As it is said Children are one of the greatest lessons in happiness, constantly challenging us to enjoy the moment as the next one will not be the same. You give them whatever like sand, mud, stone, a playing car, almost everything, playing with the marbles, with mud all over their body, moment with anything seizes them. And we, the grown up once stay aside of them with heavy heart make philosophy of life, the do’s and don’t do’s, right and wrong. May be we have consciousness delusion that our problems are special and for the sake of faking it, we let our problems define us and we even are proud of it.
While we try to teach children all about life, children teaches us what life is all about.
As we grow up we create our belief system and according to psychology till our 13 years of age, we collect all the data, let’s say the base from which our thought, emotion and behavior takes shape. And from where does this belief system come from? Our society, culture, tradition, religion, parents, teachers, peer, almost everything from what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. Also, what response we give to child’s each action create their experience and these responses for certain kind of behavior too are accumulated in their head, which results in child ideal self from which he measures how he’s living his life.
Being parents or guardians, we love our child being charismatic, intelligent, extraordinary, but we are so accustomed to our sets of belief that we want our way of thinking to be imposed on them. And children are always hungry for almost everything. As life is played by the rule of cause and effect. So before teaching them what to believe in, we our self need to figure out for what we believe in or for what we give value in our lives, are we really content with the result of it? So if not, we are always choosing it, but the problem is we are so accustomed to our suffering and we feel so safe in it rather than fear of standing alone and giving importance to what we really believe in. And child fears the things what we fear in because what we speaks to them becomes their inner voice.
As in Hindu Religion we have 33 crore God and Goddess. Everything is God, a stone, a tree, Sun, fire, water, animals, metals and many more. And it is said that this many Gods exist so that human being can experience love with everything available in mother nature. And what child does is love, just love everything. Although he does not have the concept of God, but he loves everything. And slowly while growing up, he knows the concept of God, prayer, mantra and puja. And this love later turns into respect. In love we just love there is not something higher than us or something lower than us. But when love is replaced with respect, we put same thing higher than us. When we put something higher than us, something must be placed lower than us. This gives birth to dependence, hence the fear. And how this fear works is, rather than believing in what we are capable of, we start believing that we need some external force to make our life as our desired.
We are never complete by who we are from where ambition is born. May be we are not so interesting, maybe it’s better for us to imitate something which we adhere or our idol. As Jiddu Krishnamurthy says, “If I remain what I am, I shall be nobody, therefore I must be somebody. He thinks what he is in himself is insignificant, poor, ugly; he feels lonely, utterly empty, therefore he says I must go and achieve something“. And regarding this, I am not saying we should not want or need anything psychologically, rather what I am trying to say is more important than the life goals we accomplish before we lie in the death bed is how we’re living right now. Journey is an important destination isn’t. The child learns that he should shape himself to the life’s circumstances by which in the verge of getting everything else, he starts losing himself.
As a father of Humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers said, “Each person is biologically and psychologically unique experiencing different social, cultural and physical aspect of the environment. Individual experience conditions of worth, the evaluating one’s own experience based on the belief and values of others that may limit the development of the individual. When there is conditional regard, individuals may lose touch with themselves and feel alienated from themselves.” Also, this may sounds quite awkward, but Pioneer of Child Psychology, Jean Piaget said, “When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself“. The interviewer asked the coach of C. Ronaldo when he was around 12, so how come he becomes the great hero? The answer was although there were great players than Ronaldo training with him of the same age, the only reason that this kid turns into best footballer is that his parents were uneducated so he could walk in his own path without any authority of what might be best. There was only unconditional positive regard of whatever his wish and his way was.
We don’t need to be anybody to feel special, to love our self. We are born so we have a unique identity, we don’t need to be anyone else to create our identity, we are special regardless of whatever we are whoever we are and however we are. Rather than creating our identity after quarter of our life, we should explore who we are and dive deep into it.
Our sole purpose in life is to become our greatest version.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child to old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.