Bringing up
Children
Beloved Osho,
What are the major mistakes in bringing up
children?
The major mistakes in bringing
up children are many, but I will talk only about the most important. First: the
idea that they belong to you. They come through you; you have been a passage,
but they don't belong to you. They are not your possessions. Out of this idea
of possessiveness many mistakes arise.
Once you start thinking that
they are your possessions, you have reduced them into things, because only
things can be possessed, not human beings. It is the ugliest act you can do.
And those poor children are so helpless, so dependent on you, they cannot
rebel. They accept whatever your idea is. And to protect your possessiveness
you make them Christians the moment they are born. You make them Hindus, you
make them Mohammedans, you make them Buddhists, you make them Jews - you can't
wait! And can't you see the absolute absurdity of it?
In politics, the person will be
adult and capable of voting when he is twenty-one. Is religion something of
lesser quality than politics?
But the child cannot even
understand language and he is circumcised; he is told that he is a Jew. He is
baptized, with no consent from his side - for the simple reason that you don't
need any consent from your furniture, where to put it, to keep it or throw it.
You are behaving with your children in the same way, like things.
If the parents are really
alert, conscious, they will wait for the child to grow up so that he can
choose. If he feels like becoming a Christian, he is free. If he feels like
becoming a Buddhist, he is free. But he should choose only when he decides.
My feeling is that if
twenty-one is the minimum age for politics, then for religion forty-two should
be the minimum age when people can decide. And in fact that is the time when
religion becomes important. You have lived life; you have seen all the seasons
of life - forty-two is a very important turning point. You have to decide
whether you will continue the same routine life, or you will bring some new
dimension to it. And that new dimension is religion.
If the person chooses to be
religious - simply religious, not belonging to any organization, not belonging
to any church - that's perfectly good. He has chosen freedom. But it is
personal, intimate, absolutely his own affair; nobody can interfere in it. But
parents start interfering from the very beginning. Why the hurry? The hurry is
that later on the child will argue, later on he will ask why he is a Jew -
because he was not born a Jew; no child is born a Jew or a Christian or a
Hindu. All children are born as a tabula rasa: a clean slate. Nothing is
written on them... pure innocence.
The first thing to remember is,
don't reduce the child into a thing, by any of your efforts. Give him
individuality; don't impose personality on him. Individuality he brings with
himself; personality is imposed by the parents, by the society, by the
educational system, by the church. If you understand, you will not impose
anything on the child, you will help the child to be himself.
Certainly it is difficult.
That's why all the societies of all the ages have chosen the simple path: it is
simpler to impose something on the child. Then he is obedient; then he is not
rebellious. He does not give you any trouble, he is not a nuisance. But if you
give him total freedom and help him to be free and individual, he is going to
give you trouble about many things. People have chosen to destroy the child
rather than accept the troubles.
If you are so much afraid of
troubles, it is better not to give birth to a child. But to give birth to a
living being, and then to destroy it just for your peace of mind, is very
inhuman. Children are the most enslaved class of people in human society, the
most exploited - and exploited "for their own sake."
The child, if he is free, is
going to ask questions which you don't know the answers to. And your ego does
not allow you to say, "I don't know" - it is better to force the
child to keep his mouth shut. Every parent is continually telling the children,
"Shut up. Sit silently. When you grow old you will know the answer."
My grandfather used to tell me
the same thing in my childhood. Year after year I continued to ask the same
questions, and I asked him, "I am growing, but your answer remains the
same: Shut up... when you grow up. Can you please tell me at what age I will
know the answer?"
The day I asked him, I was
fifteen. I said, "I have been hearing this for ten years. In ten years
nothing has changed, and I suspect that even in a hundred years nothing is
going to change. My question will remain a question and there is not going to
be any answer. And you cannot look directly into my eyes. You also don't know
the answer, but you don't have the guts to accept it."
He was taken aback, shocked,
but he thought that it would be better to say something, because it was going
to happen again and again. He said, "You are right; I am sorry. I don't
know the answer, I was just postponing it. I thought you would forget all about
it. And that's how it has been all along. I had also asked the same question
and I was told, `When you grow up you will know.' And now I am seventy-five,
just on the verge of death, and I have not got the answer. Just by growing old,
you cannot get the answer. I was hoping that you will also grow old, you will
have your children asking you the same question, and you will say to them,
`Grow old and you will get it.' This is how it has been done for
centuries."
An individual child is
troublesome because he is alive, because he is intelligent, because he can
expose your ignorance. And you are ignorant in almost all the basic points of
life. Do you really know God? Do you really know that Jesus Christ was the only
begotten son of God? Do you know that there is a hell and a heaven beyond this
life?
What do you know? Do you know
yourself, who you are? - except the name, which is a label glued to you after
you were born, except your profession, that you are a doctor, that you are an
engineer, that you are a scientist, that you are a professor. But this is not
your being, this is your profession. What do you know about yourself?
