Psychology: Father Son Conversation

The other day in office washroom I overheard a telephonic conversation between a father and his kid. The person called up his child (let us assume it was his son) and told him that he had received a Whatsapp message from school that the kid had not submitted an assignment which he knew he had taken to submit the previous day. “You had taken that assignment yesterday to school. Why did you not submit it?” The kid said that he had indeed submitted his assignment. Then the person asked him if that was the case then why did he receive a message reminder from school. The kid answered that the message must be a common message to all irrespective of whether the concerned student had submitted the assignment or not. The father simply said okay; accepting the reasoning. Then the kid asked him if he had received individual message or in the group. The father accepted that he had received the message in the “group” i.e. Whatsapp group. 

Two things struck me in the conversation. 

First, the father did not trust his son. When the son said that he had submitted the assignment, the person tried to trick him into accepting the opposite by doubting “if son had submitted the assignment then school won’t have to send a reminder!” The son had to explain how the generic messages work and then the father was satisfied. 

Secondly, the father was proven stupid when he confirmed that the “message was sent in the group and hence was a generic reminder” and it was not sent individually to him. The father should have understood this very simple fact by using common sense. So, the son would either have noticed that his father was stupid or else he would have noticed that he did not trust him. Either way the inference coming out from the conversation was not healthy. 

Lastly, these generic reminders are weird and often create confusion. I remember in my previous organization all of us used to receive emails asking us to take some mandatory actions and then in the end there would be a sentence saying, “Please ignore if you have already done this”. In the age of advance analytics and artificial intelligence, such “generic mailers” are simply time-wasting stuff which also add to the unnecessary stress to the employees. The fact that this was happening in an IT company makes it look more stupid. 

Now in my childhood days, my father never checked upon me if I had done assignments or not. I would of course do the assignments most of the times, since otherwise I would look stupid in front of others in the class and would also get punishments. Therefore, I do not understand this need to add a new check and “alert” mechanism which today’s parents are trying to put. If kids know that parents would remind them and alert them if they were missing something, they would have some less serious “sense of responsibility” and rather focus on having some better excuse making capability and certainly better “argumentative capability”. Now these may not be totally useless skills but still I would choose the scenario where the kid owns his decisions regarding school matters and has his own mechanisms of reminders, rather than his father calling him from washroom and asking him stupid questions to trap him, while being involved in something more urgent (using the washroom). 

- Rahul Tiwary