Dear Parent,
I don’t profess to know how you should bring up your child.
To the best of my understanding, your child chose you, even before incarnating, because they believed you would be the perfect parent for them in this lifetime.
But from being a child and a parent myself, and having been close to other human beings who have shared their experiences of being children and parents, one thing has become clear to me: children need our love and acceptance, more than anything else in life.
You may have been led to believe that studies, sports, careers, money, legacies and teaching them ‘how behave’ are the most important things, and I don’t blame you. These things can be immensely helpful to smoothening their path through life.
But they are a poor substitute for the love and acceptance of a parent.
And all those worldly things, if imposed on them at the expense of their self-worth and self-acceptance, will harm them more than you can ever imagine.
Forget the rhyme about sticks and stones. The truth is that even words can and do hurt. They have the power to scar children for life.
A child who is told that they are ‘not right’, ‘not normal’ or ‘not good enough’ will go through life believing this to be true. As a consequence, they will create a life experience that mirrors these ideas.
The irony will be that they will feel unworthy and undeserving of the very things that you want them to have and enjoy in life.
They will have relationships in which they are made to feel not good enough. And they will meet failure and poverty at every turn.
And so, in your eagerness to do good by them, you will have unwittingly become the cause of their greatest suffering.
And although you might work, strive and sacrifice on their behalf to the point of exhaustion, it is likely that the thing they will remember most clearly about you, whenever they think of you, will be the hurt and pain you caused them.
Please don’t let it be this way.
As the American abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass famously said:
‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’
So teach and guide your child by all means, but don’t hurt or attack them.
It is up to you, as the grown adult, to regulate your feelings and deal with these in an appropriate way.
Your child is not your punching bag.
Let your love and acceptance of them as individuals be what shines through all your words and actions, and not your anger or frustration.
In the words of the Sufi poet Rumi:
‘Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
And above all else, let your child know on a daily basis how much you love them, and how much they mean to you.
Let them know that you love and accept them, no matter what.
Some call this ‘unconditional love.’ Psychologists call it ‘unconditional positive regard.’
But whatever you call it, it works!
And don’t just think it. Tell them and show them. Spell it out to them.
Let it be the one thing they know without a doubt about you and their relationship with you.
And if, by some chance, you’ve gone about it any other way, don’t lose heart. You’re not alone. And you can fix it and make things better.
Love, and time, heals all wounds. So it’s never too late.
But you have to take the first step. You have to apologise.
And you might have to be a little patient and give them time to process things.
There is a world of children and grown people who used to be children that are hurting and suffering. And they may very well end up doing to their children what their parents did to them.
And there is a world of parents who are hurting because their children are rejecting them and distancing themselves in adulthood.
So much unnecessary suffering…
But you have the power to change this. And you can do something about it right now.
Please accept my sincere apologies if anything I have said offends you. That was never my aim.
I am not a saint, or perfect in any way, and I don’t pretend to be. I make mistakes every single day, though I’d love not to.
But I can’t stand by and not share what I know to be true, when it can help to prevent unnecessary suffering. And this is my only reason for writing.
I wish you love, peace and happiness, and the close and loving relationship with your child that you want and deserve,
Indika
Leave a Reply