The whole society has been
living in utter ignorance - and perpetuating it by not allowing children to be
individual seekers, because it is through individual seeking that one comes to
know who he is, and whether there is any God or just a fiction. One comes to
know whether his life is eternal or just confined to seventy years. Only
experience... but experience needs enquiry, search. But all of that is being
stopped by the parents, by the teachers, by the priests.
Either they say that you will
get it when you are old enough, or they give a fictitious answer, which the
innocent child cannot argue against. They say that God created the world. Every
child asks, "Who created the world?" Every child is being told,
"God created the world." Do you really know? Were you a witness when
God was creating the world? Was there any witness at the time of creation? If
there is no witness, then what are the grounds on which you are basing your
fact? And stupidity knows no limits....
Christians say God created the
world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ's birth. They exactly
know the time - four thousand and four years before Christ was born. Certainly
it must have been January first, Monday. That can be easily inferred. But the
whole answer is nonsense, because we have excavated ancient cities in China, in
India, of civilizations which are seven thousand years old. Ruins of great
civilizations - they must have remained in existence for a few thousand years.
We have found skeletons of animals fifty thousand years old. And according to
Christianity, it is only six thousand years old - the whole of creation!
But the child cannot ask. If he
is too inquisitive, he is punished for it. If he is obedient, if whatever you
say he accepts without any argument, he is praised. That's your story of Adam
and Eve. Why were they expelled from the Garden of Eden? Because they
disobeyed. There begins the wrong upbringing of children. They were the first
children, mythologically.
And what kind of father was
this God, who told them not to eat from the tree of knowledge and not to eat
the fruit from the tree of eternal life? Two trees are prohibited....
The story is significant. It
shows what perhaps every father is doing: preventing the child from becoming
wise, keeping him ignorant. But it is the natural curiosity of every child - if
you prevent him, if you tell him not to eat the fruit of this tree... In the
Garden of Eden there must have been millions of trees. If God had not pointed
them out, I don't think we would be sitting here; we would be still wandering
in the Garden of Eden. It would have been almost impossible to find those
trees.
The whole civilization, the
whole evolution of man goes back to the disobedience of Adam and Eve. They ate
from the tree of knowledge.
And you can see the antithesis
that I was talking about just before: God says, "Don't eat from that
tree," and the devil comes in the shape of a snake and says, "Eat it -
because if you eat it you will be wise, and if you eat from the other tree
also, you will be as eternal as God, as wise as God. And that old guy is really
jealous; he does not want you to be equal to him."
Now this is conspiracy! On the
one side prevention, on the other side provocation. And what can you expect of
innocent Adam and Eve? They ate from the tree of knowledge. They loved it - for
the first time they became alert, alert of their nakedness, alert of their
animalness. But before they could reach to the other tree, they were expelled.
They were caught red-handed and expelled from the Garden of Eden, and since
then man has been searching and searching for the other tree.
The whole scientific endeavor
is nothing but a search for eternal life, and the whole religious endeavor is
also nothing but a search for eternal life. The other tree we have missed. And
the first tree has been so helpful to make us human beings - now we know we can
be equal to gods. All enquiries are basically to find some source so that life
can be eternal... or perhaps it is eternal and we have to discover it.
What God did to his children,
every father is doing to his children. It is perfectly right to say, "God,
the father" - they have a similarity. Every father should be called
"Father, the God."
Obedience has become the basis
of bringing up children, and that is the wrong basis. Intelligence,
rebelliousness should be the basis. The child should say yes only when his
intelligence says yes; otherwise he should say no. And his yes or his no has to
be respected. He is a stranger from an unknown world, a visitor, a guest to
your family. Behave with him as a friend, as a guest. He has every right to say
no or yes, and you have to make it completely clear that whatever he says will
be respected; otherwise we create yes-sayers. That is spiritual slavery.
In offices they are saying yes
to the boss, in the home they are saying yes to the wife. They have forgotten
completely that the word `no' exists. And it strange that `no' defines you,
gives you a clear-cut personality; `yes' dissolves you.
One should first learn to say
no.
Your yes is meaningful only
when you are also capable of saying no. If you are incapable of saying no, your
`yes' is a robot `yes'. It is meaningless.
Children should be treated with
great respect. All the societies have done just the opposite: they have been
teaching children to respect the parents, respect the elders, the grandparents.
It was a continuous problem for
me because in India the families are joined. In my family there were almost
sixty people; everybody was an elder, and there was a continual exercise to
touch their feet. Finally I said to my father, "Enough is enough. I don't
see any point in it. I don't have any respect for these people; I don't see
anything worth respecting in them. Why should I touch their feet?" I
refused. My father said, "That is going to be a trouble."
I said, "That is your
problem, that is not my problem. I have solved my problem. I will certainly
touch the feet of somebody whom I feel respect for, whom I feel some deep love for.
