Don’t teach, just learn

[1]

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

Every child has the necessary intelligence to live his life fully. As a parent, you just create an atmosphere for the child to grow into his/her intelligence; just encourage him/her to be intelligent, to be aware. Watch an ant and you’ll see that it has all the intelligence to live an ant’s life fully. It may not be able to do what you do, but as an ant, the necessary intelligence for being an ant exists. The same goes for every creature.
The problem is that you want your child to be intelligent the way you want him/her to be and not the way s/he wants.
Your idea of intelligence is that your child should become a doctor. Maybe s/he would have made a wonderful carpenter, but you want the child to become a doctor. Not because doctors are needed in the world or because you want your child to dedicate himself/herself as a doctor, but simply because you have an idea in your head that in the social structure, a doctor or an engineer means some kind of prestige: “My child is a doctor.” You want to live your life through your children, and this is a sure way to destroy them.
The first thing to do when bringing up a child is not to influence their minds with your minds. That is the first step you need to take.
If you believe that when a child is born it is time to teach, then you will ruin the child. When a child comes into your life, it is a time to learn because you have missed much in your life and so much of you has become distorted. Now, a child is just looking at life. You sit with him/her and look at life afresh. The only thing that you can do to your child is to love and support; his/her intelligence will grow.
Yes, the child can get exposed to many rotten minds but you cannot isolate any child totally from that. When it comes to influencing a child, the teachers play a role, so do friends and many others. You can’t help it; you cannot build a sanitarium for your child, but still, as a parent, you can play a very important role in allowing the child’s intelligence to bloom. That is all. Create a loving atmosphere for him/her where intelligence will naturally flower.
Your child need not do what you did in life. Your child should do something that you did not even dare to think of; your child should do that which you did not even have the courage to nurture a thought about. Only then this world will progress and something positive will happen.