Get to know you child

They should be allowed to live their nature

From the minute a child is born one of the most important things a parent can do is observe the child carefully in order to get to know them and learn who they are. This new person that has just come to the world is initially a stranger, and you must not assume that you already know them in some way. If you observe with an open mind, you would be surprised how much you can learn about your child within the first minutes, hours and days.

It’s important to uproot the idea that the child is ‘your’ child or that it is in some sense an expression of you. Even though the child may have come to the world through you they do not ‘belong’ to you in any real sense. They are their own person, entrusted to your care, and they are not a projection of who you are. It may in fact be more healthy for both of you to regard your child as someone who was adopted by you rather than someone who was born through you. You brought them into this world, or were entrusted by society to take care of them, and you therefore have a duty to learn who they are and to take care of them throughout life in the way that is best for them.

What is best for the child is to be able to live according to their own true fundamental nature. Anything else would be condemning them to a life that could not be fully satisfactory. It is very important to avoid giving the child the feeling that there is something wrong with their inherent fundamental nature. I don’t believe you can change the fundamental nature of a child in a good way, nor should we want to do it. Trying to change their character would be a waste of time, but more importantly, very harmful to the child. In reality character cannot be changed, it is too deeply built in, and it is harmful to try and do it. There could only be two possible results to such an effort, none of which is great. One is rebellion and the other is crushing the child’s spirit.

The fundamental nature of the child is who they are, how they were made. They have not in any way chosen that nature, it was pretty much determined by their genes. If there was any choice involved in the process of creating that nature (at least at the current state of reproduction technology), it was the one made by you in choosing the family of your biological partner in creating that child. I say the family of your biological partner, because the biological reality is that the genes of the child are going to be randomly selected and combined from the genes of the extended family, actual or potential, of your biological reproductive partner. If you therefore want to be as deliberate as possible about selecting the nature of your child, the best way to do it is to take a good look at all the extended family of your reproductive partner candidate before making that choice decision.

But now this choice has been made, and it was not your child’s choice. One of the worst mistakes you can now do is have expectations about who they should be. They are, at this point, who they are. Your children do not need to conform to some idea you may have just because they are your children. They have the right, and you have the obligation to allow them, to live their own nature and be different from what you might have wanted them to be. Disappointment in who the child is does not have a legitimate place in the parent child relationship. If you are disappointed in your child, it is an indication of you and your improper expectations and demands. Projecting those expectations on your child would be a source of a lot of harm and sorrow for both them and you. Your child would not be able to live a complete and fulfilling life if they live in a way that tries to conform to your expectations at the expense of being true to their real nature. Trying to mold them from an early age into something different than what and who they fundamentally would harm them and be a source of constant suffering to them (and consequently to you) throughout life.

I do not believe that there exists a fundamental nature that is inherently bad. The nature of the child was molded by genes that have passed the test of billions of years of evolution. It is just a matter of finding and guiding the child to what is best for their nature. The important thing is to find what this character is good for - what are its strong points - and enable the child to divert their energy in the right direction for them. The strength of humanity lies in diversity - the fact that each person has a different personality with different inclinations and talents. Not to see it as a strength and not to take advantage of it is a costly mistake for both the child and society.