But why should I go on doing this exercise to every person for whom I don't
have any feeling?"
But this is the way the
children are being brought up: respect the old people. Why? Just because they
are old? Has oldness something respectable?
And this is the same logic:
respect the people who are dead, because they are even older. Respect the
people who have been dead for thousands of years, because nobody can beat them.
You are making the living respect the dead. You are making the fresh, the newly
sprouting leaf respect the dead leaves which have fallen on the ground, or are
just going to fall down.
In a right upbringing of
children, children should be respected, because the old people are soon going
to disappear, but children have a long life to live.
And respect has an alchemical
effect. If children are respected, the very respect will prevent them from
doing many things - it goes against their respectability. It will make them do
many things which they would not have ever cared to do, but now they are so
much respected, they feel like being worthy of that respect. But right now the
whole thing is upside down.
The children need to be taken
care of, they need your help, but they don't need to be made dependent on you.
Your real help will be to make them independent; your real help will be such
that your help is no longer needed.
They are strangers in the
world. You can keep an eye on them so that they cannot fall into a ditch, but
there is no need to enslave them just to save them from the ditch. If these are
the only two alternatives, I prefer the ditch. At least by falling in the ditch
they will learn something. They will learn what ditches are; they will learn
not to fall again into any other ditch. But slavery for their whole life,
protection for their whole life, makes them incapable of learning.
When you send them to school, a
basic education should be given to all children. By basic education I mean: one
international language to create one world, their mother tongue, the three R's:
reading, arithmetic, writing. You can see it: people's handwriting is so ugly
for the simple reason that nobody pays any attention to their writing. And
writing is their signature; it shows their whole personality, whether there is
a rhythm, an art. Their writing should be a painting, an art.
This should be the basic
education. And after the basic education, the teachers, psychoanalysts,
psychologists should be continuously learning about the children and what are
their potentials. Tests can be developed which can give more evidence that the
person can become a great musician or a painter or a poet or a scientist. Right
now the whole world is in a chaos: the painter is making shoes, the man who was
meant to make shoes is painting. Naturally, if you see the painting it looks
crazy - it is no wonder! Everybody is somewhere where he is not supposed to be.
It is such a mess!
I am reminded of a great
surgeon. He was the greatest surgeon in his country, very much respected, a
Nobel prize winner - and he was retiring. He was almost seventy-five, but still
no young man was capable of doing such artful surgical work as he was capable
of. Even at the age of seventy-five, his fingers were not trembling. He was a
brain surgeon. In your small skull there are seven million nerves - you can
think how small they will be - and when somebody is operating on the brain to
remove some nerves, the danger is he may cut other nerves which are so close
together, so the hand has not to shake at all.
At the age of seventy-five he
was still a perfect surgeon, and all the doctors and the surgeons had given him
a party because he was retiring. They were dancing, singing, but he was sitting
in a corner, sad, with tears in his eyes. One of his old friends came by and he
said, "What is the matter? Everybody is so happy and you are looking so
sad - I even see tears in your eyes." He said, "Yes, there is a
reason. In the first place I wanted to become a dancer, I never wanted to
become a surgeon. My parents forced me. Although I became the most famous
surgeon, it was not my heart's desire. I would have been far happier just with
a guitar on the street as a beggar - a singer, a dancer.
"All this fame has meant
nothing to me. All these awards have meant nothing to me. Each award has only
reminded me of one thing, that I am losing my life and I am not where I am
supposed to be. And now my whole life is finished. These tears are... I am
crying because... why could I not rebel against my parents, and just do
whatever I wanted to do?"
The world is so miserable.
Ninety percent of its misery and anguish comes from the fact that everybody is
doing somebody else's work. Naturally he is not happy; he cannot put his whole
soul into it.
So the parents should not
decide where their children are going, in what direction. It should be decided
by psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers who have watched those children for
four years during their basic education. The children should be given tests so
everything is clear, where they will feel a fulfillment.
Now parents decide for a better
job; their reasons for deciding are different. They are not deciding for the
child and his potential, they are deciding for financial reasons, for
respectability. If he becomes a great engineer or a surgeon he will have a good
life, a comfortable life; he will have a respectable life. Their intention is
not bad, but the path to hell is paved with good intentions. The question is
not their good intention, the question is what is hidden in the child that
needs a flowering.
And that is possible now. We
can find out what is hidden in a child and let him move in that direction.
Perhaps he may not have a very comfortable life, but he will have very
contented life - and what is comfort in comparison to contentment?
Perhaps he may not become world
famous, but who cares? How many people know him does not make any difference.
But dancing or singing or painting, he will have a fulfillment, a flowering.
His life will be juicy.
His aura will be of joy.
This whole world can be a
paradise; we just have to put everybody in his own place. Right now everybody
is in the wrong place: nobody is happy, nobody is blissful, nobody is
contented. And the whole responsibility is on how we start bringing up
children.
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