A neurosurgeon tears up and expresses that they have felt like a failure their whole life because their father wanted them to be a researcher, not a practicing surgeon.
A researcher with a Ph.D. from Stanford feels like a failure because their grandmother had chided them for not getting into Harvard.
Another professional in a lucrative job lives paycheck to paycheck, no matter how much they earn, sabotaging themself financially because their mother worried about their inability to manage money during their childhood.
A 72-year-old recovering alcoholic struggles with self-acceptance because their family viewed them as a “bad child” during kindergarten.
These are not fictional stories, but rather real examples that illustrate the importance of the self-image we construct that is shaped by how significant adults view us in our formative years.
Psychologists such as Adler, sociologists such as Mead, philosophers such as Foucault and mystics such as Osho have all emphasized the idea that as children, we do not have a true sense of who we are. We look to others to tell us.
Over time, our self-image is developed based on how others see us, and the perceptions of others become the primary lens through which we view ourselves.
We project our expectations and fears onto our children, with little awareness of how it builds an inner prison and self-fulfilling prophecy. If the children do not meet expectations, they are left with a deep sense of guilt at having failed us, leaving long-term emotional impacts.
Similarly, our worst fears about our children naturally become ingrained in them, exacting a heavy toll on their happiness.
The effects are long-lasting, because, as the Indian mystic Osho says, “Children grow out of childhood, but the parents never grow out of parenthood. … And because parents never withdraw from the life of the child, they remain a constant anxiety to themselves and to their children.”
Is it any surprise that so many, even in adulthood, suffer anxiety and depression from an internal lack of self-worth?
Parenting must be regarded as the greatest of art forms. Ironically, to become a musician, painter, teacher, plumber or architect, society provides extensive training. But the process to learn to parent is practically nonexistent.
Osho reminds us: “To give birth to a child is nothing great. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.”
It is both amusing and tragic how parents strive to produce carbon copies of themselves, transmitting their worldview, values and ambitions to their children, even if the parents’ own lives turned out miserable.
In their zeal for indoctrination, they miss what Osho says is the real art of parenting: “to help the child to be himself or to be herself, to support, to strengthen, to nourish and not create slaves.”
“If you are a father, you will be happy if the child is rebellious, because no father would like to kill the spirit of the child,” Osho notes.
The test of awakened parenting lies in knowing that even if our children make blunders from exercising their freedom, they will be happier adults than if they lived a perfect life based on parental advice.
Freeing humanity from mental prisons begins with embracing children as pure possibility and celebrating their freedom to explore uncharted waters beyond parental imagination.