Free parent groups · Bengaluru
No one trains you for the most complicated job you will ever do.
- “Am I pushing too hard, or not hard enough?”
- “Everyone else seems to have a plan. We do not.”
- “They have to choose a stream next year. Neither of us knows how.”
- “We are the only family that has not started coaching.”
- “I keep asking about marks because I do not know what else to ask.”
- “I do not want to decide for them. I also do not want to say nothing.”
Somebody on your floor has already worked some of these out.
- One hour, once a week
- In your own clubhouse
- Free, and always will be
Bengaluru only. One community at a time.
Sreejeeth Ramprasad
I work with teenagers in Bengaluru, and I run these groups myself.
Nobody has worked all of it out. Everybody has worked out something.
You already live surrounded by people solving the same problems on the same timeline. The flat below yours did the stream decision last year. Somebody two floors up is three years past it.
None of them have a method. Every one of them has something that actually worked, in a house like yours, in this city, with a child at this school.
That is worth more than any advice from outside, and it is sitting one lift ride away. The only thing missing is the hour where it gets said out loud.
You have probably never had that conversation with the person one floor down. Starting it is the whole thing I am trying to do.
I start it, and then I leave.
I run the first few sessions myself. I bring the question that opens the hour, I keep it honest, and I get the habit going. Once the room does not need me to start the conversation, it does not need me.
You do not have to speak. Some parents talk every week. Some listen for a month first. Nobody is called on, there is nothing to prepare, and nothing to bring.
We open with a question
Usually something you have to have lived to answer.
Then the room talks
What happened at your house on Tuesday. The same Tuesday, two years ago, at hers.
I ask, I add, I close
Questions mostly. Then one thing worth taking home.
While I am in the room, I can sometimes speak for the child who is not there. Not their secrets. I sit with teenagers as my work, and I have some sense of what is going on in a fourteen year old’s head when they go quiet, or say they do not care, or suddenly want something you have never heard them mention.
What it is not
Not a class.
I am not standing at the front for an hour. Most of the talking is yours.
Not a support group.
This is not a room for what is going wrong. Most of the parents in it have children who are doing perfectly well, and are simply making good decisions for them.
Not a sales pitch.
I do have a paid practice and it is on this website. I will say what I do at the first session so nobody is confused about who I am, and then I will not bring it up again.
Not advice on how to parent.
I have never raised a teenager. I am not going to tell you how to.
I can mentor twenty families. I want to reach ten thousand.
Twenty is a hard stop.
Not a target, and not a stage I am growing out of. It is as many families as one person can do justice to, and I am one person. Those twenty get me in person, every week, one to one.
Ten thousand is the lifetime number.
There is no version of me that mentors ten thousand children one to one, and there never will be. The only way I get near it is a ripple: rooms that keep running after I leave, and parents who start one because they once sat in one.
I would rather have ten thousand parents who help each other than twenty who need me.
Parents at the same school scatter. Neighbours do not.
You already live one lift ride apart. You already run into each other at the gate. The clubhouse is already yours to book. And when the hour ends, the relationship does not, because these are the people you will still be living beside in five years.
I want these groups to outlast me. The only ones that will are the ones built between neighbours.
It takes one parent.
01
You decide it is worth doing, and you write to me.
02
You take it to your Managing Committee. A request from a resident is a community initiative. The same request from me is a vendor asking for access.
03
We pick a Saturday, book the clubhouse, and you invite the neighbours who have teenagers.
All I need is a room and about fifteen parents.
No cost to the community. Nothing to sign.
Or write to hello@sreejeeth.com
Forwarding this to your Managing Committee
- One hour, on a Saturday, in the clubhouse. Nothing is sold and no money changes hands.
- Hosted by a resident. I attend as their guest, and only for the hour.
- The community pays nothing and signs nothing.
Free, and not a trial of anything. Bengaluru only, because I am there in person. Currently one community at a time. I run a paid one to one mentoring practice which is described elsewhere on this site, and these groups are not a route into it.