Harpreet Singh Grover, an entrepreneur and content creator, took his young daughter to a swimming pool in Mumbai. However, unlike any other parent, he didn’t set a time limit on her. She was free to swim and frolic around in the pool for as long as she wanted to, and after 3.5 hours of fun, she was ready to go home.

I found this to be a refreshing take on parenting. Wouldn’t we all want to sit around in a pool for three hours? Wouldn’t we all want to just ‘live in the moment’ without worrying about time or running from pillar to post? Why then do we impose this same mindset and put our children in the rat race starting at mere 18 months?

You’ll find children today going to multiple classes after school and they just don’t have the time to sit around or play. They don’t have the time to even understand where their interests lie. And the biggest issue is that they don’t have time to form real connections and relationships with their parents, friends or other family members.

“In my previous line of work where I interacted with a lot of young students, I noticed that many of them were opposed to change. They were often too set in their ways to accept any transformation coming their way,” says Harpreet.

After turning 35 or 40, usually such people realise that they aren’t doing what they love. They realise that a lot of mistakes they made were because of the way they were raised, he explains.

The 41-year-old ran a startup called CoCubes which connected colleges and companies for placements where his interactions with fresh graduates raised several red flags.

“If somebody had been told that they were shy, they carried that throughout their life as a fact about themselves” he says.

However, it wasn’t until much later that he discovered the real repercussions of effective communication with kids. He sold his startup in 2016 when his daughter was an infant. As he immersed himself in parenthood and started researching child psychology, he found that establishing a solid foundation in the early years was the key to a well-rounded individual.

The more he read, the more he understood that it’s important for parents to take a step back, observe their children, involve them in a daily routine, and let them develop into an individual on their own, without the need for praise or rewards.

This exercise also helped him discover motivation within himself in his late 30s. In 2022, he started sharing his learnings on parenting through his YouTube channel and Instagram under the name ‘TheCuriousParent’, with over a million following him.

Take 5 minutes a day to understand your child

Once he finished his schooling in Patiala, Harpreet pursued civil engineering from IIT Bombay. After working as a consultant for a few years, he started CoCubes with his roommate from college. Here they helped fresh graduates from Tier 2 and 3 cities find jobs in various corporations, which was often difficult.