| Sunday, 27 October 2024 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Good morning! Last year, I hit a parenting milestone no one had ever told me about, nor had I ever read about it in a book. My son’s shoe size became the same as mine.
And just like that, all my shoes were now available to my son. If not for the fact that I’d stopped buying regular shoes a few years ago (after switching over to “barefoot” shoes) and our slightly different tastes, we could buy two for the price of one.
A month ago, he became as tall as me. My jackets now fit him.
There is a sense of both joy and disappointment when your child surpasses you. The disappointment comes because you realise their childhood time with you is nearing its end. And that you haven’t been prepared for it as a parent.
But I am also a child, to my parents. And my time with them too is limited. Tim Urban helped me visualise it best with his “Depressing Math” and “Life Weeks” series.
But perhaps the hardest math to process—and, in turn, the hardest Covid pill to swallow—has to do with our relationships. I grew up spending some time with my parents almost every day. Since turning 19 and moving away for good, I’ve averaged about 10 to 15 days a year with them. If I’m one of the lucky ones, I’ll have quality time with my parents until I’m 60. That means that the day I headed off to college, I had something like 350 remaining parent days total—the amount of time I had with them every year of my childhood.
The parent-child relationship is a circle.
Which is why whether you’re a parent or a child, today’s edition is special. It’s the culmination of weeks of effort from my talented colleagues who helped me make sense of the wealth of responses to our second “community quest”, the Parenting Quest from June. (Our very first one was “The Meaning of Fitness”).
We got over 900 responses from all of you, of which over 450 were from those who were parents. And what an incredibly rich and diverse set of answers we came up with!
Each of you answered nine different questions in your own unique ways. We had over 4,000 answers to make sense of! So, when my colleagues and I sat down to figure out ways we could present this data to you, we were confronted with two options.
(a) We identify and present the most common or interesting responses graphically.
(b) We open the “firehose” of responses to you.
The first option would make it easy to see high-level trends and perhaps even a few interesting outliers, but would take away all the details.
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Hari Buggana
Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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Rahul Gonsalves
Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures