Below I share the most important things I know from my own experience about how to be good parents to our children. And, as is usually the case for me, I look for the spiritual dimension of this profoundly important role in our lives.
Protecting from Mistakes or Learning from Mistakes
One of the main questions that concerns the parents I meet through my professional work is how to protect their child from the mistakes they make. The problem arises when the child does “wrong things” (or fails to do the “right things,” which is essentially the same), and the parents cannot make them stop, because the child resists all their well-intentioned advice, explanations, and warnings. Instead, the child continues in a direction that makes the parents feel powerless, angry, and anxious that something bad is happening—or will happen—to their child, and they do not know how to protect them.
The desire to spare our children the pain and suffering that follow from mistakes is understandable. But is this actually possible? Are not mistakes the very way we learn, through our own experience, to walk new paths independently—by falling, getting up, and thus maturing through the inevitable limitations and difficulties of life?
To want to protect our children from pain and suffering is to want to protect them from the wholeness of life itself. Of course, there are situations that require our firm intervention and prohibition, but the situations discussed here are not of that kind. They concern those life experiences we must go through in order to mature, even when they hurt. When we are in the position of the parent in such situations, the best thing we can do for our children is to help them learn from their experience. This means speaking to them as to adults and discussing their experiences by asking questions, offering hypotheses, and sharing our own experience—guided by an attitude of respect and trust in their ability to cope on their own.
When we respect their right to make choices and to learn from their mistakes, they will respond to us with respect as well. And if they do make a mistake, they will be more open to discussing it and sharing it with us. Shifting our attitude from “How can I protect my child from mistakes?” to “How can I help my child learn from their mistakes?” opens the door to creativity and an exploratory spirit, and supports their confidence that even if something difficult or painful happens to them, they will be able to cope—and even grow—from the experience.
What Do We Actually Want for Our Children?
Once, on a deeper level, we truly accept that we cannot forbid our children their inherent right to learn from their own experience—including negative experience—we have taken the first step toward becoming wise guides in their process of growing up. The second step is to clarify what exactly we want for them, because a so-called “mistake” is merely an experience that did not lead to the desired result. And in the many conversations I have had with parents, that desired result usually turns out to be nothing other than the various forms of success in life.
At first, this is success at school and making friends; later, success in professional realization and starting a family. If I continue asking questions, we usually arrive at the understanding that what they truly want most is for their child to be happy, regardless of the specific form this happiness takes. And this greatly changes our understanding of success.
In his book The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents, Deepak Chopra begins by defining what success is:
“Many people uncritically accept that success is essentially material and is measured in money, prestige, or possessions. These things certainly have their importance, but possessing them is no guarantee of success. The success we want our children to achieve can be defined in nonmaterial terms, and not in a single way. The definition should include the ability to love and to feel compassion, the capacity to experience joy and to share it with others, the confidence that comes from knowing that life has meaning, and finally, a sense of communion with the creative force of the universe. All of these together constitute the spiritual dimension of success, a dimension that brings inner fulfillment.”
— Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, pp. 113–114
Another author, the founder of the family constellations method, Bert Hellinger, also offers his definition of success:
“What is the greatest success for humanity? Everything that serves peace and love. These are spiritual successes that overcome division between people and nations. This too has its price. Among the prerequisites for this level of success is parting with our ideas of good and evil, of chosen and rejected, of higher and lower. And at the center of this lies the farewell to images of God that give fixed meaning and importance to such distinctions. These successes are humble and human. They are the successes of love—the success of all-embracing love. They bring paradise back to earth. They carry the promise of the deepest happiness, a happiness shared with many, a happiness open to everyone.”
— Bert Hellinger, Orders of Success
Being clear about what we truly want for our children places our relationship with them on a solid foundation. In moments of conflict, it reminds us that the only thing separating us is the different way we believe they will find happiness and harmony in their lives. And if we are wise enough, we will admit that we cannot be certain what that way is—not only because we are different, but also because even if we know what is good and what is evil, we do not know what is for the good and what is for the evil. The saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” applies in full force to our relationships with our children.
The Only Place from Which We Can Influence Our Children
Therefore, if we want to have influence over our children, it is good to begin with humility. At first glance this may seem paradoxical, but only at first glance. If we continue further, we will see that without humility we cannot feel genuine respect for their destiny, nor can we embody the wisdom through which we help them learn from their own experience. Humility reminds us of the limitations of our own perspective at moments when we impose it unquestioningly as the only correct one. It also helps us redirect our gaze toward ourselves—the only place over which we truly have influence.
This is the most important lesson of parenting: the best way to be wise guides for our children is to embody in our own lives what we wish to see in them. Another way of saying the same thing is that we can influence our children only through personal example, not through advice.
Imagine a mother whose daughter is struggling at school, allows other children to dominate her, and cannot stand up for herself. The mother becomes anxious when she sees other children bossing her daughter around, while the girl complies and does everything she can to be liked. The mother insistently advises her to stop doing this and not to neglect herself. The problem is that the mother behaves in exactly the same way at her workplace—she makes compromises that hurt her dignity, but out of fear of rejection she continues to make them. How is the daughter supposed to listen to a parent who does not live what she advises?
