Kids Don’t Stop Growing At Any Stage, And Neither Should You!

As a parent, you keep on learning something new every day. Here are three lessons this parent learnt about letting her son grow and explore his fullest potential. 

Becoming a parent transforms life. The excitement and joy a child brings are indescribable. But it also brings with it a greater sense of responsibility and accountability. We embark on a new journey that needs us too to grow – as parents. 

As parents, we focus on the right nutrition for our children’s growth; we make sure that we take care of all their needs, and are there to guide them along their journey.

After all, we become a parent only when the child comes into this world and therefore, we mature together. Besides developing the emotional quotient needed for each stage, a crucial element of this journey is financial planning and security for our child.

Here’s a sneak peek into our journey as parents and what we have learnt at each milestone.

Parenting is preparation, not control

One day when my son was still very young, he fell from the bed when we had a full house. My aunt witnessed the fall and made sure she told everyone about it. While he was fine, I was held guilty of “not being around him to prevent it from happening”.

My husband heard about the incident and understanding my feelings, assured me that I was doing my best. That day, I realised that we couldn’t control everything – yet, as parents, we do try our best to stay prepared. We make our preparation for all scenarios we can think of and add a safety net for any unforeseen events.

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Don’t just react, anticipate!

We have been lucky to have a child who attained all the developmental milestones at the so-called ‘right’ age. We didn’t really need to worry and were fairly relaxed about his progress.

It was only when it was time to put him in school that we realised how expensive things had become, and that today, any parent needs to plan and budget a substantial portion of their incomes for education. All parents in a given school have almost similar amounts of income hence, the ones that plan better can provide better when the time comes.

My husband and I realised that right from playschool and nursery admissions to pursuing higher education, we will need to earmark funds for our son. The way school fees are rising every year, especially in cities like Gurgaon (where I live), it requires a proactive approach to savings and investment – it’s not something that can just ‘happen’ – something we had to learn quickly on enrolling him in school. That was the point it hit us that we need to prepare ASAP for our kid. We did our bit of research. We looked for a stable company which we can trust with our hard-earned money with. We went with ICICI Prudential as they are the oldest private life insurance brand in India.

Let your child explore and make his own choices

Our son is now seven. He has a busy schedule, given his many hobbies and interests. This is the age to explore and he is getting introduced to many sports and activities. We realised that at this young age, it is better to let him explore, rather than box him into specific areas before he actually understands what they involve. To indulge him in all these, we needed to plan our finances as well. 

Hence once we were sure where to invest, we needed to look for a plan that suited our tight budget. We came across child plans from ICICI Prudential Life where we invest small amounts every month from our tight budget. We expect this to assist in his education. The plan provides us with the best of both the worlds. It offers to grow our investments secured for our child’s future, at the same time, secure our investments against any unforeseen events that might come.

One of the main reasons we took the plan was it offered partial withdrawal of our funds in case our child needs it at any point of time. Additionally, we being working parents a plan that would help us save taxes was on a high priority list. All these taken collectively made us select the perfect plan for our kid.

While we are always there to provide physical and emotional support to our children, we need experts to guide us on the financial support. With experts willing to guide us anytime-anywhere across mobile, website, banks or advisors we are more than happy with the support ICICI Prudential Life has given us till now.

Hence I strongly advise all parents should invest a certain amount regularly to help their money grow and secure their children’s future.

Top image via Canva; image inside courtesy the author

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