Parenting through the lens of non-duality.
Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 9:28 pm
On Parenting - In my opinion, parenting is about passive and active techniques. I view the passive techniques as a bit more submissive, the passive is about listening, acceptance, unconditional love, and just giving the space, freedom, comfort and security necessary for your child’s unique personality to express itself. it is the letting go of the desire to change the imperfections in your child that you cannot change at that particular point of their development. The active techniques are a bit more dominant. This technique is based on the control and correction of undesirable behavior, it is discipline and punishment for imperfections in behavior that the parent feels can and should be corrected at that particular moment of their development. The difficulty of parenting is how to balance the passive and active techniques towards the child because if the parent is too passive, the child becomes spoiled, ungrateful, and resentful of the parent for not setting clearly defined boundaries, and they may rebel against the lack of discipline. Children of parents who are too passive are more likely to have issues with weight or substance abuse because the child is free to develop any bad habit they want without any sort of negative feedback. However, if the parent is too active, setting too many boundaries unnecessarily by attempting to control the child too much, the child may rebel against the parent for feeling claustrophobic and feeling the pressure of being under the thumb of an obsessive authoritative controller, who feels the compulsion to control and set the all the structure for the child’s entire day. Therefore, to conclude this argument, for the healthy development of the child, there needs to be a conscious balance between the active and the passive parenting techniques, and the active and passive techniques need to be deployed with sensitivity, care, direction and awareness.