Hans Christian King on Raising Children Into Who They Already Are
I have an opinion that lands me in hot water with certain crowds. As a country, we raise our children away from themselves. We don't raise them toward who they are; we raise them toward whoever we've decided they might become. Rarely does a parent sit across from a child and say, tell me who you are, show me where you came from. Hand a kid a pad and a pen and watch what comes out. You'd be surprised. Instead, families scrap and lobby to get their child into the school they've decided is the best one, as though an education is the point. That isn't what living is about. The point is helping someone see the worth of who they already are, because none of what you accumulate in this life stays with you.
Buddha said something along these lines, but I got my own version years ago. I was around nineteen. I asked, could you please tell me the bottom line here, the single statement that sums up a life? Silence. Then roughly two weeks later I heard it: it's how you loved, and how you let yourself be loved. That's the whole of it. Now get on with your work, son. That was the answer. How you loved and how you allowed yourself to be loved. Everything else is a footnote to your life, not the life itself. Most people never actually live. They live their reactions to what happens to them.
You can see how I get myself into trouble saying this. But being at peace with yourself really is the first move toward any real relationship with another person, and plenty of people push back hard against that. It's the most important relationship you'll ever have. No one will ever matter to you more than you do. Nobody is your missing half. God doesn't make mistakes. I like to put it this way: God didn't ship half-baked cookies down to Earth. We show up complete.
Picture what would change if we told our children this: do you know that exactly who you are, right this minute, is already enough for God? You don't have to turn into anything. Just tell us what you'd like to experience. Who you are is perfect. We don't say that. We compare them instead. We set up games of winners and losers, and we teach a child that being a loser is even possible. There's no such thing. Pin that label on a child and they carry it their whole life, every single day after. What we've done to our kids is something to behold.