Parenting....Sacred Responsibility
I have always been fascinated by
growth and maturing. As a little boy we raised chickens at the backyard. It was
a free range kind of rearing. I carefully followed the process of how the
little chicks became grown chickens. I studied them so much that I formed
theories about them.
I was particularly interested in the male chicken because
that was where all the ‘action’ was. I keenly watched how the dominant male
emerged; when it grew those elegant feathers; when it began to crow; when it
began to make that male display. I was about 8yrs old when these ‘studies’ were
going on. Looking back now I believe I could almost foretell when the next
stage in the development of a cock would begin.
For humans the responsibility of
growth of the new born is invested in the parents. How the parents take this
responsibility goes a long way in determining the kind of adult the child
becomes. It is however not the absolute determinant of the child’s future.
Parenting
is a sacred responsibility. The excellence we see in the world today is largely due to some parents who did a
great job of pointing the way to the little ones. Likewise the misery of the
world today is largely due to the
lack of proper nurturing.
Nurturing children involves so many
things—feeding, clothing, protecting, affirming, correcting, disciplining,
modelling ,etc. Modelling—correct modelling—means showing the child an
example of correct and principled living. (Of course the parents cannot give
what they don’t have). The greatest impact on the child is the example shown by
the parent or parent figure. What the parents say is worth almost nothing if it
is not consistent with their lifestyle. The parents who consistently speak one
thing and do the other are unwittingly modelling hypocrisy and duplicity. The
child learns these automatically. The poor child cannot help it.
When the little one grows older he
may start to see that some of his perspectives to life are faulty. He now has
the responsibility to change these. If his parents have been abusive and essentially
selfish he can choose to be otherwise. The acknowledgement of the
responsibility to re-script himself (as Stephen Covey put it) is the key to his
transformation. If he does nothing about it, if he says to himself, ‘Look,
that’s who I am’, he too will be abusive to his children and thereby raising
children who possess a high tendency of being abusive and so the vicious cycle
continues.
Parenting is sacred responsibility.
