The Conscious Parent

breaks out of the family’s mold, choosing to be who they want to be,
doing what they want to do, even if this means being a black sheep. If a
child threatens our egoic attachment to conformity, we experience
emotional turmoil.
I think of a teenage girl who was always different. Slower than her
friends and difficult to handle, she experienced more emotional
meltdowns than other girls, which tested her parents’ patience to the
limit. She was lazy, whereas her parents were just the opposite. She was
a dreamer, whereas her parents were practical. She was unconcerned
about her looks, whereas how her parents looked was of vital concern to
them.
Though she didn’t want to be, this teen knew she was an
embarrassment to her parents. She was particularly irksome to her highly
ambitious mother, who had taken great pains to carve her own place in
society. The reality was that she didn’t know how to become the child
her parents wanted her to be. Although she tried, nothing she did was
ever good enough.
When we resist our children’s way of being, it’s often because we
secretly harbor the notion that we are somehow “above” what’s
happening, especially if what’s happening is something we believe to be
a mess. We tell ourselves that while what we consider undesirable
aspects of life may befall others, they simply cannot and must not befall
us. Engaging in the ordinary fallibility of life and exposing our own
fallibility is simply too threatening. By refusing to accept life as it is, we
become mired in our attachment to the idea we are superior to the
common lot. A child who violates this image of ourselves then feels like