Family visits are great! When the part of our family with small children comes for vacation from the Gulf, the house turns into a lively chaos. Everyone takes turns to get a chance to take care of the little ones, much to the delight of their parents. Especially the one year old is a real attraction.
One day it was my turn. I had fed the small one pieces of chapatti and was completing his breakfast by giving him water to drink from a small steel cup. He had just started to learn drinking from a cup. After a few sips it happened. He swallowed the water the wrong way and started coughing.
Within a split second several thoughts went through my mind: How should I react? My culturally learnt approach would be to slap with my hand on his back. The expected reaction in India, I knew from my observations, is to tap with the hand onto the head of the person. Scientifically, I once saw on tv, neither approach does have much of a realistic effect. The head tap I know only in theory, but I am not very experienced to tap onto the head the right way.
When I had taken my decision and was slapping the back of the poor one coughing, my mom-in-law appeared. While I was slapping on the back, she started tapping on the head to do the right thing to give relief to the baby.
Even after we both stopped our attempts the small boy was coughing for a little longer before everything was finally alright again. Hopefully till date he is ignorant of different cultural concepts of giving relief to people who swallow the wrong way and he at least felt cared for when we both tried our different concepts on him.
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