Today, I visited a residential school to interact with the 10th-grade students. It was wonderful listening to them and interacting with them. I was once again concerned after listening to the same old fear. Fear of parental disapproval. Do we realize what we do to our kids in the process? How much burden do we place on their shoulders? I asked the children whether their friendship is based on judgment. Would they break their friendship if their friend gets bad marks or chooses a different career? They said no. I asked them then why their relationships with their parents would suffer if they get low marks or choose a career that they do not like. Children answered that parents are their well-wishers.
Are parents really? It's time for the parents to introspect. Children feel so burdened and want to repay the debts of parenting by getting good marks in the examination and by choosing a career that their parents want for them. In fact, few kids said that they will decide on their career based on what their parents want. They will pursue what they like as a hobby. It feels so bad to see the kids suffer due to unreasonable expectations of their parents and the way parents have conditioned the minds of their kids.
Children are not robots that will carry out any work at the command of their parents. Children are living human beings. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. They have their own aspirations. Just because children are sensitive, does that give any right to their parents to brainwash them to the extent that they feel responsible to make the decision of their career, keeping the ambition and desire of their parents in their minds. Have parents given birth to their kids so that they may use their kids to fulfil their ambitions? How do these feelings get carried to the minds of the children? Mostly due to a constant demonstration of unhappiness and great pain, and efforts in bringing up the kids, to make them feel obliged. Isn't that tantamount to emotional manipulation? Parents gave birth to kids out of their sweet wish.
In many cases, there is a genuine concern also on the part of parents. They have faced great difficulties in their lives, and they do not want their kids to face the same difficulties. There are two fundamental flaws here with the thinking process. First, what is difficulty? Somebody climbing Mount Everest also faces great difficulty takes it as a challenge. Thus, every difficulty is a challenge, if we have a mindset to grow, and challenges make our lives fulfilling. Thus, it's just a matter of perspective. Second, why are we jumping to conclusions for our kids? Why do we want to impose our solutions on them? Maybe, they are interested in quite different challenges and quite different solutions for their life. There is no harm in advising somebody, including our kids. If they want to move on a path we have already moved and we fell into a pit, and warn them of that to prevent them from falling, that's completely all right. However, if they want to take a different path and we have no knowledge of that path, and we just want to force them on the path we took, it is absolutely stupid.
Most often, the "well-wishers" hurt us the most. They end up forcing their own wish list on us in the name of caring. Not because they want to harm us, but because they haven't sorted out their own lives and pass on their confusion to us. They found a "winning formula" told by their parents to succeed in this world. However, these "winning formulas" have made them even more insecure. From these insecurities, they rush to define the meaning of life, again based on their limited understanding and awareness. They want their children to reach these milestones quickly. They fail to realize that any "winning formula" makes us more insecure, and an insecure person is never truly happy, no matter what milestones they achieve. We need to work on our inner selves to become fearless. At least until then, we can stop passing these fears onto our kids and let them be who they are. I really like the following scene from the movie Iqbal:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxRKFU-5mYnNR0i2Z4r-o099vZ0NPceYra?si=ylYdWh1rDJMEGC46
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