The vulnerable infant, the defiant teenager, the struggling young adult and the confused parent. What a maze of wires we seek to untangle in the struggle for balance throughout our years of parenting. When will we strike this neutral balance and what is the shortest route to get there? Time is so precious as we soon come to realize when our babies quickly spring out from their infant years under our noses, straight into their early teen years. The beauty we once thought would stare us in the face for a lifetime, the innocence we once cherished seems to be slipping away through a monstrous evolution called growth. A parent’s nightmare seems to be the uncontrollable and defiant child that simply cannot see the well-intentioned parent - why has this kind of common conflict spread all across the globe and how can it be addressed in the most effective way whilst minimizing time and effort?
Before our children are born our imagination seems to be fired, aflame with the ideas of how our children might grow, how we might shape their future so that they can become happy, successful and pleasant members of society. Here is the well-intention parent such as you and I, and here is our expectation in a world of uncertainty. Are we setting ourselves up for pain in life through our expectation or does life really fall short of delivering justice? What is confusion? Confusion is not being able to understand the reason for something due to expectation clouding our natural vision. If we have no expectation, then whatever presents itself in front of us will be true in its own form for we would have placed no resistance within ourselves to counter its reason (we see things exactly as they are without taking judgement). If one can even come close to viewing ourselves, the child, the teenager or anything in the world in this state of clarity then we are almost home and dry to maximizing the potential for the best possible outcome in any situation. The single principle which can be noted as self-awareness can be applied to any area of life though we will use the idea of parent and child as this seems to be the common area of struggle throughout the world today and of course, change starts at home - within.
