The Conscious Parent

walked this planet.
When you parent, it’s crucial you realize you aren’t raising a “mini
me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own signature. For this reason, it’s
important to separate who you are from who each of your children is.
Children aren’t ours to possess or own in any way. When we know this in
the depths of our soul, we tailor our raising of them to their needs, rather
than molding them to fit our needs.
Instead of meeting the individual needs of our children, we tend to
project our own ideas and expectations onto them. Even when we have
the best intentions of encouraging our children to be true to themselves,
most of us unwittingly fall into the trap of imposing our agenda on them.
Consequently the parent-child relationship frequently deadens a child’s
spirit instead of enlivening it. This is a key reason so many of our
children grow up troubled and in many cases plagued by dysfunction.
We each enter the parenting journey with visions of what it will be.
For the most part these visions are fantasies. We hold beliefs, values, and
assumptions we have never examined. Many of us don’t even see a
reason to question our ideas because we believe we are “right” and have
nothing to rethink. Based on our unexamined worldview, we
unknowingly lay down rigid expectations of how our children ought to
express themselves. We don’t realize that through our imposition of our
ways on our offspring, we constrain their spirit.
For instance, if we are super-successful at what we do, we are likely to
expect our children to be super-successful also. If we are artistic, we may
seek to push our children to be artistic. If we were an academic wizard in
school, we tend to carry a torch for our children to be brilliant. If we