As a parent - man or animal, who is the best

Who care their offspring's the most, the man or animals? Asked Dr S Ranganathan, Director of ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., in a meeting on 'the impact of social evils in the upbringing of children' held here in Chennai. Only the parental care can be the answer to the problem. When children are exposed to various anomalies, horror & terror, the fragile family bondage in the society, the children get confused and worried. This confusion and worry may impact their thought and action in future.

The larger issue the parents need to understand is about the essence of parental care. Parental care does not end with feeding, caring, getting and educating…. etc. If we peep into the evolution of life, we can understand the very purpose and meaning of parental care from nature, especially from various animals. Unfortunately, much of our wildlife has been destroyed and hence our leaning opportunity is limited.

The biological definition of the word parental care is ensuring the present for a larger future. Parental care in animal world is unconditional. Parental care reaching to the extent of altruism is well known among various animals.

Man has classified Kangaroos, Opossum, Tasmanian devil, Echidna etc to be the primitive mammals. Amazingly, how unconditional care kangaroo mother offers to her joeys. How our ancestors – the monkeys care their young ones. How birds take care of their nestlings.

Parental care seldom differs in animals with 'precocial' and 'altricial' babies. Do animals have any expectations from their young ones other than ensuring them to continue the generation. We can easily define the parental care seen in animal kingdom as a biological event, but is unconditional.

The parental care in humans is more of psychological care than mere biological care. How many parents realize that the psychological care is what needed the most. In abstract sense, parental care means 'biological investment' for man. Some time we may loose our investments in the fake finance companies. But still our greed to multiply money goes on. Similarly, we make our investments on children. We want them to be ….so on and so forth. We want them to earn big money, big name, fame etc. We hardly have allowed a child to be a child when he was a child. But we claim, we are biologically more evolved than animals.

In many occasions, what we offer as parental care to our children is mere biological care and baby sitters are the one who does the psychological care. The nature is blessed with wonderful fauna and flora and by seeing the beauty of the nature, a child will get the best parental care. But unfortunately, man has destroyed the nature, fauna and flora.

Parent-child connectivity is the inevitable component of parental care. The concern, the care, the value, the worth and the meaning & purpose of life intoto has to be expressed, communicated and taught the children during parental care.