Christine Wushke, relationship with 11 year old son
Is guidance at cross purpose with friendship? I asked Christine to comment on child rearing:
Awesome~ Really Spot ON~ Thank you Christine~<3
Here are some sample comments that I've communicated to my 11 year old, at various points throughout her journey towards arriving at 11. In age-appropriate language, of course.
*****
Learn to identify two voices in your life. They will be the only voices that you will need to hear, for you to blossom int the most beautiful flower that you are:
the voice of silence, and your personal, authentic voice.
As you grow older, you will discover that most of the people that you will meet have not discovered these two voices for themselves. The voices that they hear are mostly other people's voices. Other people's voices that they have assumed to be their own.
And because they have assumed other people's voices as their own, they will want you to do the same with their voice. They will want you to believe that their world should also be your world, their fears should also be your fears, and their truths should also be your truths.
But if you know what the voice of silence and your personal, authentic voice sound like, you will never be tricked into falling asleep as they have.
You, my precious child, have come here to discover the secrets that the voice of silence and your personal, authentic voice have in store for you.
But you must first learn how to identify those voices from the din of the other ones.
Which is why I was given the pleasure of being your dad. To help you to discover and trust in those only two voice that matter.
Because they are the only two voices that matter to me.
And as a gift for my trust in those two most important voices, I was given the most valuable gift of all...
the gift of you.
*****
Life then becomes an adventure, for the child, of discovering the voice of silence and his/her personal, authentic voice... amidst the clamor of the rest.
Christine's belief that she is here to guide her son is also the prevailing belief of most parents who also believe that for themselves.
I rarely meet a parent who doesn't share that same conviction.
So she has that in common with an overwhelming majority of parents today.
Most parents believe as she does; that they are here to guide their children.
Would guiding our children also include desiring them to see the world as we do, or efforting for them to have the same thoughts as we do (enter some of Kahlil Gibran's admonitions here)?
I'd be interested to know what she and anyone else may mean when we say that we are interested in "guiding" our children.
A much more pertinent question to me... other than does guidance or friendship impinge on the other... is what do we mean by our desire to guide our children?
From my conversations with parents on a daily basis, who also have the desire to guide their children, it almost always means that they want their kids to think and believe as they do.
If that is the case, does that motivation end up serving our children or ourselves?
1. One is to preserve life in an "unnatural environment". Cars are big, streets are busy, drivers are pre-occupied.
2. Follow the law. Kids can actually be taken away from you for the weirdest of reasons, like not going along with an inoculation program.
3. Dear child, please discover what I haven't been able to discover, and please take me along with you. (Maybe that is why I do NeverNotHere.)
4. Please be my carbon copy and never exceed my stature and my brilliance. (That one doesn't seem to hold much water in my experience??)
5. Please be my guest to list some more.
Guidance is whatever the parent feels is a "stable platform" to survive and participate fully with life. That is my belief of course, that somehow participation tends to equalize and harmonize all imbalances, while reservation and isolation tends to exaggerate all imbalances. You just see it in an appropriate manner, because you are there, fully present.
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