We use Instagram to promote our child’s music, but family time is always gadget-free

"We have two kids, and I always lecture them on how too much screen time is bad for the eyes and also warn them about online predators and how screen time always eats up family time. However, with a teenager, a preteen and a techie husband, it’s close to impossible to manage screen time.

Then I realized that screen time can be utilized for a good purpose too! Here’s how.

It was a pleasant surprise when we realized that our daughter, Mohar, who was then 6 and had been born and brought up in the UK, had a penchant for both Hindi and Bengali songs. She grew up listening t    o her dad, a passionate guitarist who used to strum Hindi and Bengali songs on the guitar. Soon, she joined him and would hum along beautifully.

However, language became a big barrier for Mohar—every time she got the tune right, she struggled with the lyrics. Despite being from a Bengali family, I struggled to read the language myself. Still, my daughter’s love for Bengali songs motivated me to brush up on my own Bengali so that I could help her with the lyrics of old and new Bangla melodies.

Our next step was to take advantage of various search engines available on the net to find the lyrics of the songs she wanted to learn. We would read those ourselves first and then write the entire songs down in English so that she could read them, all with the help of the technologies available.

Our efforts paid off, and now she sings Rabindra Sangeet as well as modern Bengali songs. I don’t know how that would have been possible without the use of technology, living in a faraway country, where we hardly interact with people who speak the language. Now, my daughter can even speak our mother tongue, albeit broken!

Now, at the age of 11, my daughter is receiving training in both opera singing and Indian classical music. Photo-sharing sites like Instagram have emerged as major platforms to promote musical talent and gain recognition. As my daughter is keen to pursue music as a career, we recently started an Instagram page in her name where my husband and I upload videos of her songs and snippets of her daily life.

While Mohar is excited to have an Insta page in her name, we have informed her about the pitfalls of social media and why her account needs to be monitored by us at all times. We make it a point to scrutinize all the content closely before uploading it on social media.

Through social media, we are trying to build a community of loyal listeners who appreciate my daughter’s posts and her singing. She gets thrilled to see people following her—it’s like having an audience to admire her singing prowess. The encouragement and feedback she receives online are huge motivating factors for her to hone her musical skills further.

Of course, we also discuss negative comments and trolls and how we need to deal with them—we just ignore them! We believe that when utilized correctly, social media empowers artists to do what they could not do before the internet. We believe in the positive and judicious use of gadgets today.

All said and done, nothing can beat going gadget-free once in a while to enjoy pure family time. Family get-togethers, barbecues, endless addas (informal, relaxed conversations) with friends, and father-child jamming with a mic, guitar and drums are our usual ways of having family time without any screens, and we all look forward to these sessions.

Looking forward to ParentCircle’s #GadgetFreeHour initiative on November 20."

By Shilpi Chakraborty

 (As told to Monali Bordoloi)