In the last few months, my life has changed in awesome ways. We bought and moved into our own house which is a great feeling. To top that, I became a father in Jan of this year. Atharv has been a delight who instills pride and sense of dread as to what kind of dad I will turn out to be. But this post is not about parenting but about one of the aspects of me being a father that I find appalling.

Atharv likes being sung to when he is about to sleep. The songs he wants to be sung changes every few weeks. Initially, it was Achutam Keshavam by Ankit Batra which is an amazing rendition. Do check it out below.

Achutam Keshavam

Over the past few weeks, he has gotten over it and since then, his new favorite song is “Five Little Ducks”. This song horrifies me simply by its existence. Like who in their sane mind made this rhyme up. The first para goes as below:

Five Little Ducks went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said Quack, quack, quack
But only Four little ducks came back

Say what!!! There’s one missing duckling and the mother duck is fine. She even allows the remaining ducklings to go out until none is left before she makes the effort to go find what happened. What even is happening.

Then comes the Five Little monkeys rhyme. This one makes me  positively call the Childcare Services. Monkeys jumping on the bed, one falls and injures himself and the doctor just says no more jumping on the bed. He should be advising the mom monkey to not allow the baby monkeys to jump. Just imagine the insurance cost or cost for doctor’s visit. Enough to make a deep hole in the pocket. I mean why is the doctor so indifferent to the irresponsible parenting on display. Let us not even go into having five kids.

If the first 2 rhymes were examples of parenting done wrong, the next one is going a step further. What goes further than parenting mistakes, it is exposing kids to violence in the form of the innocuous rhyme “Baby Shark”. We go to lengths to keep kids from being exposed to violence in visual media but gladly do that in the form of rhymes which they remember for a long time. Yikes. I didn’t exactly explain what is going on with Baby Shark yet. Baby Shark introduces the Shark Family of Baby, Mom, Dad and Grandparents. Lovely, right. Too soon, too soon. Right after the introduction, Sharks go hunting causing all other fishes to flee. Sheesh. And here I was thinking that this is a nice enough rhyme.

So Swapna has no objection to expose Atharv to these horror rhymes as he drifts into Dreamland but she will yell and scream if I expose him to Japanese Anime such as Baki. SMH. Let us maintain one uniform standard where kids do not exposed to these rubbish rhymes and instead grow up listening to more wholesome rhymes. So, which ones do I consider wholesome, no clue, if left up to me I would rather make it a karaoke session of Hotel California than sing these rhymes. Until such time he doesn’t grow out of these rhymes, I am forced to comply; not to mention that singing these a few hundred times has made me forget all the bands and albums I used to listen and groove to. Instead, singing Five Little Ducks has become muscle memory and I can rattle the entire rhyme without even waking up.

Till next post.
Nik