Therefore, if we want to be able to influence our children, it is important to know that the source of influence lies in our integrity—not in what we say, but in what we do; in how we feel and what we radiate from the deepest core of our being. It is actually a good thing that our children do not want to listen to advice that we ourselves do not live by.
This leads us to the next important characteristic of the “school for parents”: the teacher–student relationship in this school is reciprocal. This means that our children can learn from us only to the extent that we ourselves are open to learning from them. In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey writes that “to have influence, you must be open to being influenced.” This principle of mutual influence lies at the heart of the fifth habit, which he calls “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Thus, communication with our children can turn into an endless, mutually enriching process of learning if we maintain an open and receptive attitude toward life and are aware that change happens from the inside out. Only then does the reversal occur—our children sense this and begin to seek our advice willingly. They want to follow us in the things that make them respect and value us.
The mother who has difficulty standing up for herself at work needs to develop self-respect and the strength to set clear boundaries when others take advantage of her. When she succeeds in doing this, that message will reach her daughter even if she does not say a single word or give a single piece of advice. Moreover, children who behave submissively at school often compensate for this behavior by becoming authoritarian and domineering at home. If the mother develops self-respect, she will not allow her daughter to “walk all over her,” and thus she will provide a living example of what it means to stand up for oneself, to set clear boundaries, and not to allow oneself to be exploited.
Being a role model is the best gift parents can give their children—and the most difficult one. We do this by giving our inner child the inner parent we ourselves needed when we were young. This means many things, but at its core lies the quality of unconditional love. When we manage to develop and express it toward ourselves, it naturally begins to express itself in our relationships with others, including our children.
Theories of Parenting Change Over Time—and So Do We
When I was a young mother, the theory of child-rearing associated with Benjamin Spock was in vogue. It is now outdated; today the fashionable approach is attachment parenting, associated with William Sears. In place of rigid and strict prescriptions about how to care for babies, a theory has emerged that is in many ways its complete opposite. This is the idea of intuitive parenting and spontaneous responsiveness to a child’s emotional needs, according to which the parent is the primary authority in determining what is right in this very intimate process of relationship.
I like this theory very much because it represents a step toward higher levels of psychological health, but I have already observed how it, too, is beginning to be treated as a dogma. This is the problem—when theories about life become more important than life itself, and instead of trying to understand life in its complexity and uniqueness, we try to force it into a theory about it.
I have a client who was a strong proponent of natural feeding, but at a certain point she became ill. After medical examinations, it was determined that the cause was physical exhaustion resulting from an excessively long period of breastfeeding. I also know a woman who feels deeply guilty because she had to give birth via caesarean section rather than through the natural birth canal. She had been advised that babies born in this “unnatural way” have a poorer start in life. I also know another mother who, after six months of devotedly responding to her crying infant, eventually collapsed from emotional exhaustion and began searching for alternative books (theories) on how to handle the situation.
These are theories—maps of reality that change and are updated as new facts accumulate. At best, they approximate certain aspects of reality, but they can never become the whole of that reality. The theory of natural parenting is a wonderful theory which, when taken to an extreme, becomes deeply unnatural. One of its main arguments is that this is how children were raised in primitive tribes, where they grow up more confident, calm, and happy. But the psyche of a mother in a primitive tribe and the psyche of a modern mother are profoundly different.
Attachment parenting is based on trust in the mother’s intuitive understanding of the child—but intuition functions only when there is a healthy connection to oneself and one’s instincts. Unfortunately, the connection of the modern woman to her instincts is severely wounded (see Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés).
I remember how I felt when my daughter was a small baby and I had to make decisions for her. I tried to sense what the right action was, but I could not, because I encountered a dense layer of fear. If at that moment I had relied solely on what my instincts were telling me, I would have been constantly confused and anxious. It took me many years to restore trust in my own sense of what is “right and wrong.”
As Clarissa Estés writes, “Wild animals and the Wild Woman are endangered species. In the past, the feminine nature was plundered, oppressed, and forcibly altered. For several thousand years it has been devastated like the wilderness, banished to the remotest corners of the female psyche.” The Wild Woman is that innermost instinctual part of the mother’s psyche that knows beyond words. The great difficulty is not in following her; the great challenge is restoring our connection with her. Once that connection is restored, following becomes easy.
Innate Images
And so we arrive at the next very important factor that interferes with a full and healthy parent–child relationship. In the time we live in, awareness of the exceptionally important role of the parent in a child’s upbringing and development is steadily increasing. The problem is that this, too, begins to lead to one-sidedness and extremes, leaving us with the oppressive feeling that our children’s fate depends entirely on us as parents—that if we fail to meet their emotional needs in the “right” way, we will traumatize them, and thus our most precious beings will suffer for the rest of their lives because of our parental mistakes.
