While our children are growing up, as concerned parents, we tend to offer them advice. Children do not like to listen to our advice and most don’t heed our advice.
Actually, if we watch ourselves carefully, many a time, this piece of advice is based on our own past experience. Something would have happened in the past and we would have handled the situation in a particular way leading to success or failure. We would have archived this incident and the consequent lesson somewhere for ‘future reference’. When we see or expect to see a similar situation in our child’s life, we quickly retrieve the file and offer it as advice.
For us, this advice is the most prudent thing. Why would anyone do anything else?
Except that our children have had no such past context. They have probably never experienced this situation or faced this particular challenge in their life. In any case, they have never learnt THIS lesson.
In such circumstances, offering our advice is like offering them a painkiller when they have no idea of what pain is.
As parents, our role is not to find short-cuts in our children’s journey so that they could avoid painful paths. That would rob them of their own Life lessons. Our role is to stand rock-solid with them while they go through the pain.
Because pain is part of Life’s curriculum.
I wrote this piece based on a recent series of Life Coaching sessions with a highly successful professional who was just not okay to allow his teenage daughter to learn her own Life lessons. Thankfully, as my client acknowledges, things are changing now.
Happy to hear your views. You can write to me at [email protected]. I have been getting a lot of comments from my readers.
By the way, did you get a chance to look at the new tab, ‘Services’, on my website?
Now, my short-form pieces appear under the category, ‘Seeds’, on my website.
For several long-form articles and the free e-book, ‘31 Ways to Reclaim Your Happiness’, visit www.ksramanan.com.
