" The Responsibility of Parents towards their children " By a Meditation Master

Parents impose their beliefs, ideas, views, culture and even their ambitions on their children. Man wants to become immortal through his children. If we conceive, it is not only because we love children, but also because we want to continue to exist and to rule over others. This may seem harsh but is true nevertheless. Parents tend to forget that each individual is a unique being and that it is our duty to help bring out this uniqueness. Instead, they feed the child with already existing patterns, thus suppressing its creativity. This inevitably leads to a great frustration about which the child knows nothing. Who can suppress energy? It is like trying to suppress a volcano. See what is happening today. Youngsters are becoming wild, yet elders, parents and others have the guts to say, "See how these youngsters are corrupted." But then the following questions arise: whose seeds are they? Under whose care and responsibility are they?

I know many parents who emotionally blackmail their children, command and possess them. It is said that parents are the first guru of the child, but do parents play the role of a guru? Do they at least know what it is to be a guru? It is not difficult to give academic and intellectual formation. It is easy to give moral instruction to a child or to anyone, but it is not easy to bring out inner virtue from him. Unless the parent is already virtuous, it is not possible to make a child grow into a good human being. Man is himself a neurotic being, then how can we expect his progeny to become sane? The parents are themselves in a big mess; they have become parents without understanding what parenthood is. They simply follow the pattern or do what has been done to them.

As a child grows into a teenager, a lot of changes take place, not only on the psychological level but also on subtler levels. The journey of the positive and negative, or male and female, starts unfurling, but these are suppressed, misinterpreted and avoided. The child has no proper guidance. Imposing moral precepts and the ways of society is no guidance at all. The child is potentially a rebel, therefore he should be carefully observed, listened to, then helped. But we wish to control them, hence the revolt. Children should not only be given freedom, but also helped to assume their responsibility because with freedom come a lot of responsibilities and the more one is free, the more responsible one becomes.

The problem of teenagers is that of the elders because the latter have not grown up. The root cause of this state of affairs is ignorance of one's real nature. If we go deeper into our ignorance, we will find that we are cut off from nature. The first severance is from our mother, the second from nature, and both are the causes of frustration. During our whole life, we seek for the bliss of the womb. Most marriages are based on that reality, but our dreams and expectations are broken because our partner fails to fulfil them. The reason for broken marriages may be thousand and one, but the real one is frustration from both sides. We need to be united with nature to feel fulfilled. And the only way to know how to become one with nature is through meditation and for that, the guidance of a master is essential.

From Swami Paramananda, a Meditation Master and writer.

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