Kajol Reveals 3-Year Struggle Parenting Gen Z Daughter Nysa: “Hormones Hit, We Were Fighting”

Recently, she spoke candidly about her films and the characters she portrayed on screen during a session with YouTuber and TV host Lilly Singh. She also opened up about why she believes 90s kids are the best, her take on Gen Z, parenting two Gen Z children, and her bond with daughter Nysa Devgan.

Kajol On Her Bond With Daughter Nysa

Kajol welcomed her daughter Nysa in April 2003. Speaking about how complex a girl’s life is, she said, “I have a lot of talks with her. I talk to her, I talk her through things.

But the mother and daughter did not always have it easy. They worked hard to build a bond like this. “It’s a relationship that we had to build, and we built it simply because of the fact that – I mean, hormones hit and she was just 12, and we were all over the place. We were fighting, and we were both irrational at times. We were both illogical at times,” she shared.

She further added that as an adult, she stepped back and decided to be the rational one. “I decided that no, I am not going to fight with her that much. I am going to try to talk to her as much as I can and work with her,” the actor shared.

“We both struggled for nearly 3 years. Both of us were like, ‘I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t want to talk to you,'” she said, adding, “But eventually, they became conversations, long conversations. It became more about me sitting down listening to her.”

Sharing her parenting notes, she said it wasn’t about talking so much but about listening to her daughter and giving her space. “And that made the biggest difference,” she noted.

“She just needed me to just sit there and listen to her as much as I could. That was my biggest learning as a parent. We’re okay today,” Kajol said, with a hint of pride and affection in her tone.

Kajol On Parenting Two Gen Z Children

Lilly Singh praised Kajol and said, “You were very ahead of your time. You were Gen Z before Gen Z was even Gen Z. And what I mean by that is you said that you are a big yapper, you talk a lot, your character (referring to Simran from DDLJ) encouraged solo travel, which Gen Z is all about.”

She added that the actor is unapologetic, and Gen Z communicates using GIFs and memes.

Replying to her, the actor said, “I think the 90s people are actually the most amazing because we have seen a span of no social media, no phones, and we knew how to write properly, in cursive. Our generation is fabulous. And we did what we wanted to do, and there is no proof today. We were smart, we didn’t have phones.”

“I think that the fact that we had to adapt to so much – adapt to first having phones, going from landlines to handphones to social media, and that was another huge jump completely. So I think we are the most adaptable generation,” she further noted with pride.

Laughing, she said, “And if the end of the world happens, if the zombies take over, and if they come to attack us, we will be the ones.”

Speaking about Gen Z, she said that they are overloaded with information. “Maybe we grew up in a time when we had zero information, or only information given to us through parents, so we had to make up our own minds about everything, whether it was ethics or boundaries or what we can or can’t do, our limits, our ceilings that we wanted to break or didn’t want to break, what we believed we could achieve,” the Do Patti star added.

Sharing her observation about Gen Z, she said that they are bombarded with so much information that they are just swimming in it and are unable to make a decision about what things are. “This is supposed to be like, or that is supposed to be like that, but what do you want. Make up your mind about it. So I feel that is something most of them struggle with,” Kajol added.

Parenting two Gen Z children, she added that they both process information quite differently. “My daughter and son (Yug) both process the information differently because she is a girl and he is a boy. I think boys lead a slightly simpler life, and girls have a lot more thrust at them,” she concluded.