To be a parent is a great art, something extraordinary

THE TROUBLE with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of their parenthood! Man has not even yet learned that parenthood is not something that you have to cling to it forever. When the child is a grown-up person your parenthood is finished. The child needed it -- he was helpless. He needed the mother, the father, their protection; but when the child can stand on his own, the parents have to learn how to withdraw from the life of the child. And because parents never withdraw from the life of the child they remain a constant anxiety to themselves AND to the children. They destroy, they create guilt; they don't help beyond a certain limit.

To be a parent is a great art. They are to support, they are to strengthen, they are to nourish, but not to impose their ideas, not to give the shoulds and should-nots. They are not to create slaves.

But that's what parents all over the world go on doing: their whole effort is to fulfill their ambitions through the child. Of course nobody has been ever able to fulfill his ambitions, so every parent is in a turmoil. He knows the death is coming close by every day, he can feel the death is growing bigger and bigger and life is shrinking, and his ambitions are still unfulfilled, his desires are still not realized. He knows that he has been a failure. He is perfectly aware that he will die with empty hands -- just the way he had come, with empty hands, he will go.

Now his whole effort is how to implant his ambitions into the child. He will be gone, but the child will live according to him. What he has not been able to do, the child will be able to do. At least through the child he will fulfill certain dreams.

It is not going to happen. All that is going to happen is the child will remain unfulfilled as the parent and the child will go on doing the same to his children. This goes on and on from one generation to another generation. We go on giving our diseases; we go on infecting children with our ideas which have not proved valid in our own lives.

Parents are not consciously exploiting their children; they are doing it for the child's sake. They think that if he is a engineer, a scientist, a mathematician, a professor, a politician, a president, a prime minister, that will be good for him; if he is rich, has great money and wealth and name and fame, he will be happy in his life. But they are completely unconscious because they know... but they know only in a very very vague way, it is not clear-cut. They see presidents, prime ministers; they know they are not happy. They see the rich people; they know they are not happy. They themselves may be rich and they know they are not happy. They may have succeeded in their life, in their profession, and they know that life has been just a stupid exercise of utter futility, nothing has been gained. But that's all they know, and that's all they can teach. With all good wishes they impose their ideas on the child.

That becomes the circumference of everyone.

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing -- any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.

And the criterion is that the real parents will give freedom. They will not impose themselves upon the child, they will not encroach upon his space. From the very beginning their effort will be to help the child to be himself or to be herself.