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Growing With Myths and Superstitions

My grandmother told me not to have milk after eating fish as it would cause a severe skin problem.  Dad told me that he had tied a piece of black cloth beneath the tail of our new car for good fortune and mom told me I will get a very beautiful wife as the “BAY” (i.e. an alphabet of the urdu language) was made perfectly when I joined both my hands together on the same angle. 

The positives were that some of these myths particularly the one my mom told me still excite me, however, the others made me more precautious fearing of the consequences, killing a black cat once by running the car over it in order to stop it from crossing in front of my car and bringing me bad luck. Yes, that is exactly how much of importance these myths and superstitions were to me and I would go beyond limits to turn them in my favour. These myths and pastoral tales are still told in our community which ultimately means that youth today also grow up listening to such kind of credulous accounts of the natural phenomenon. 

I am, by any means, not against the cultural and traditional training as I have been through the process myself and believe in them to some extent. However, these lessons are often seen to be indoctrinated in the minds of immature children without comprehending the harm they do to young minds. My mother also did not know if she was indoctrinating me but now I realize that she did; although unintentionally it was. It took me some serious amount of time and effort to get out of what I was told during my childhood, however, it was only partially possible and to this date also I feel doomed. 

I suggest it would be more appropriate if children are told about the natural phenomenon with a minimum amount of facts if not in a "scientific" way as whole. The training of a child to be a healthy contributor to the society begins at birth. Those young and immature minds can accept the facts very quickly and without much thought at that stage and most importantly those facts often remain with them for their whole lives.

The worst part is that children, after learning these made-up explanations, also tend to share it outside with their friends which start a never-ending chain of intellectually negative impacts on their minds. Moreover, practices like these also leave an extremely damaging impression on a child's curiosity to learn and discover. I wonder how many children grew up listening to these tales like me and I really doubt that most of them reached the satisfactory answers to the natural phenomenon. 

All these legends might be important to the people but we must not forget that they also have a price when it comes to the intellectual growth of a society. The training of a child should be carried out in a way that it should encourage and inspire them to question with reason and logic. It also enhances the evaluation skills of children in a critical way where they can decide better for themselves in the later part of their lives. 

On the other hand, if we keep telling our children these myths in a superstitious way, we might not help them at all to be active members of society instead develop a sluggish behaviour of accepting things without judging rationally at first hand. It is about high time that we must admit the highly adverse bearings of these myths and superstitions related to natural phenomenon on the brains of younger generation. 

We must also take this responsibility individually to train our children with the best possible knowledge we have instead of carrying on with centuries old tales that have no basis and are devoid of logic. Some little hearts will definitely break like mine after getting to know that those “BAY’s” on our palms were meaningless but at least this way we can save the lives of some black cats in our society.

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