Happy Children's Day

Steve Jobs was put-up for adoption by his unmarried parents as reportedly Steve’s maternal grandfather was opposed to the idea of his daughter marrying a Syrian muslim immigrant. Their loss was the gain of Paul and Clara Jobs who adopted him and gave Steve not only their name but more importantly a home. It was in this home that Steve Jobs learnt the first lessons of life that went on to define him as an individual and professional. “Growing up with Paul and Clara Jobs – a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper – the couple who had adopted him soon after birth, the child Steve learnt many profound lessons. Not only that he was ‘chosen' and ‘special,' rather than just ‘abandoned,' but also that craftsmanship is important. “Steve, this is your workbench now,” Paul had told him when marking off a section of the table in the garage. “I thought my dad's sense of design was pretty good, because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him,” Jobs would reminisce. Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View, informs Isaacson. “As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. ‘He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see.'”


I am sure that down the years looking at how Steve was molded into an iconic entrepreneur, his biological parents would have repented even more that they could not retain him. Steve, even in his later years, continued to identify his foster parents Paul and Clara jobs as his real dad and mom. Parents play such a huge role in nurturing a child’s present and shaping her/his future. For Steve Jobs, if his biological parents could not give him anything except ‘birth’, his foster parents gave everything to him except ‘birth’. The latter was definitely more precious for the child in every possible way.

Can you take enough time-out from your work and give the same ‘attention’ to your kid today? We may not be giving our kids up for adoption but are we doing more than just giving them ‘birth’ and arranging provisions for them? Are we? (The ‘attention’ here should not be read as being he over-zealous parent but in taking her/him through a journey of self-discovery and lifelong learning).

“From the start of Nooyi’s tenure at the head of PepsiCo, she wrote personal notes every quarter to the spouses of her executives, but still felt she wasn’t doing enough to forge the bonds of a ‘PepsiCo family’. After a trip back to India, she was reminded that in the Indian family, you are always your parents’ children; she realised that her executives were all kids once, too, and decided to start writing to their parents every quarter as well – something an American CEO would never dream of. The response, in Nooyi’s words, was “huge”.

Can our organizations help their employees to be better parents by simply giving them the flexibility in balancing their work and life schedules? Being there for one’s child first performance, first day at school, the parents-teacher meet, annual day, taking kids and his friends out for an ice-cream and similar small but precious moments for the kid could give them their best childhood gifts and their parent unimaginable happiness. The same happiness they bring back to work and convert it into ‘value’ for the organization and the society. Believe me that in doing so organizations do not lose anything, if at all they stand to gain!

Today as 'Happy Children's Day' is being celebrated across India (coinciding with the birth of our first prime minister Jawarlal Nehru), I sincerely hope that all our kids are really 'happy'.

Happy Children’s Day!