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Many of us like the festive season and enjoy the rituals attached to them. Some others like the idea of getting holidays because of festivals and they enjoy the break from their daily schedule. Our kids also enjoy the festive season and look forward to break from school and studies. Different personalities results in different take on the festivals.
Having grown up with this festive spirit over the years, we adults enjoy and appreciate the meaning of each of these cultural traditions in our lives, or we even consider these days to be auspicious to begin something new, or make a purchase, but do you think children these days really know and understand the significance of festivals and traditions?
As elders it is our sole responsibility to teach our kids the importance of celebrating these festivals and the rituals involved with it. As the saying goes “Everything has a reason”, there are certain reasons why we celebrate the festivals throughout the year and the reason being different for different festivals. As we dig deeper behind the reasons we will realize the prominence of it and gain a lot too. Here are some of the basic reasons as to why celebrating festivals is important for kids :
- Fostering life-long bonds: Festivals are one time when families visit each other, go for holidays together, or even simply drop in to greet each other. It is a great time for the child to meet his cousins, grandparents and other family relatives, who otherwise may live far away. Meeting like this, will help your child bond better with the family over the long run as they grow up.
- Better understanding of the Indian culture: Celebrating festivals is a great way to teach your child about the Indian culture. Knowing more about why a festival is celebrated, what its significance is, and why we started celebrating it in the first place, can help a child understand the importance and significance of each festival, and it can be a great way to impart values to the child as well.
- Tolerance for tradition: Explaining the importance of each ritual and how it welcomes good fortune for the entire family, may not register with your kid just yet, but over the long run, once the child becomes an adult, these are the very same rituals he/she will follow, thanks to you taking the time out to explain their significance.
In order to make them understand the importance of the festivals, you don’t need to lecture them for a day. Instead you can create some activities through which they can at least understand something out of it. Following are few of the ideas that you can conduct during festive seasons :
- Create a game: Make the festivities hard to get! Create a mock contest that your child has to win, in order to get his/her precious crackers, or the dandiya sticks for example. Pose questions and urge him/her to read up and be prepared on the eve of Diwali/Navratri night. This not only infuses fun in the learning process, but also helps him/her value the celebration that much more!
- Play dress up: Get fun costumes for your child to wear for different occasions, traditional outfits for Navratri, a Ravan mask for Dusshera, etc. This way he/she gets the opportunity to play around with the props and it becomes easier for him/her to understand the reason behind Ravan’s ten heads or why people play Dandiya during navratri.
- Festive decoration:Involve your child in the home decoration process. Involve him/her right from the diya selection, to the rangoli decoration, to making the special festive food. Even if you don’t indulge in decorating the house yourself, make it a project for your children, they will not only enjoy decorating the house, but will also proudly show it off to family that comes to visit you.
- Dinner table conversations: Make festival or occasions a dinner table conversation as the date approaches, this shows your child, that you think it’s important, and he/she will automatically start showing interest in learning more about the festival/occasion.
Festivals are a very good opportunity to spend some quality time with our kids. And celebrating festivals together strengthen the bond between parents and children very well.
Another advantage of celebrating festivals with kids is that it allows us to let kids know about the importance of team work which is very significant for any successful end result, such as organizing a festival together.
By celebrating festivals together you can instill the right values in your kids. Festivals are the result of our mythological and traditional believes and this will help our kids to learn about their ancestor’s culture, values and tradition. In this way they will also feel connected to their roots.
This Content has originally written by Pikaboo Kids and published on November6, 2018. No Copyright/IPR breach is intended.
