On the weekend there was horrible news in all TV news channels and all newspapers: an Indian couple, Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya, who live in Norway, have lost custody of their children – two and a half years old son Avigyan and five months old daughter Aishwarya – last May for not taking proper care of them. Not taking proper care was for example feeding the older boy with the hand instead of a spoon and having the children sleep in their bed instead of getting a separate bed for each of them.
It is terrible that the child care authority of Norway can take away children from their parents for these reasons! These children, loved and taken care of by their parents, have been brought to a foster home and are soon supposed to be put into two different foster homes where they should be taken care of until they are eighteen. The mother has to pump out her breast milk and give it to the authorities who then bring it to the foster family to feed the five month old girl. The parents are fighting to get their children back but have had no success so far. Their visa expires in March and so they are now in an emergency to get their children back – they obviously don’t want to leave Norway without them!
Their grandparents have met the Indian president Pratibha Patel on Saturday to ask her for support and she promised to do whatever she can to help the family.
The child care service obviously believes it is doing a good thing by splitting up this family. Their reason is after all to protect the children. The reality is however that these parents are not criminals, drug addicts or alcoholics! They are Indians! This is our culture, this is the way how children are raised here! We don’t eat with forks, spoons and knives! We don’t have baby cots and separate beds for children!
I believe the western world has itself a serious problem with raising children! Children growing up in the west often lose every little bit of respect for their parents. They go into drugs, yell at their parents and curse them with the worst words you can imagine. I think this would be a worse sign that something is going wrong! Child care services should look into such problems first and try to fix them instead of separating parents from their children because of their culture!
I had to think of the man who last year killed nearly a hundred teenagers in the same country. He was not old, he was a young man and I am sure that there was something wrong with how he was raised so that he developed such a sick mind. There are many problems with people raising children which are much worse than feeding your child with your hands.
Children need love and closeness and in the name of freedom and individuality you take this away from them. Will it become a law now that you cannot let even your two-and-a-half-year old sleep in your bed? In India children grow up much more closely to each other. They usually have a loving environment in a big family with closeness to uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. Very normally family members sleep together in one bed, live together closely and just share love more closely than what I have seen in Europe.
I want to request the Indian government to take strong action now to help these people. They are Indian citizens and they have not done any crime! Not the parents and surely not the children! If you cannot let them live their culture, just depart them but don’t force these children, who are at the beginning of their lives, to grow up with strangers instead of in the arms of their parents! I saw on TV how the couple is crying. It is so cruel to separate children of this age from their parents! Why would anybody ever want to come and live in a country where they are not allowed to feed their children the way they want?
There is a clear lack of respect for our culture which I had not expected from a country like Norway.
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I agree with you. They have no right to force their way of thinking and their cultural beliefs as the only right way to raise children. In the western countries, children have by far the worst problems. They do show lack of respect, and very much lack of proper socialization and emotional attachement to their parents, which results in all types of neurosis, problems, addictions, etc. I hope these parents get back their children as soon as possible before the children become traumatized for life. Also, foster homes can be a terrible place causing very severe damage to the children.
Yes totally shocking!
While this does look extreme, however, I have seen sometimes people from our country go easy on laws. Once in Sweden a minor tried to sweet talk me into buying him a cigarette. I knew the law and said I cannot . He went away. Knowing law of the country of the residence helps to avoid troubles