When children are young, they depend on us for food, for helping them maneuver their routine and for supporting them with homework and school. When they are slightly older, they become more independent about those areas, but continue depending on us for emotional support and guidance.

This kind of dependence prevents them from feeling confident and capable of living by themselves when they grow up into young adults. They might not tell you this, but deep down they may be fearful living by themselves, handling problematic situations and taking important decisions.As parents, we need to help them get completely independent: physically, practically and emotionally.

When they can manage without us and are not dependent on our emotional and physical support, we can say with certainty that we have completed our parenting tasks well. This kind of independence is really hard but is something we should definitely aspire towards.

Children are beings of energy.

This is true whether we are aware of it or not. They absorb energy all the time. They absorb the terrible vibrations when parents fight, they absorb the calm feelings when they are in nature. They also absorb the love that parents shower on them.

Have you had a moment when you missed your mom terribly and you received a phone call from her just at that moment. Her words were filled with love and you felt so good. Our children are deeply connected to us. They feel our love, we are connected to them and we know it when they need our help and support. And most importantly they feel our love and absorb our love even when they are not around us, even when they are not awake.

So as parents we should always remember to send them those blissful love vibrations. Kiss them good night, bless them and send those good vibrations even when they are asleep.

Your love is more powerful than you think it is.

As parents, we go through many situations where we experience bouts of intense worry and anxiety about our children. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet, reminds us not to have an attitude of ownership with your child; rather tell yourself that ‘my children have come through me. They do not belong to me.’ 

So what is the gardener philosophy? You know, as part of bringing up our children, many of us parents develop a deep attachment towards our children. In fact, some amount of attachment is really good. But when that attachment becomes excessive, that can become a little detrimental. And that is what Khalil Gibran calls it as a principle of ownership or the feeling that our children belong to us, or we own our children.

How do we know that we have the sense of ownership without children. So some of the ways that I feel that I can identify when I have the spirit or attitude of ownership is when we parents try to enforce our dreams or thrust our dreams onto our children, maybe something that we haven’t accomplished, we want our children to accomplish.

Again, another way to identify this attitude of ownership is when we feel we take things very personally, especially the mistakes or lack of accomplishments of our children, we take that very personally, and we feel that it’s a failure on our part that we were not able to do that. And again, another way would be, we worry incessantly about children, almost to a point of being obsessed about a child, you know, all constantly, our children are in our thoughts, and we worry about them too much. These are some of the ways that I identify for myself and say that, ‘Oh, this is I’m probably feeling that attitude of ownership of my child, and it’s time to step back a little.’

And what’s the right solution for this? Khalil Gibran gives the answer very beautiful in his code. And he says that all we have to do is to remind ourselves that our children don’t belong to us, they have come through us, they are not come from us, we are not the owners.

And I would add a little bit to say that we are like the trustees, or we are like the gardeners, our job is to just nourish the standard plants or tender saplings that we have brought in into our homes, to help them become the kind of healthy individuals that we want to become. And that’s what we do with, uh, with our plants in our garden, right? We tend them, we take care of them, we put the right soil the right amount of water, and expose it to the right amount of sunlight. But finally, sometimes even after all, the care that we give, the plant doesn’t do well, maybe it is attacked by weeds or insects. At that time, instead of taking things personally, we just step back and say, hey, what can I do about it right now? What should I do now, to ensure that the plant is able to bounce back to a state of good health? And that’s exactly what we need to do as parents, instead of getting too affected by it, sit back and say what can I do to help my child discover his or her unique potential and live their destiny that they have chosen to live?

It’s an it’s an attitude that we have to develop over time. It doesn’t come to us in an instant. There are some days when we have more of ownership. Some days we kind of step back and say ‘no, come on, my children don’t belong to me.’ I have to let them lead their own lives and step back and say, ‘I am a gardener.’ So this is a constant practice that we have to follow.

There are certain categories of children, no parent is happy about: naughty children, disobedient kids, kids making wrong choices and kids answering back……… 

We spend a lot of time correcting our children because we do not want them to have bad behavior or make bad choices. In the process of correcting our children, many of us go overboard. Too much focus on correction, demotivates both the child and the parent.

We might also be so preoccupied with the process of trying to make our child develop good habits, good behavior and make good choices that it’s easy for us to forget that our child is already a good kid.

When we recognize the innate goodness in our child regardless of how the behavior is, that will help the child, too, discover and focus on his/her own goodness.

 Can you imagine what that does to the self-esteem of the child? When the child believes that he/she is a good child, there is an aspiration to live up to this internal image of themselves.

Don’t let yourself become so concerned with raising a good kid that you forget you already have one. ~Glennon Melton

We watch our children grow and we worry a lot about them. We imagine them alone at school or when they grow up and move out to college on their own and we worry how they will be when we’re not there to protect them. 

We want our kids to be successful adults, and so we spend our time worrying about the right way to discipline them, the right way to encourage them – the right way to manage every minute of our lives around them.

In the end, though, what matters the most is love.

No matter what kind of techniques of parenting we follow, children will turn out well  so long as we shower them with love and  they receive and feel the love of parents.

Studies in human children found a connection between early social experiences and the volume of the amygdala, which is that part of the brain that helps regulate emotional reactions and stress responses. Greater the love connection between the parent and the child means a larger and more connected brain and better ability to self regulate.

 Numerous studies also have found that children raised in a nurturing environment typically do better in school and are more emotionally developed than their non-nurtured peers.

So as parents, when we  touch, talk and play with our kids, when we are patient with them, and reassure them when they’re worried, we are actually contributing to emotionally stronger and happier children.

This is a fact proven in many parenting research and studies that loving our children is the one thing that makes all the difference – in more ways than you can fathom.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

Almost a century ago, in 1923,  the Lebanese-American poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran addressed the essence of parenting in a short passage in his famous book, The Prophet.

He says: ‘Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you’

As parents, we all feel a biological, emotional and spiritual connection with our children. We have chosen to have these children and we are conscientiously raising them, teaching and loving them. What does Kahlil Gibran mean when he says that these are not our own children? 

When we look at these poignant lines more closely, a profound truth about life is revealed: we do not ‘own’ our children. They do not ‘belong’ to us like our homes or our cars. While we may have chosen to be the means to bring them to this world, we did not create them.

A force greater than ourselves — we can call it God, nature, Gibran refers to it as: “Life’s longing for itself,” it is this force that is responsible for the creation of our children.

Our kids come to this world with their own unique identity, and their own unique part to play in this world. We have little idea about their innate potential, and we have absolutely no clue how their future will turn out to be. 

While we can take care of them and offer them our very best, we cannot make them think like us or have beliefs like ours. And we shouldn’t want to make them like ourselves because they will need different thoughts and beliefs to navigate a world we can’t foresee. Our children have come into this world for a different purpose and they have been created to fulfill their own unique destiny, separate and apart from our own.

In this connection it is worthwhile to remember that we are mere gardeners, tending these young saplings. Through our sincere parenting practices, we endeavor to help them grow and bloom to their true potential, helping them live a life of purpose. All the while, we might want to remember, we are only the ‘gardener’ and not the ‘owner’.