“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

-Kahlil Gibran

Within hours of being born a foal can start walking; sea turtle hatchlings are able to make a dash for the sea within days of emerging from their shells. Now compare the human baby – it takes around a year for him or her to walk and even months to be able to just raise the head! Among all the mammals, the Homo sapiens also have the longest childhood. They spend almost twice as long in childhood and adolescence as chimps, gibbons, or macaques do.

What’s more – a human child requires resources to be provided by multiple adults, almost certainly more than two young parents. For example, a recent study of two groups of South American hunter-gatherers suggested that each couple required the help of an additional 1.3 non-reproducing adults to provide for their children.

The most significant corollary of the long dependency period of our species is that humans also spend a major part of their life parenting. if a human child takes an average of eighteen years to grow up, someone must be bringing him or her up over all these years. And this is why Mahatman considers parenting a crucial phase in a person’s life and an indispensable topic for discussion. Above all parenting forms an important tenet of the Immortalize pillar of Mahatman. Whether your kids are biological, adopted or foster, being responsible for the complete well being of another human in this world is an immense responsibility – one that is best fulfilled with awareness, intelligence, and the Mahatman Way.  Let us divide this chapter into three sections – how to prepare yourself to bring a baby into this world, early and middle parenting, and preparing teens for adulthood.

The first rule of Mahatman parenting is to do it only when you are ready –financially and emotionally. Never ever bring a child into this world if you do not have the emotional and material resources for its healthy upbringing. Being unprepared will mean a financial mess for you – you will be buying stuff on credit, take a second mortgage maybe and perhaps even end up ruining your credit score.

Generations of men and women have been ruined because their parents brought them up as insurance for senior years. In traditional patriarchal cultures especially parents prefer male child so that they are assured of being looked after financially in their old age. The disastrous consequences of this system range from female foeticide, infanticide and exploitation of the girl child to bringing up boys with an unhealthy sense of superiority and functioning as a mere cash point for their elderly parents. So rather than bring up a child, especially a boy, to ensure your financial security, be emotionally and financially secure yourself so that you are not doing it out of neediness and inadequacy.

Also ask yourself if you have the emotional stability and depth needed to become parents. Bringing up a child – whether biological or adopted – is a full-time emotionally demanding job with no afterhours and weekends. You need to be able to draw on immense reserves of emotional maturity if you are going to bring up a kid. And I am not just talking about missed weekend bashes and ruined dinner plans. You have to be able to put another being’s well-being ahead of your own – day in, day out, 24/7. The enormity of this level of emotional commitment cannot even be fathomed by people who have not yet become parents.

We have talked about Self-Esteem and Self-Image at length in the Energize section of this book. Go through those chapters again and see if you are emotionally grounded enough to become a parent. When you are entirely responsible for another being, there will be a hundred times when you will be second guessing yourself about whether you are doing the right thing. Should I be letting my baby sleep with me? To practice demand feeding or maintain a schedule? Parents, well-meaning neighbours, experienced co-workers and YouTube videos are all OK to occasionally get inputs from – but remember finally the buck stops with you. If you are struggling with self-esteem issues yourself, you will find yourself buffeted with doubts and anxieties from all sides when bringing up a child. With parenthood being put off till late 30s and beyond, it is possible to wake up one fine day and realize that your biological clock is ticking – you panic at your solitary living arrangements, decided that a cat doesn’t count and set about planning a baby like an office presentation. And with single parent families becoming increasingly common, you don’t really need another person to do all this, right? However if you are looking to have a baby merely to fill a perceived emotional lack or to give supposed meaning to your life, watch out. Ask yourself if you want to become a parent because you have earned enough money or are bored and may as well use the time to have a baby? Reads strange but there can be number of reasons why people have babies, ranging from the stupid to the bizarre.  You need to possess adequate self-worth, be emotionally anchored yourself, and only then can you take charge of another being with the necessary degree of assurance and emotional strength.

Equally importantly, ensure you love yourself first, completely and unconditionally, and only then will you be ready to love another being. If you are still wondering about this, read the Self-discipline chapter and learn more about how to practice this all-important life skill. Don’t think a child will be a guarantee of always having someone around who will think you are most beautiful or handsome person in the world. That might seem true only till the child is 7-8 years old and then when his or her world view expands, you will hardly enjoy such a supreme position anymore.

See that you love every inch of your body, you are proud of the complex breadth of your mind and are happy about who you are as a person now – not just who you were at some distant point in the past or plan to be in future. By all means you are on the road to Self-Actualization but if you withhold all love for yourself till such and such time, when you achieve such and such things, you are depriving yourself from some much needed loving now. Fill your own body, mind and heart with so much love and worth for yourself that it naturally flows outwards to the new being you are planning to add to your family.

