The Role of a Parent

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The Role of a Parent

Sadhguru, what should be the role of a good parent in today’s world?

It is a parent who is a very funny thing. You’re trying to do something that nobody has ever known how to do it well. Yes? Nobody has ever known what is the best way to parent their children. Even if you have 12 children you are still learning. You may raise 11 properly. The 12th one can give you works, no? You want to do your best. What is the best thing you can do?

One foremost thing I would say is … First thing is to work up on yourself a little bit. Spend sufficient time with 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. I think you must look at yourself very carefully because the children are picking up everything rapidly, and they’ll exaggerate everything that you’re doing. One foremost thing is, at least make yourself in such a way that you would like to be. Somebody may not approve. It doesn’t matter. At least you made yourself in such a way that you like the way you are. At least that much you must do. Maybe you cannot raise to somebody else’s standards. We don’t know what kind of standards they set for you, but at least you must become the way you like it the way you are. That is a must. That will only create the necessary ambiance.

It still doesn’t make you necessarily a good parent, but it creates the necessary ambiance, but creating the necessary ambiance is a large part of parenthood, large part. If you create the right kind of atmosphere, of a certain sense of joy and love and care and discipline, for yourself and your home atmosphere, generally they grow up. Of course you want to provide opportunities for them. Each one of us can provide opportunities only to the extent it’s available to us, isn’t it? Yes? You cannot provide an opportunity for which you don’t have access. You’ll always do according to your limitations. I’m sure in that area you’ll do your best, but the important thing is, what kind of human beings or brats you raise? For that, what kind of human being are you, is an extremely important part of raising children.

If your wife became pregnant, it’s time for transformation for you, because now another life is coming in. You yourself are the way you don’t like yourself to be. Definitely one more need not go that way, isn’t it? Becoming conscious of what we are doing is extremely important. What should we teach? What we should do? I think one important thing that you should teach your children is that they learn to question everything, but not with suspicion, with a genuine wanting to know. Questioning can become a very sick thing or a very healthy process. People question because they already suspect everything is evil. This is a sickness, but the basic purpose of a question, question is an instrument which helps you to dig a little deeper than where you are. Isn’t it so? Yes?

Question is essentially an instrument with which you can dig a little deeper. That’s the purpose of a question. If you just bring this into your child’s mind, that a child can question anything including you, the way you are, if you allow that in a healthy way, not in a sick way, questioning things because you think something is wrong with everybody. If you bring this, the child is constantly exercising his intelligence. This will not ensure whether he’s going to become a doctor, engineer, this, that, but one thing is clear. His intelligence is active. If you anyway 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 you bring him up without any sense of identity, without any sense of identity, if you can bring him up, if you do not entangle his intelligence by being identified to this or that, that he is willing and open to everything, if you bring him up this way, the best possible that he can make out of his life, he will do.

He may not become like somebody else, but he will grow to his maximum potential. Of course it depends on along the way who he meets, what happens, what situations he gets into, whether he comes into a spiritual space or he goes into a war zone. Where he ends up, who knows? Those things you cannot control essentially, but if you create an atmosphere of love, meditiveness, openness, when you’re not identified with anything, naturally there is no sense of prejudice. If you bring up a child free of prejudice in a loving, very open atmosphere, generally they do well, but there is no guarantee because there are other influences in the society. You don’t know into whose hands they’ll fall tomorrow morning. Yes? You may be doing your best. Tomorrow morning, into whose hands your child will fall? There is no insurance or guarantee. That’s a risk that you’re taking always, but the only thing is, did you do your best or not? That’s all there is to life.