At retreats I visit, the topic of parenting comes up regularly. People often ask teachers about it, myself included. I wanted to write about what I’ve heard and found to be true over the years, as well as my share own experience. I don’t consider myself some special authority on raising children, other than having parents, and being a parent myself. I’m learning everyday.
I’ve been a father of two for about 12 years now. Learning how to be a parent was a trial and error process. Kids don’t come with a manual. I didn’t take any parenting classes, and neither does anyone I know! It’s kind of peculiar that we invest so little effort into learning about parenting, before we have kids.
Of course, it’s about intuition, and learning by doing, but some guidance would have been welcome. The culture that I grew up in didn’t give me much, on the contrary, many assumptions that I absorbed growing up, I’ve found to be simply wrong. I went through a process of letting go of those, to find my own way.
By the way, children are great teachers. They will teach us how to become better parents, if we pay attention! So, here are some things that I believe we can strive for, to be better parents.
First of all, nobody can be the perfect parent. All we can do is our best, knowing that if we screw up, and we will, we can apologize. We set a good example for our kids this way: nobody is perfect, it’s fine to make mistakes and when we do, we acknowledge and own them.
What do young kids want most of all? That we spend time with them. Our attention and our love, they are not two different things. And children intuit this. The more we can remember what life was like for ourselves as a child, the more we can relate to their world and the things that they are interested in.
Be honest and be straight with them. I don’t believe in pretending that the world is different than it really is. Of course, we don’t tell them about things that are not appropriate, or that they don’t need to know about. But if they ask a direct question, tell them the truth. They will sense anyway, unconsciously, if you are not being truthful.
Don’t kill their enthusiasm and natural curiosity. These are qualities of our true nature, that we as parents should nurture. We should take time to answer their questions. A child’s enthusiasm is an important guiding force in their lives, like a compass of the heart. We don’t want to teach our children to cut themselves off from that. Our job is to notice their enthusiasm and encourage them to follow it.
We don’t ‘have’ children. They are not ours, they are children of the universe. And so are we! We provide for their basic needs and we teach them how to interact with society. We provide a safe and loving home, from where they can explore the world. And when they decide that it’s time to become more independent, we let them.
Children are not an extension of ourselves. It’s pointless to try to mold our children after our own ideas, or push them to do the things we wished we had done in our lives. It’s ultimately doomed to fail and we will just create suffering. If they need to take the long way to learn something important, than that’s how it’s going to be, despite us thinking we ‘know better’.
One of the best thing we can do as parents is to start our own inner journey. There are many good reasons for this, but a major reason one is that we are less likely to pass down our own issues from growing up. When we become parents, the more unhealthy patterns of our own parents are guaranteed to come to the surface, in ourselves! This is a great opportunity for us to grow, and by taking on this challenge, we don’t pass it on to our children.
As an example, our inner journey will teach us to be with our own difficult emotions. Many people, myself included, grew up learning to suppress emotions. This has a major impact on children. If we can’t stay with our own emotions, it’s going to be very difficult to be with our kids when they are emotional. They need us, when they go through intense emotions, to listen and hold the space. We don’t need to say much, just be there. If we don’t do this, our children will likely learn how to suppress emotions that seem to be too much for the parents to endure, and the cycle continues.
What would you do different from how you grew up? Are you raising kids? Please share your experience, I’d love to read about it.