"Your children are not your children".Do you agree with Kahlil Gibran's views? Justify the answers.
Class 12 NCERT
Answers
- You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, But seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
- The role of parents generally is viewed as "imparting" values and thoughts, more than nurturing their values and thoughts. Parenting is looked upon as imposing our unfulfilled dreams on our children, whereas it should be helping them to develop their own dreams.
- Social and peer pressure wrought by parents needs to be re-evaluated in the light of these lines by Gibran.
I absolutely agree. In religious terms I would say that children are gifts from God, whom we get temporarily to grow and nurture them. But they are not ours, not our property. They are not independent, however, either. They belong to God, as we ourselves - whether they realize it or not. We are responsible for them to a certain degree, we are their custodians until they be come fully responsible for themselves before God. Afterwards (as far as I can see) our responsibility diminishes and we have no rigth whatsoever to determine their decisions in their full life. They are not our tools to realize our own goals. They have their own life, responsibility, their own aspirations. It is reassuring if these goals are similar to ours, if we succeed to transplant our values to them, but it is rarely the case. I am firmly convinced that the tyranny of parents killed the spiritual development of many. I know that personality vs. group morality is different in the Western and in some other cultures and I also realize that the cult of personality may lead to egotism, but the tyranny of the family is just another expression of egotism. The only differece is that is such traditional cultures many have to suffer from the egotism of a few. I also realize that there is a noble ethos is submitting to the will of the father and of the family, but in the last analyis we are all responsible to the Heavenly Farther - both as sons and as parents.