To see ourselves in this way is to think of ourselves as God. And it also means to be blind to the facts.
Many remarkable individuals have had childhoods that were “severely traumatized,” yet this did not prevent them from becoming a source of inspiration for others. Children born into the same family can have such different characters and temperaments that, from the outside, it seems as if the only thing they have in common are their parents. The book The Soul’s Code is full of such examples, illustrating that trauma itself often lies at the very core of what shapes our individuality and creative potential.
“Since the ‘traumatic’ view of childhood dominates psychological theories of personality and its development, the focus of our memories and the language with which we narrate our lives are saturated with the poison of these theories. Our lives are determined less by childhood itself than by the way we have learned to think about it. … What harms us is not so much the traumatic events of childhood as the traumatic way we remember childhood—as a time of excessive, externally imposed disasters that misshaped our character.”
— James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 18
As Hillman writes, there is within us an innate image, like an acorn whose destiny is to become an oak. To understand what our innate image is—what the seed is from which our individual destiny will grow—we must “abandon the usual and rather worn-out frameworks of psychology. They do not reveal enough, because they prune life so that it fits the framework… Such a life becomes a story without a plot, focused on an increasingly tedious main character—the ‘ego’—wandering through a desert of dried-up experiences.” According to the author of this remarkable book, as long as psychological theory does not recognize the primary psychological reality of destiny, we will continue to look for the answer to what determines our life in the wrong place—in heredity or environmental factors—rather than turning toward what is most essential: the soul, born on Earth in order to develop and create.
“Today’s dominant paradigm, which explains human life as an interaction between genetic determination and environment, misses something essential: the particular feeling of being oneself.” (pp. 19–20)
Kahlil Gibran: Your Children Are Not Your Children
There is a poem by Kahlil Gibran that I love very much. Through the imagery of poetry, it expresses what is most essential for relieving the excessively heavy burden of parenthood and stepping out of the role of God that we try to assume in relation to our children’s fate.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
— The Prophet
When we know that, on a spiritual level, our children “come through us, but not from us,” the unbearable weight falls from our shoulders. The knowledge that it is not we, but the Archer—the Spirit—who is the true parent of our children helps us release responsibilities that are not ours. This is precisely where the spiritual approach to parenting becomes more important than ever. It becomes a source of deep humility before the forces that shape both our own and others’ destinies, even when that destiny sometimes takes turns we do not understand and that lie beyond our notions of right and wrong. Seeing the divine seed in our children helps us simply provide the conditions for its growth, to the extent that we are able.
Summary
To briefly summarize what has been said above:
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It is the birthright of every human being to learn from their own experience, including negative experience, which we usually call a “mistake.” Even if we fail to protect our children from making mistakes, we can at least help them learn from them. Well-intentioned advice from the outside cannot do what pain and disappointment from our own negative experience can do. When we help our children learn from their negative experience, we nourish their self-confidence and their faith that they will cope, whatever difficulties life may bring.
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To embody within ourselves what we wish to see in our children. If we want them to listen to our advice, we must first become a credible source of advice. You would not listen to financial advice from someone who is poor, would you? But if the same advice came from a millionaire, you would be far more likely to consider it.
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To realize that, on a spiritual level, the success we most deeply desire—for ourselves and for our children—is growth. This means becoming increasingly authentic and true to ourselves, following the curves and winding paths of our own unique destiny rather than the expectations of others. Therefore, if we have problems with our children, it means it is time to change something within ourselves. Our children are also our teachers—but only if we understand the lesson that Life is teaching us through them.
One More Thing
This is related to a widespread parental attitude of placing children first, seeing them as the meaning of one’s life and making sacrifices that later turn bitter for the children themselves. It is no coincidence that at the end of his poem, Gibran speaks of the Source from which life comes:
“For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
Placing our children first not only burdens them with the unbearable task of giving meaning to our lives by reciprocating the sacrifices we have made, but also contradicts the Divine order, in which both the bow and the arrow that flies from it have an equal place in the heart of the Archer.
When I once said this to a client, she timidly asked whether my daughter knew this. I answered, “Yes, she does. And not only does she know it, she is very happy about it. She says it makes her feel free to follow her own path without feeling guilty toward me.” I added that she probably understands it in the right perspective because she has always felt deeply loved by me. Since the mother continued to look at me with doubt, I asked her: “How would you feel if you knew that you were the meaning of your mother’s life and that she had sacrificed her own happiness for you?” Only then did she understand…
And because there is still a risk of misunderstanding, I will add one more clarification. Of course, being a parent involves making sacrifices. It begins with wanting to sleep while your child is crying—and continues in countless forms thereafter. But there is a profound difference between the attitude that you are making these sacrifices for your child and the attitude that you are making them for yourself—for the experience of being a parent, which you have consciously chosen. The former poisons our children’s lives and burdens them with an unbearable responsibility; the latter teaches us the most selfless and pure forms of love.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
