How to Help Your Children
The following is an excerpt from Eckhart Tolle’s, “A New Earth; Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose”.
If you have young children, give them help, guidance and protection to the best of your ability, but even more important give them space-space to be. They come into this world through you, but they are not “yours.” The belief ‘I know what’s best for you’ may be true when they are very young, but the older they get, the less true it becomes. The more expectation you have about how their life should unfold, the more you are in your mind instead of being present for them. Eventually, they will make mistakes and they will experience some form of suffering as all humans do. In fact, they may be mistakes only from your perspective. What to you what is a mistake may be exactly what your children need to do or experience.
Give them as much help and guidance as you can, but realize that you may also, at times, have to allow them to make mistakes, especially as they begin to reach adulthood. At times, you may also have to allow them to suffer. Suffering may come to them out of the blue or it may come as the consequence of their own mistakes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering. No it wouldn’t. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper.
If you want to read more, A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose Here