Vishen Lakhiani recounts parenting lessons in a YouTube talk titled "The Biggest Mistakes I've Made as a Dad." Using a Khalil Gibran quote as framing, he identifies and critiques three common "lies" about parenting: (1) the need to discipline children strictly, (2) the impulse to push children toward the lives we missed (over-directing their future), and (3) imposing cultural or religious traditions. He argues for "conscious parenting," which treats children as sovereign, authentic beings and views parenting as mutual growth; the piece concludes with a call-to-action to a free masterclass.
Chapters
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. So said the poet Khalil Gibran. Hidden within those words is one of the world's greatest parenting secrets. That our role as parents is not to mold our children. Instead, our role is to ensure that our kids blossom into their truest and most authentic selves. So how can you become the best parent you can be so that you give your kids the best lives they can live? We have to rid ourselves of these lies of parenting. The first lie is that in order to be a good parent, we have to discipline our children. I remember when this lie hit me. I walked into my daughter Eve's room and I found that Eve had taken watercolors and created her version of four year old art. How dare she express her creativity on this beautiful wall with watercolors? And then, shamefully, I realized what was going on. Eve was showing to me her expression of life, her expression of her artistic creativity. And. And in my mind, I was thinking, oh my God, how am I going to find that exact paint color? Who do I have to pay to repaint that wall? Fortunately, Eve's mom was wiser and smarter than I was. She said Eve can paint on every wall in her room. This is Eve's room. She gets to decide. And I realized I was operating from a script that had been drilled into me multiple generations down. Think about it. If I had disciplined Eve, what would have happened? Eve's meaning making machine as a young child would have taught her to say, wow, I will never be creative again. There is no place in the world for art. I should not express myself. These are Dad's walls. For generations, we've been taught that we have to discipline our children or they grow up to be unsuccessful or worse, delinquents. But studies show that children who grow up in households with stern discipline actually are the ones who have problems and often become bullies themselves. They have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and lower grades. Approach your children's behavior issues with compassion and with empowerment. The second lie is that we need to make our children happy and give them everything we never got in life. From the time my son Hayden was a young boy and I saw that he had a knack for science. I started talking to him about MIT and the Ivy League universities and how great it would be if he somehow got to go to MIT and dabble in robotics or artificial intelligence. Then I Started to understand why. I remembered how When I was 18 years old, I applied to 10 Ivy League universities. I remembered my dream school, Yale University. And I remembered the day I got rejected. I never made it to a single Ivy League university. That so many of us are obsessed not with our children living life right now, but this idea we have of who our kids might be in the future, the dark side is that this can push our kids to go into careers, fields, universities, even marriages that do not resonate with them. We are setting up our kids to lead the lives we missed out on. This doesn't mean that we don't teach our kids the the experiences and knowledge of life that we have. But it means that as we do this, we respect the fact that our kids lead their own lives. They are sovereign, sentient beings. The third lie. It is the idea that we need to impose our traditions, our culture and our religious beliefs on our children. Don't get me wrong. Culture, religion, traditions, these are things to be celebrated. But remember, as one writer said, tradition can be peer pressure from dead people. Why did you become a Jew or a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu? It was because your soul in this lifetime was merely born in a Jew or Muslim or Christian or a Hindu family. And your parents indoctrinated you in that belief. They did it with love. But keep this in mind. Did you ever get to choose your own religion? The world is changing fast. The today we can pick and choose our traditions, our culture, our religion, our beliefs. We can freely marry people of a different culture or religion. Yet in some parts of the world, this is even illegal. This is how bad this lie has gotten. When we push our beliefs on our kids, we disconnect their true formless essence. And it creates this pressure to conform to another person's beliefs and ideas. So remember, tradition can be beautiful, but it should absolutely not be forced onto our children. Our children come to us whole. They come to us worthy. Our inability to see this is more a reflection of ourselves than them. And worse. These lies are often disguised as positive virtues. Billions of parents around the world believe these destructive virtues lies. I did too. Until recently. The greatest thing you can do for your kids is to practice conscious parenting. It is the idea that you are not there to mold and shape and educate your children alone, but your children are also your teachers. That parenting is an act of self growth first. And from this place of conscious awareness and growth, you deliver the best to your children. And if you'd like to go deeper in the ideas of conscious parenting, join me and Dr. Shefali Sabari in this special masterclass, completely free. Brought to you by Mindvalley.
