Born and brought up in Kolkata, parenting influencer Riddhi Deorah is quite a popular face across India. She also believes that the process of parent influencing is completely driven by personal experience as a mother. This is both challenging and exciting at the same time.
Riddhi holds a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge, UK and from the London School of Economics. She started her own online knitwear apparel brand in 2013 which became a popular name in the span of just 2 years. Based in Gurugram, Riddhi worked with a start-up, Roposo for a brief time. Besides that, she briefly invested in the public equity markets and grew her portfolio at 15% CAGR.
She also launched her own fashion label Riddhi & Revika in 2015 which now has a flagship store in Delhi. She began writing and sharing content on parenting in 2017 with a mission to help 100,000 parents live a happy, holistic and spiritual lifestyle. .
Talking about the idea, Riddhi says, “When I shared my experiences as a mother, I saw mothers reaching out to me saying how they resonated with what I was sharing.
I believe that people can see through you. If you are authentic, honest and have a helpful attitude, people will get attracted to your energy. You will see your group growing beautifully right before you. That’s what I believe happened to me. It was just the start of my journey and from sharing experiences, I now build parenting courses on mindful parenting, active parenting, hero method of communicating with your child, easy stress management, phonics and so many other topics. The journey has indeed been beautiful, but I want it to be a community of lifelong learners, who make parenting not only a happy but also an enriching experience.”
Talking about her challenges, she tells, “As a first-time mom, I had my own challenges, balancing work and baby both wasn’t easy. When I was at work, I kept thinking about my baby and when I was with my son, I kept thinking about all the pending work on my to do list. I was never 100% in one place. I feel that a lot of us go through this phase. This for sure was my greatest challenge. Nichiren Buddhism really made things easy for me and I was able to spend more quality time with my son and productivity at work also went up.”
Parenting has changed a lot for Riddhi over these years, she feels, “Parenting is not a set of rules that you can follow to achieve a pre-determined goal, it is about building a beautiful relationship with our little ones and raising them into happy responsible individuals. Even though the end results that we want as parents has more or less remained the same over the years, there has been a phenomenal change in the parenting.”
“Parenting is becoming more and more complex with the ever-changing environment in which we are bringing up our children. It used to be just a new relationship. However, now it has become a challenge of sorts and also a cause of anxiety for so many young parents. Parenting should be an easy, enriching experience that adds joy and not stress to our lives just like it used to be in the past,” she adds.
While describing the process of parent influencing, she believes, “My influence is completely driven by my personal experiences as a mother. I share about my moments with my son, my challenges as a mother and also about what I learnt from the varied experiences. Since everything that I share is something that has happened with me, there are always other mothers who have had a similar experience. This enables mothers to resonate with what I say, and it feels amazing when mothers come up to me and tell me how they have benefitted from my story. I am on a mission to help 100, 000 parents live a happy, holistic and spiritual life. I am grateful that I found my mission and I am committed to serve the community till the end.”