comes from having hope that things will turn out well eventually. If we don't have courage, we will be griped by fear and that spins off other negative emotions. If we don't have hope, we lose the will to keep going. How can we create courage and hope then? These two elements can be created through the positive energy we spread and the kindness we give. It is not just about we giving so others benefit, we ourselves get part of the healing energy and strength that comes from giving. I wrote about how building the kindness community and developing the kindness culture can eventually be our biggest safety net here:http://tinyurl.com/zyr7nh6

I created the kindness platform (P2P), whereby there are abundance of kindness opportunities here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1437902803105381
If you are hurt, please visit the group as there are plenty of healing energy where kindness thrives. My 4 admins are doing a fantastic job managing the group there, while I channeled my energy into writing articles that can encourage positivism and happiness.

Being an ordinary person, I am doing what I can to help stop this wave from hitting all of us, but I cannot do this all by myself. I encourage you to do your part if you can. Start off by taking good care of yourself, your physical health and emotional state. Then, spread the positive energy to the people around you. It is human nature to want to complain and make ourselves unhappy but it is possible to count our blessings and make happiness a choice and stop the negative energy outflow. Kindness will be our direction, it will go hand in hand with the positive energy and we can help one another to get through this. We can make happy adults, who will then raise happy children. Remember the 4 guiding principles, my dear friends :)