The other crucial preparation according to Mahatman is laying a strong foundation of relationship for your child. Advancements in reproductive technology and new family equations have meant that it is now possible for single parents to give birth to and bring up kids completely on their own. And yet the two parent equation remains the norm for the majority of the global population. and with good reason too since child rearing is an exhausting, highly time and resource consuming occupation. And one person could be overwhelmed doing all of this on his or her own. The previous quoted study shows how collaborative breeding used to be widely practice in earlier societies and collaborative child rearing has been dominant for most of human history. It is only in current highly individualistic societies with easier access to resources and legal protection that single parent families are springing up. But even such parents take adequate help from parents, siblings, neighbours, co-workers and paid services like day care and crèche. The point I am trying to make is that parenting never was and still not is an exclusively solitary undertaking. So while the paradigm of the heterosexual married couple as the ideal context for bringing a baby is changing, other family equations like blended families, same sex parent families and multi-generational families are being explored.

So if you are planning on becoming a parent, it is highly unlikely you are planning to do it all by yourself. What I want to say here is, ensure that whoever you are planning to do it with, is on the same page as you are. According to Mahatman, see your relationships are strong enough to provide the perfect foundation for bringing up a child. One of the worst reasons couples have a baby is because they think it will save a faltering marriage. The truth is that it only makes things worse. In the short run, the unhappy couple might be compelled to work together as a team to bring the baby into the world and then care for it but eventually the cracks in the marital relationship are bound to get wider – eventually they are not only likely to get divorced but will then have to contend with the additional repercussions of the divorce on their child.

On the other hand if you plan to become a single parent and then rope in your parents or extended family for child rearing duties, see that the people involved are aware of the full implications of your decision. Bringing up a child does not stop at feedings and cleanings but involves play time, outdoor walks and lots of running about – all extremely physically taxing duties that may be difficult for seniors. Again your best friend, flatmate or cousins may be enthusiastic about your idea to have a baby and even take it up as a fun shared project but don’t go by what happens in Hollywood movies alone. Sooner or later they would want to get back to their earlier personal lifestyles and you will find yourself staring at all the child rearing responsibilities on your own. So examine your relationships very thoroughly to see if they are strong enough to take on the additional demands brought upon by caring for kids. No relationship is perfect but if you and your partner sincerely wish to bring a child into the world, see that it is based on mutual respect, commitment and a healthy love for each other.

Not the least important is the physical preparation of becoming a parent. Remember what the Great Health chapter of this book tells about the importance of diet and exercise in optimizing your physical being. Imagine doing the same for your baby now. If you plan on being a mom, eat the right foods which will enrich your body with the necessary nutrients; for example an adequate intake of folic acid is advised for mommies-to-be even before conception to minimize chances of neural defects in foetuses. Green leafy veggies and beans are rich in folic acid so load up your diet in such foods. Again quit smoking and avoid alcohol which in some studies have been linked to low birth weight. Being both overweight and underweight are not ideal conditions for a pregnancy so if you fall in either category , talk to your doctor about what your ideal weight would be and take measures to get there.

One of the modern rites of passage on the way to becoming a parent is to read up as much as you can on various aspects of bringing up kids. Earlier this used to be mainly through books – Dr. Spock became a veritable institution this way – while now you have websites and online videos as well, advising young parents on practically everything from colic symptoms to how to bathe a 1 month old.

The purpose of this chapter is clearly not to add to this already considerable volume of material; instead I wish to show young parents how the essential concepts of Mahatman can prove great parenting philosophy as well. But let me begin with a story…

I was born in a village called Kodapalli that is located in a reserve forest, straddling the Indian states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Anyone with a fair idea about the geopolitics of the region will know that it is vulnerable to violence perpetrated by militant radical left group colloquially as Maoists. My maternal grandfather was one of the most prominent residents of the village and perhaps because of this, he and his wife was chosen as the target of Maoist violence one night in the 1970s. The attack left my maternal grandmother injured and my grandfather blind for life.

All this came to me as stories when I was a child. But the man I would see as I spent my summer holidays at Kodampalli was hardly a helpless blind old man. My grandfather never whined or complained about what had befallen him – he simply went on with his work and life like the sighted people around him. In fact, he fulfilled every indulgence for us kids which grandfathers are expected to do – regaling us with stories of the forest, shielding us from parental discipline for those precious few days and spoiling us with treats.

