your children are not your children
they are the sons and daughters of
life's longing for itself
they come true you
but not from you
and though they are with you
yet they belong not to you
so said the poet khalil gibran hidden
within those words
is one of the world's greatest parenting
secrets that our role as parents is not
to mold our children instead our role is
to ensure that our kids blossom into
their truest and most authentic selves
so how can you become the best parent
you can be so that you give your kids
the best lives they can live we have to
rid ourselves of these lies of parenting
the first lie is that in order to be a
good parent we have to discipline our
children i remember when this lie hit me
i walked into my daughter's eve's room
and i found that eve had taken
watercolors and created her version of
four-year-old art how dare she express
her creativity on this beautiful wall
with watercolors and then
shamefully i realized what was going on
eve was showing to me her expression of
life her expression of her artistic
creativity and in my mind i was thinking
oh my god how am i gonna find that exact
paint color who do i have to pay to
repaint that wall fortunately eve's mom
was wiser and smarter than i was
she said eve can paint on every wall in
her room this is eve's room she gets to
decide
and i realize i was operating from
a script that had been drilled into me
multiple generations down think about it
if i had disciplined eve what would have
happened
eve's meaning making machine as a young
child would have taught her to say wow
i will never be creative again
there is no place in the world for art
i should not express myself these are
dad's walls for generations we've been
thought that we have to discipline our
children or they grow up to be
unsuccessful or worse delinquents but
studies show that children who grow up
in households with stern discipline
actually are the ones who have problems
and often become bullies themselves they
have higher rates of anxiety depression
and lower grades approach your
children's behavior issues with
compassion and with empowerment the
second lie is that we need to make our
children happy and give them everything
we never got in life from the time my
son hayden was a young boy and i saw
that he had a knack for science i
started talking to him about mit and the
ivy league universities and how great it
would be if he somehow got to go to mit
and dabble in robotics or artificial
intelligence then i started to
understand why i remembered how when i
was 18 years old i applied to 10 ivy
league universities i remembered my
dream school yale university and i
remember the day i got rejected i never
made it to a single ivy league
university that so many of us are
obsessed not with our children living
life right now but this idea we have of
who our kids might be in the future the
dark side is that this can push our kids
to go into careers fields universities
even marriages that do not resonate with
them we are setting up our kids to lead
the lives we missed out on this doesn't
mean that we don't teach our kids the
experiences and knowledge of life that
we have but it means that as we do this
we respect the fact that our kids lead
their own lives they are sovereign
sentient beings the third lie it is the
idea that we need to impose our
traditions our culture and our religious
beliefs on our children don't get me
wrong culture religion traditions these
are things to be celebrated but remember
as one writer said tradition can be peer
pressure from dead people why did you
become a jew or a muslim or a christian
or a hindu it was because your soul in
this lifetime was merely born in a jew
or a muslim or a christian or a hindu
family and your parents indoctrinated
you in that belief they did it with love
but keep this in mind did you ever get
to choose your own religion
the world is changing fast today we can
pick and choose our traditions our
culture our religion our beliefs we can
freely marry people of a different
culture or religion
yet in some parts of the world this is
even illegal this is how bad this lie
has gotten when we push our beliefs on
our kids we disconnect their true
formless essence and it creates this
pleasure to conform to another person's
beliefs and ideas so remember tradition
can be beautiful but it should
absolutely not be forced onto our
children our children come to us whole
they come to us worthy our inability to
see this is more a reflection of
ourselves than them and worse these lies
are often disguised as positive virtues
billions of parents around the world
believe these destructive lies i did too
until recently the greatest thing you
can do for your kids is to practice
conscious parenting it is the idea that
you are not there to mold and shape and
educate your children alone but your
children are also your teachers that
parenting is an act of self growth first
and from this place of conscious
awareness and growth you deliver the
best to your children and if you'd like
to go deeper in the ideas of conscious
parenting join me and dr shafali sabari
in this special masterclass completely
free brought to you by mindvalley
[Music]
you