This is a YouTube video titled "How to Parent Children Consciously | Eckhart Tolle" containing a conversation recorded in May 2022 featuring Eckhart Tolle discussing conscious parenting. The dialogue includes Eckhart Tolle and another speaker, focusing on the importance of parental presence, awareness of the child's being, and managing the child's emotional challenges. Eckhart Tolle shares insights on how parents can foster a conscious home environment and addresses common issues in parent-child relationships.
Parents are often hypocritical. They demand certain things from their children, but they themselves don't do it. So the state of consciousness that you are predominantly in at home is the main teaching. And there's just been a book published on parenting by Susan Stiffelman, and the title is Parenting with Presence.
Okay, lovely.
That may be helpful. I believe it's a good book and I wrote the foreword for it. There may be in a year or two another book on parenting, but this may already help you. I recommend it. I write a little bit about parenting in the New Earth, but one could say much more. Many volumes could be written about it. I am perhaps not the most qualified person because I've never been a parent, but.
We talked about that. I mean, we talk about this being challenged every day and staying in the presence and so on. It is. I think it is a very much challenging will children.
Yes. Huge challenge. Yeah. But a great opportunity too, for you. Presence the main. Often there have been quite a few questions here also on asked written questions about bringing up children consciously and what's the main thing to do to bring up children consciously. What do we do? The main thing is your own state of consciousness in the at home. That's always your main teaching. There's often a discrepancy between what parents teach their children verbally and how they behave at home and their state of consciousness. And the children know that they can feel that. That basically parents are often hypocritical. They demand certain things from their children, but they themselves don't do it. So the state of consciousness that you are predominantly in at home is the main teaching. So to be able to, I mentioned in A New Earth, to be able to, for example, give your full attention to your child when you're listening to the child and not always equate attention with some kind of thing that they either should be doing or should not be doing. That's how many parents relate to their children. Whenever they give attention, they say, don't do this or you should be doing that. The entire home environment seems to consist of either stopping to do something or doing something that they're not doing. And that's the only way attention flows out to the child. So, and that is not. There's a lack of presence, a lack of the acknowledgement of the being of the child. The entire household is dominated by doing. And in the doing, which includes the mental doing and the physical doing. In the doing, the being is completely neglected. It's never acknowledged. The presence of the child is never fully acknowledged. The child is not seen, seen really by the parent. And deep down the child can feel, can sense that something essential is missing. And what arises then in the child is a discomfort, a sense of lack, and even some anger sometimes towards the parent, which often comes out when they reach teenage years. For some inexplicable, seemingly inexplicable reason, the teenager becomes angry with the parents and say, what happened to this house? Can he turn into this monster? And it is often the case, don't blame yourself. But it's often the case that for years the child's being felt unacknowledged. Basically that means the child felt not seen by the parent. And then that is almost to be deprived, to be deprived of real lovingness, which is attention and not the conditional love that is usually attached to the doing or the not doing. And that is missing. And that's a vital thing that really brings about a lot of conflict between the child and the parent, especially as they grow into their teenage years. Can you be total? Can you be fully yourself? Can you be in your essence as much as possible when you relate to the child? That includes periods when you're not talking about what he or she should be doing or should not be doing, but just giving your fullest attention. You look or you listen to what they have to say, or you look or you're asking questions and then you listen. And sometimes it may just be wordless attention too, for brief moments, just looking. And that is all that changes. That brings in a different energy field into the home environment. And that's the main teaching. Everything else is secondary. What you say to the child and so on is all secondary. Although there are things you can say that are helpful too. I have spoken a few times about the pain body in children, when it begins to manifest to bring some attention to the child's pain body after it's happened. Some children have temper tantrums or go sulking and withdraw. And these are so children already experience pain body attacks, some more acutely than others. And so I recommend that after it has subsided, perhaps the next day or a few hours later, you say, what did you feel when that, what was that? That came up when you started screaming? What did it feel like? Even perhaps ask a child to draw a picture of what this thing is that the anger it felt. He's 14. What?
He's 14.
14? Yes.
I asked him to draw it down.
14. Is this is mostly for younger children? Yes. And because painting a picture of it creates some awareness and creates some space around it, and then the next time it comes up, you can just. You won't be able to stop it, but you can say, oh, there it is again, isn't it? So you're not trying to stop the pain body, you're trying to help the child to become aware of it. And you can start with that already when they're four years old, five years old. So that is very helpful. It's an amazing challenge bringing up children. And every parent makes mistakes. That's inevitable. But at least your son is lucky to have you because you are endeavoring to bring him up consciously. And so that's a new thing that's coming in. There are more humans now who are actually, they may not always succeed, but they are becoming conscious parents. And that is a wonderful thing. In my generation, when I was a child, conscious parent was unheard of. Nobody had conscious parents. Well, at least nobody I knew. All the parents were very unconscious, totally dominated by ego. They just the same upbringing that they experienced, they inflicted on their children. There was no change whatsoever. And so conscious parent is something relatively recent. Although there may have been exceptions, of course, in the past too. There are always. Except I just never met them. And certainly my parents were not conscious. They were just as unconscious as everybody else, trapped in their own ego. And there was constant dysfunction and it was not a pleasant environment. And there's nobody to blame. That was the way they brought me up, corresponded to their state of consciousness. That's all. So thank you.