Is it possible that early on, I emulated this spirit of hardiness from him? Did I learn from him the all important lesson of persevering without complaints and just get on with whatever you have to do to advance your position. I like to think, I did – not the least because of the distinct impression I took away of being his favourite grandchild from the huge gang of cousins who would congregate on Kodampalli for the summers.

My point of telling this story is to underline the Mahatman precept of Nurture over Nature. Mahatman believes that the role of environment wins hands down over genetics in determining what kind of a person a child will grow up to be. To continue with my grandfather’s example, he had around 10-12 grandkids milling about the house in summers. If genetics was the all important determinant, then surely all his grandkids – who shared his genes – should have done well in life. But the fact is that no one else has made the kind of enormous progress that I have. And I believe this was due to the special level of motivation and encouragement I received from him which equipped me better than my cousins to set high goals in life and achieve them.

The debate of Nature versus Nurture is an old, old one, especially in Psychology. Developmental and personality theories in psychology continue to grapple with the question which has more influence over an individual and still more experiments are conducted every year to look for supporting evidence on either side. The Nature proponents say that genetic passed down from parents to children are more influential in the creation of the latter’s personality while the Nurture proponents believe that environment is the more influential factor. Both have studied sets of identical twins to shore up their respective arguments. Identical twins with the same genes, provide evidence that a behaviour trait is inherited if they share the trait significantly more often than fraternal twins. The strongest of this evidence comes from studies of identical twins separated at birth and nurtured in different homes. If their behaviour is similar, the cause of the behaviour is more likely to be inheritance than environment. Also studies have compared large numbers of fraternal twins with identical twins on the same criteria to distinguish between nature and nature.

One such project was undertaken by psychologists Newman who compared 100 paris of twins, identical and fraternal, on several traits. The identical twins shared more similarities than fraternal twins in matters like physical dimensions, intelligence and educational achievement. The researchers concluded that “genetic constitution is a large factor” in these traits. At the same time they also reported that intelligence, like body weight and school achievement, is subject to change by environment. Scores of intelligence tests revealed significant differences between identical twins brought up in separate homes. Even more importantly such research found out that identical twins were not much more likely to share personality traits than fraternal twins.

Another way to untangle the strands of nature and environment has been to study adopted children separately early in life from their biological parents. Similarities between these children and their biological parents have been sought to provide evidence of heredity. Cadoret and his team studied the temperament, activity level, tendency towards antisocial behaviour and development of adopted children in two groups. One group was born of parents judged psychologically disturbed while parents of the other group were judged normal. The study found that if parents were psychologically disturbed, their biological children were more likely to be hyperactive.

All said and done, such research only indicates tentative suggestions of the role played by heredity in shaping behaviour. Practically every major theory of personality acknowledges that it is the set of influences, experiences, interactions that a child goes through in the early phases of his or her life that really constructs the mould of the personality. And one of the major theories to demystify this process is that of the Behaviourists. This asserts that the human personality develops out of contingencies in daily life – reinforcements and punishments result from responses which in turn direct the course of future behaviour. B F Skinner, the chief architect of this theory said, “Genetic endowment is nothing until it has been exposed to the environment and the exposure immediately changes it.”

Even those personality theorists like Freud and Rogers who seem furthest from the Behaviourists, each in his own way, never doubted the importance of childhood influences. Freudian theory, in fact, has been criticized for the excessive weightage given to experiences in infancy and childhood in the development of neuroses and more severe conditions. Humanists too believe the more children are exposed to “conditions of worth” in the childhood, the further they move away from their core authentic self – a process which leads to an unhelpful self-image and maladaptive behaviour. Later psychologists like Eric Berne too claimed that life roles, positions and life scripts were already acquired by an individual by 6 years of age and experiences over the rest of the life span were merely validated through already formed scripts.

Based on evidence forwarded by so many theories, Mahatman reiterates the importance of childhood influences in the development of the individual’s personality. This is precisely why while raising kids you must ensure positive and energetic surroundings. Inculcate a good self-image and self-confidence in your kids by setting an example yourself. Albert Bandura was one of the first psychologists to prove that modelling is one of the ways that kids learn about the world and develop an identity. So the more you give in to insecurities, anxieties and low self-esteem, the higher the chances of your kids picking up such attributes from you. Make a conscious effort to live by all the three Mahatman Pillars as parents and you will be teaching your kids the essentials of Great Health, Great Wealth and Great Wisdom in the most effective manner possible.

