Honoring Your Child's Unique Gifts

What about when mom or dad didn’t get the grades to get into a good school? Well, darned if their kids are going to fail to do so. They will get where the parents didn’t even if they have to force them there! To give an example, when I was growing up, my friend Bill was a slow moving, very likable guy who did not much care about sports. His dad very much regretted he had not gone to the right college. I couldn’t count the times I was over and heard his dad screaming, “Bill, you have to get good grades and get into Stanford,” which was where he himself had been rejected. In other words, Bill was supposed to take care of his father’s unfulfilled need, rather than the other way around. He was going to make up for the lack and make his father feel good again.

As he grew up, Bill got pretty sick of hearing about Stanford. But some kids operate from a sense of independence and security and miraculously are able to act on it. Turning his deep sensitivity to the deaths of so many in Vietnam, Bill dropped out of school in 1968 and joined the famous antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago, which some say was what turned the tide in America against that war. Bill, who today tends an orchard in eastern Washington, found his own path through his deep convictions to fulfillment and inner peace. His dad, however, died believing his son was a failure. It all makes me think how much richer a life all of us parents can have if we see our boy or girl not for what we hope they will achieve, but for the person they truly are at any given time.

Relationships

Sometimes parents are sure just who they want their girl or boy to date and their own preferences limit their kid to their own predilections. Let me once again give an extreme example of what could be lost if the kid doesn’t ask her own questions. There was a day when I was growing up that my teenaged sister came home and dropped a bombshell. She announced she was marrying her hippie boyfriend. “Not on your life,” my dad the business professor said. “That bearded, lazy so-and-so will never amount to a thing.” Only that lazy so-and-so was not so lazy when he jammed with his guitar. I could listen to the skillful finger picking and the soulful bard’s voice for hours. However, Dad wanted someone who could make it in the financial world; this “nobody” didn’t seem to care a fig about money.

But Dad had to eat his words, though, after the first album sold out and the band became wildly popular. My new brother-in-law’s name was Jerry Garcia. It took Dad decades to admit my sister had married one of the great rock legends of the 20th century, and that if she had bowed to his demands, she might have missed out on history.

Thus, if we can stop trying to use our children as surrogate selves, who will be what we should or could have been, or spoiling them so that they can enjoy what we couldn’t have-- and if we can instead nourish and respect them as the people they really are, the results can be miraculous.

Dr. Stephen Ruppenthal is the author of The Path of Direct Awakening: Passages for Meditation. He is also the co-author of Eknath Easwaran’s edition of The Dhammapada and the author of Keats and Zen. He has taught meditation and courses on Han Shan at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Dr. Ruppenthal is an international workshop leader in passage meditation and in courses for those looking for end of life spiritual care and for the spiritual step component of twelve step programs.