Joyful Parenting

          Suppose you were given a seed. All the time you think this seed is to become a rose bush. As it begins to grow, you think, “These leaves are strange – they are bigger than they should be.” In your confusion and frustration, you begin to prune the tree and cut the large leaves smaller and smaller. Every day the bush seems to be getting bigger than you can control and the stems are growing thicker than they should, and every day you are thinking, “This is not what you are supposed to be.”  Finally, one day, a huge flower appears on your rose bush. It is large and white and the smell is so sweet. In this moment, you realize that what you thought was a rose bush was really a magnificent magnolia tree all along. You missed out on the essence of the plant, by imagining it was something else.

Similarly, when we raise our children, we may not see them for who they are. Instead, we want to mold them into just what we think they should be. The problem is, we limit their growth to the image of ourselves.  

       “If you think the way you are is everything, naturally your aspiration will be that they should become like you,” but what the next generation will be is something that you cannot even imagine. Instead of trying to mold our children, we should put our energies into creating a joyful atmosphere where a child can be more than what we are.

       If you are joyful, your children should be more joyful than you. If you are balanced, your children should be more balanced than you. Let us spend time creating the atmosphere that will allow our children to be more than us, not just have more than us.