Are You a Good Parent?

Parents have a truly important job – not only are they helping to mold their own child’s future, their efforts are helping to shape the face of the next generation of humanity. While the parenthood experience can be many things – joyful, busy, colorful, messy, and full of love, it can also be confusing at times.

Between multitudes of conflicting advice, books on different parenting styles and parenting methods, and blogs and forums full of parenting advice and tips, it can be difficult to navigate and find what is truly important for your child’s wellbeing.

Below, Sadhguru provides three simple guidelines which will help you to become the best parent that you can be, ensuring that your children have the support they need to blossom to their fullest potential.

Sadhguru: Parenthood is a very funny thing. You are trying to do something that nobody has ever known how to do well. Even if you have 12 children, you are still learning. You may raise the first 11 properly, but the twelfth one can give you the works. So what’s the best thing you can do?

Spend Time on Yourself

The foremost thing is to spend sufficient time and work a little bit upon yourself. Look at yourself carefully  – how you are, how you sit, how you stand, how you speak, what you do, what you don’t do because children pick up everything rapidly and they will exaggerate everything that you are doing. So at least make yourself in such a way that you like the way you are because if even you don’t like yourself, then definitely your child – one more human being need not go that way. So becoming conscious of what we are doing is extremely important.

Teach Your Children to Question

One important thing that you should teach your children is that they learn to question everything; not with suspicion but with a genuine wanting to know. If people question because they suspect that ‘everything is evil,’ this is a sickness. A question is an instrument which helps  you dig a little deeper than where you are. If you just bring this into your child’s mind that he can question anything, including you – the way you are, if you allow that in a healthy way, the child will constantly exercise his intelligence. If you put him through the necessary physical paces to give him a healthy body and an active intelligence and of course some level of education according to what you can afford, and if you bring him up without any sense of identity – if you do not entangle his intelligence by being identified with this or that, so that he is willing and open to everything, he will make the best out of his life. He may not become like somebody else but he will grow to his maximum potential.

Create the Right Atmosphere

A large part of parenthood lies in creating the right kind of atmosphere – a certain sense of joy, love, care, and discipline within yourself and in your home. If every day in your house, tension, anger, fear, anxiety, and jealousy are the only things being demonstrated to your child, he will obviously learn only these. If you really have the intention of bringing up your child well, you should change yourself to be a loving, joyous, and peaceful being. If you don’t know how to keep yourself in this manner, what can you do for your child? A parent should not implant fear, prejudice or hatred in a child; this is an unpardonable crime. A basic responsibility that man has to fulfill is to ensure that the next generation should live a little more joyfully, with less fear, less prejudice, less entanglement, less hatred, less misery. Your contribution to the next generation should be that you don’t leave a brat in the world; you should leave a human being who is at least a little better than you.