Parenting at home

Children need parents who devote time and care for them, who listen to them and who help them through the vicissitudes of growing up. Children look to parents to be role models for how life should be lived, and our every action is observed by them and classified by them as a value.

And children grow and thrive when we give them our most precious gift -- our time. Remember, our children will tend to parent their children in the same way as we parent them.

Similarly, no matter how eager or ambitious you are in shaping your children's lives, there is a limit to what you can accomplish. Swami Vivekananda, founder of Ramakrishna Mission, uses the analogy of growing a plant to drive home the point:

You cannot make a plant grow in soil unsuited to it. A child teaches itself. But you can help it to go forward in its own way. What you can do is not of the positive nature, but of the negative. You can take away the obstacles, but knowledge comes out of its own nature. Loosen the soil a little, so that it may come out easily. Put a hedge round it; see that it is not killed by anything, and there your work stops. You cannot do anything else. The rest is a manifestation from within its own nature.

To extend this analogy still further, early childhood can be compared to soil that is just prepared for sowing the seed. It is a great opportunity in the life of the child, and an even greater opportunity for the guardian, to sow the seed of knowledge and of righteousness in the heart of the child. But just how and with what values we choose to influence our children have to be carefully considered.