Raising children without making them resent Kṛṣṇa
We can observe that many children of devotee parents are not very attracted to the practice of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. There are even many cases of children who completely reject the process.
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We can observe that many children of devotee parents are not very attracted to the practice of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. There are even many cases of children who completely reject the process, connecting it to negative experiences they faced as children or young adults. Here I try to share some common mistakes and how to avoid them. If you have a child or consider having one in the future, this can be an important read.
The first point is the challenge in itself. Raising a child nowadays, balancing time, economic pressures, cultural challenges, and so on, is already not easy. Parents who try to educate their children in Kṛṣṇa consciousness face even greater challenges, for on top of everything else, we have to reconcile our duties as parents with our spiritual practice and transmit spiritual values to the child in a positive way. All of this requires a great deal of maturity in spiritual practice, which we do not always have.
The first mistake is to think that a child is “ours.” Each child is an eternal soul who ultimately belongs to Kṛṣṇa. This soul passed through many lives in the past, and our role as parents is to help this soul understand his eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa and escape the cycle of birth and death. The child is not a possession or an instrument of satisfaction of our ambitions and frustrations.
The second mistake is to become too lenient, allowing the child to do whatever they want, or, on the other extreme, to become too rigid. In the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa explains that we cannot practice yoga if we eat too much or too little or sleep too much or too little. Moderation is necessary in many aspects of spiritual practice, and children’s education is one of them.
Children need boundaries, guidance, education, and protection. The question is that all of this must be offered within a context of love and care. When there is love, a child can easily understand that these restrictions are for his or her good and accept them, but when love is absent, it becomes a system of repression that makes the child grow resenting the whole process. On the other hand, love without discipline can easily become neglect. We need to remain clear of both extremes.
Another mistake is to see married life and the education of children as “māyā”, something that is separated from our spiritual practice. This is a very mistaken idea that created serious problems in the past. It comes from a basic misunderstanding, the same mistake Arjuna was making at the beginning of the Gītā, wanting to leave the battlefield before the battle.
When we chant the mahā-mantra, we pray to Kṛṣṇa for an opportunity to be engaged in His service. Kṛṣṇa then sends us a child, a soul who is dear to Him, and whom He entrusts us to bring closer to Him, but we reject it, thinking we have more important things to do. This is similar to Arjuna wanting to leave the battlefield before the battle. The whole Bhagavad-gītā was spoken to correct this mistake.
Family responsibilities are not separate from devotional service. When Arundhati d.d. wrote to Śrīla Prabhupāda mentioning her difficulties in taking care of her child while at the same time serving as a pūjāri in the temple, Prabhupāda answered that “For you, child-worship is more important than deity-worship. If you cannot spend time with him, then stop the duties of pūjāri.”
Kṛṣṇa is absolute, and service to Kṛṣṇa is also absolute. Just as a book distributor or a cook is not less important than a pūjāri, educating a child is also not less important than worshiping a deity. The point is not in serving Kṛṣṇa in a particular way, but in learning to perform all our activities as an offering to Him. Again, this is the main message of the Bhagavad-gītā.
For a child, attention from the parents is a biological necessity, just like eating and sleeping. When a child is deprived of this, he or she may still look physically fine, but psychologically, he or she will be broken. Many children of devotees learn to see Kṛṣṇa consciousness as a competitor that takes their parents away from them. The problem is not devotional service itself but the artificial separation between service to Kṛṣṇa and care for one’s family.
Lord Ṛṣabhadeva teaches that one should not become a parent unless one can help one’s dependents become free from repeated birth and death. This may sound harsh at first, but it emphasizes the main point that we should take responsibility for giving our children a real opportunity to progress. This implies spending time with the child, observing, educating, giving affection, and so on. When we learn to do that in proper consciousness, this is something that brings us closer to Kṛṣṇa.
The next point is the difference between education and repression.
In the Gītā, we learn that beneficial activities are often distasteful in the beginning, while inauspicious activities are often very pleasant in the beginning. Eating fast food may feel good, but it brings suffering later in the form of many health problems. Spiritual practice, on the other hand, may be difficult in the beginning, but it brings lasting happiness in the long term.
Children should understand the value of honesty, cleanliness, self-control, compassion, responsibility, etc., and learn the dangers of different forms of intoxication, promiscuous sex, gambling, etc. They should learn the value of spiritual practice and spiritual knowledge. The question is how to transmit all of this.