Here are some additional practical tips for young parents:

• Use Positive Parenting techniques – These are based on positive reinforcements which build on your child’s wish to please you. Instead of punishing your kid for acting out, ignore the undesirable behaviour but as soon as he or she displays a positive action, like putting away toys or sobering down after a tantrum, appreciate in clear enthusiastic terms.
• Always be ready to listen to your child. Avoid distractions like checking your phone or watching TV when your kid has something to say to you. If indeed you are in the middle of work, let your child know that you cannot be disturbed now but will give him or her your full attention after a while.
• above all, unconditional love your child – like Carl Roger points out in his theory of personality, setting conditions of worth – like I will love you if you get straight As or make it to the football team in school” is a sure-fire way of making your kid grow up with a skewed self-image. Instead extend unconditional love and acceptance towards your child and you will be providing him/her with the strongest possible foundation for the growth of a healthy personality.
• Respond to children in a predictable way. This can be done with having routines at home, whether related to chores or festivals. Such schedules give structure to kids’ lives and increase their chances of growing up as self-assured, stable individuals.
• Show warmth and build emotional bonds. Gone are those times which believed that it was sentimental to show love and affection for your child. By all means, express your love for your kid in ways he or she welcomes. So a toddler would lap up hugs and kisses while a sixth-grader might not want to be seen being walked to school by you. But that’s OK – look for other ways to bond with your kid like by sharing books, discussing choices in the music of favourite TV shows. All this will strengthen your emotional link to your kid resulting in what psychologists term ‘secure attachment’
• Be available – This does not mean that you have to run to your kid at the snap of his or her finger but just that you should be ready and present when the child has something to share with you – whether happy or stressful events.
• Be sensitive to your child’s abilities and interests. Not all kids, even born to the same parents, are built the same way so comparing one unfavourably with the other will only serve to alienate him or her from you.
• Set boundaries – this is especially important since Mahatman advises positive parenting techniques which forbid physical force. But sometimes you may have to drive home a crucial point about safety, civility and so on. Instead of scolding or punishment after the undesirable behaviour has been done, ensure the child knows his or her limits beforehand. These could cover non-negotiable actions like sleep timings on weeknights, inexcusable actions like foul language or hitting siblings or daily responsibilities like setting the dinner table. Ensure the child knows and bears the consequences of missed chores or foul behaviour – use appropriate discipline without harshness
• Support health and safety – Once again the only effective way to do this, in the long run, is to model yourself healthy behaviours for your child. Follow the Mahatman precepts of Great Health like eating a nutritious diet and working out regularly. Kids, of course, will require different levels and types of food intake as well as different levels of exercise but on the whole, they will learn these healthy habits better if they see you doing it.
• Keep your cool – manage your stress by following Mahatman practices of breathing, smiling and mindfulness. All this will help to deal with small and big crises in a calm and sensible manner. And believe me, bringing up kids will mean that you are going to have plenty of those moments. But if you find that you cannot cope with your own difficulties, rather than taking it out on kids, see if you need professional help.

The final section of this chapter is all about how to prepare teens for adulthood – the challenges, changes and opportunities that come with the phase. Erik Erikson, the famous development psychologist theorized humans go through several stages of psychosocial stages, each encountering a challenge and thereby presenting the opportunity to acquire essential resources preparing us for the next stage in life. Erikson said that from the ages 12 to 18 years, teens experiment with varied roles as a way of building their self-identity which will determine how their adult lives pan out. However there are certain practical tips to make this process smoother for your teens.

This is something you already came up in this book and it can equally work wonders for your teen. Popular culture and media portray success stories as overnight phenomena but all the backstage years of hustle and hard work are seldom highlighted. But your kids need to know the value of the grind that their brains and bodies have to go through so as to have produced something of worth.

It is a good idea to teach your kids healthy financial habits from the time they can count and express wants. When they reach their teens, they would like to have even more control over what they want to buy and consume. It is your job to teach them the right financial practices so that they can plan and spend and indeed even acquire the discrimination between wants and real needs.

As described in the Self-discipline chapter, it is essential for people to love themselves first so that they have the strength and depth needed for forming truly loving relationships. Same with sex – ensure your teens know that sex should never be a means of acquiring acceptance or validation; instead it should be part of healthy and timely expression of deep emotional connection.

This chapter is set out to give an overview of how you can use the Pillars of Mahatman to become better parents. The same precepts can be taught to your teens as well but better still, hand them a copy of Mahatman For Teens which expresses the essential tenets of Mahatman philosophy in a fun and relatable way. In the end your teens will not only have acquired a powerful guide to the complexities of life ahead but they will get wise to the goal of and means to achieve Self-Actualization.

Summary:

• Parenting is one of the ways to Immortalize
• Prepare yourself before you bring a child
• Practice Positive Parenting
• Equip your teen with essential life skills