Art of Parenting

The kindest thing that a parent can do for a child is to give the child love and emotional support and to help it to climb to self-hood. A growing child develops a healthy or a deficient personality in direct proportion to the love given or the love denied. Just like a plant needs sunshine and rain to grow, a child also needs love and nurturing to become a mature adult.

There are two major reasons why parents don’t love their children enough. First, the parents do not love themselves. Parents with low self-esteem find it difficult to love their children. They only play mechanical role of parenting. The second reason is that some parents have a mistaken notion that children exist to fulfill their expectations. If the child’s behaviour differs from the parents’ expectations, the mother or father responds with criticism. The child feels unloved and the foundation is laid for personality problems later in life. In fact, the antisocial behaviour of a child is a cry for help, an attempt to escape the feeling of guilt, anger, resentment that begins with criticism! The starting point in raising super kids is to realize that the children have their own independent individuality. They belong to themselves.

Each child comes into this world with his or her own agenda, with special talents, interests and abilities. What the child will be in future can never be predicted even by astrologers and fortune tellers. The child’s job is not to conform to his or her parents’ expectations but to bloom and become everything he or she is capable of becoming.

Kahlil Gibran, in his book The Prophet, says: ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing itself. They come through you but not from you and though they’re with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backwards nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth’.