Control vs Guidance in Parenting | Eckhart Tolle

The mother bird is taking the little tick and going. And then it will, oh, no, you can't fly like that. You have to do this.

I guess, just to go along with questions about boys. My daughter is 17 years old. There are times when, and many times recently when she does not want to follow my direction. You know, how do I stay present when she's doing, you know, me, you know.

So she's 17.

She's 17.

So you've only got a few more months of control over her and then.

You have to let go. Well, she's been at this for a while.

So then the shift then. As your children grow older, of course, the younger they are, the more you need to, in some cases, control what they do because they might do something to hurt themselves, like, don't play with fire, don't walk on a high wall because you might fall off. So those things they. And then gradually the parent needs to learn to allow a bit more, always a bit more freedom and a bit more just give guidance rather than control. Some parents find it hard to shift from exerting control as they grow older and giving guidance. And as teenagers especially, they resent, as you know, and everybody knows, they resent being told what to do because they're beginning to be independent adults.

Well, she knows everything.

Yes, of course, yes. So there's as much learning for you as there is for her in this situation. For you, it's to do with continuing to give guidance without giving the impression that you are trying to control what she does. And if guidance is not received, no matter whether it's given but it's not received, then you need to accept that, especially soon she will be reaching 18. And then compassion comes in. You continue to help her as much as you can offer help or guidance, realizing that she now has her. She is autonomous now and will decide what to do on her own. And she will make mistakes, hopefully, because if she doesn't, she's not going to grow. She will make mistakes and you may see it and she won't. And ultimately they are not really mistakes because they're all part of one's growth process and becoming eventually conscious. Often mistakes, if they are leading to suffering and then can lead to awakening, and then retrospectively, they're not mistakes. If a mistake leads to awakening, it's not a mistake eventually. So it's a letting go, internally compassionate letting go. Like think of the image of a nest and the bird, the mother bird is taking the little chick and going. And then it will, oh, no, you can't fly. Like that you have to do this. But birds have learned to fly for a million years and more without the mother bird telling them what to do. They'll learn. So it's trusting in the movement of life and realizing how that so called mistakes are an important part of our growth and that we had somebody else before we talked about allowing them to do that. So it's think of the image and that will help you to be. Your associated question was to do with patience or presence. This will help you the bird. You let the bird fly off and the flight attrast may not be smooth and they may have a hard landing. And then you just watch and you know that's fine. Do as much as you can. Patience is not quite the same as presence. In presence, the whole idea or concept of patience disappears when you are present and somebody says, oh, you are so patient. You say patient. I didn't know I was patient. Patient is not something that you're trying to do really. I'm trying to be patient here. Here is the key word. I'm trying to be patient here. So the patience is something you're kind of holding back. I'm very patient with you. But in presence, really you're not thinking of yourself as patient at all. It doesn't come into it really anymore at all. You're just present with what is. And as I said, if somebody called you patient, you'd say, what does that mean? I'm not patient at all. It's like forgiveness also in presence. Forgiveness happens naturally. And so you don't need to make a big deal and say I'm trying to forgive that person. I had again in my life, I had for many years resentment towards my father until I finally woke up. And then the resentment disappeared and my relationship with him changed completely. There was suddenly love. And until the age of 29 I had enormous amount of resentment. I didn't realize, of course, that he did what he did because of his programming. He was had an enormous amount of anger in him that comes from his childhood. And again, I could explain why, but it's not necessary. It comes from his childhood and the way in which he interpreted his childhood, what his mother did to him, not actually, rather how he interpreted her motivation. He was the seventh child, the youngest, and then his father died when he was only 14. And then the family didn't have enough money to have all the children at school, at grammar's high school. So two of his sisters were kept at school and he was taken out of school because they didn't have Enough money and he had to become an apprentice in a. In some store. Not supermarket, they didn't have supermarkets then, but some store where he had to make deliveries to big houses. And then that enormous anger started to up in him. During all that time, what my mother did to me, what they did to me, and that never really left him. So living with him, the anger was usually not directed to me, but was directed to my mother always. And living there was like living with an unexploded bomb. It could go off at any moment whenever he was there, like a powder keg. Any moment it could go off. One wrong word by my mum and my mom was very good at saying the wrong word, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't. I. That was his. He couldn't help that. And as I then disidentified from that in his later years, there was a considerable degree of awareness coming in. Some remnants of that anger remained, but far less than before. And he read the Power of Now a few years before he died. And it was meaningful to him. And there was quite a bit. In some areas of his life he was virtually enlightened. And in other areas there were still big pockets of unconsciousness. But compared to what he was before, there was an enormous shift. And it has, I'm sure, something to do with the shift that happened in me towards him. So there was no longer anything to forgive. That's the beauty of it. And it was all my. His ego was huge. So I learned about ego before I even knew the word ego. Throughout all my childhood, I learned about how the ego behaves and what it does through observation, without knowing that that was ego. But I saw the dysfunction, normal dysfunction in relationships. It's all fine. Trust, compassion, letting go, and then life will do the rest.

Well, thank you very much.