Repression is about imposing a rule for the sake of the rule itself, just because we say so. The child then follows based on enforcement, out of fear. Education is different. It means to present a rule based on the principle of its value. “We do like this, because this is the right way.” A rule is presented as a higher law that everyone is supposed to follow, something I also personally follow.
For example, I cannot teach honesty to anyone if I’m dishonest myself. I can’t teach a child to not smoke if I smoke myself. Being a parent means being the embodiment of the values I’m trying to teach.
I remember a class in which Pṛthu Prabhu shared that once, while crossing the border, the customs inspector asked if they had any goods to declare. The father said they had none, and he, as a child, corrected him, saying that they got a big cheese. They got a fine. When they came home, his father slapped him. After that, he learned that he shouldn’t take very seriously when his father talked about honesty... That was a point that stayed with me.
Enforcement is based on producing a certain action, but it works only as long as we are looking. Education is meant to help a child to develop intelligence to make the right choices when we are not there. This is done by walking our talk, showing the child how to behave and what choices to make, not only by words but especially by example.
The next challenge is how to make a child interested in the spiritual process itself.
Devotional service is voluntary by nature. It means willingly offering something to Kṛṣṇa out of devotion. It can’t be imposed by coercion. If I force someone to serve Kṛṣṇa, this doesn’t really count as devotional service. It is just external action based on coercion. One may force a child to sit and chant japa, bow before the deities, attend programs, wear devotional clothing, or recite verses. However, without love for Kṛṣṇa, these are simply external actions. A child will not get a taste for any of these by being forced, and as soon as they grow up and start to have a choice, they will abandon the process.
Prabhupāda mentioned that leaders should not destroy the individual, spontaneous, and voluntary spirit of devotional service. A genuine leader creates an atmosphere of love and trust that inspires people to willingly offer their energy to Kṛṣṇa. An oppressive leader may keep people in line temporarily, but eventually they become discouraged and leave. The same principle applies even more strongly to children.
It is much more effective when we personally do everything and allow the child to gradually come to participate. Children are naturally attracted to imitating adults, and when this tendency is properly directed, it can become the most effective form of education. We can potentiate this further by emphasizing the joyful sides of spiritual practice first. We can organize the experiences in a way that the temple is seen as a place where the child feels welcomed, chanting as a source of happiness, festivals as a source of new friends, and so on. When a child gets a taste, it becomes easier to also teach the restrictions as foundations that support it. When both are combined, the child can get a higher taste.
Often, we see apparently well-behaved children become rebellious teenagers. Of course, this is a phase that brings many challenges, but it often just brings up things that were hidden. It may be just a reaction to resentment that accumulated during years of forced obedience. We then often worsen it by using toxic shame (”your are a disgrace,” “you didn’t learn anything,” “why dd I have you,” etc.)
This brings us to the last point for today, which is unconditional love. This is the factor that supports the positive and blunts most of the mistakes we may make.
Unconditional love does not mean approving everything. It does not conflict with the need for educating, etc. The main point is to use the relationship as a weapon. It means to not make the relationship dependent on a certain pattern of behavior, to not become emotionally distant when the child makes a mistake or does not act the way we want, and to make it clear we are there to help, not just to punish.
For a small child, this removes much of the anxiety by giving the idea that he or she will still be loved even after committing a mistake. This makes the child more open to telling the truth and sharing difficulties with the parents instead of falling into the pattern of lying and hiding. The parent becomes a trusted person, instead of just an institutional authority. This becomes even more important later, in the teenage years.
Most teenagers need time to evaluate things independently and understand their options in life. If the relationship remains intact, at this point, the positive impressions of childhood later reawaken, and this brings them back to spiritual practice, now as their own conscious choice. If the relationship is destroyed, however, the resentment toward the parents usually also affects their attitude towards the spiritual process itself.
To avoid that, we should not become attached to the image of having a perfect spiritual family. We should accept that there will always be difficulties and imperfections and that they are not a sign of defeat.
We should not make the external behavior of our children a source of personal prestige. This is a source of many mistakes, because it makes us react disproportionately to mistakes or non-compliance, seeing the behavior of the child as a threat to our public image. For a child, this is a very painful realization: the moment they understand that their parents don’t love them for what they are, but only in the measure they perform a certain role. It is much more productive when we stop trying to produce a child that can work as an extension of our ego and start seeing him or her as a soul that we can help to gradually come closer to Kṛṣṇa.
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