Frustrated with your children’s behavior, but they just seem to ignore you? Here’s Sadhguru’s eye-opening take on how you can actually transform your bond and communication with your near and dear ones.
Questioner: I don’t like giving advice to others about what they should do, including my kids, my husband, and my family because I do respect them as a fellow life. But unless I say something, nothing gets done, not even the basic things. So, what should I do?
Sadhguru: Managing situations is one aspect of life. But if someone keeps giving you advice as to what you should do, you will get tired of them, no matter who they are. They may be your parents; you may have all the love and respect for them, but if they start advising you, you frown. Your children will definitely do the same thing. Just remember when you were 14 to 17 years of age – how did you experience your parents’ advice? Your children will experience it the same way today.
Does it mean to say no one should say anything to anyone? No, we can start conversations. Family is the basic unit of a society – the first partnership. From there, we build various kinds of partnerships in society to make a nation, to make a global situation, everything is a different level of marriage. Countries are married; communities are married; businesses are married.
Marriage means coming together. But right now, we have made marriage into something else in our lives, which creates a situation where no one is willing to listen to you. Once you are married, you should not be a wife to that man – you must become his best friend. You should not be a mother either. Mother and father are like bosses – no one likes them.
You must become your child’s best friend, and you have all the opportunity. From their infancy, they are looking up to you. If you cannot befriend that person, who are you going to befriend in your life? If you cannot build a real friendship bond with a person who has to come to you even for their basic survival at one time, you lost it. You lost it because you are trying to act like a boss.
What is your qualification to become a boss to your children? The only qualification is that you came here a few years earlier than them. This culture is everywhere. In high school, some idiot wants to bully you because he joined the school one year before you. So, do not be a bully. Most parents are bullies, and they do not understand this. Because that is how they have experienced the parents – always trying to tell them what to do.
You need to build a bond of friendship. For you to listen and do what I say, I must have that kind of relationship with you. Without that bond of friendship, if I sit above and say, “Listen to me!” when I am there, you will pretend. The moment I am gone, you will do something else. Is this not what most children are doing? When parents are there, they behave one way. The moment they are gone, they do something else. Why? Because you are acting like a bully. In front of a bully, everyone pretends to listen because they are “big.”
Do not take these positions as absolutes because no human relationship is an absolute. You must constantly nurture it. You must tend to it every day – then only there is a relationship. Otherwise, your husband or your wife may be physically there in your home, they may be hanging around for so many reasons, but they will not be there with you. The same thing goes for your children. So, do not take these positions of being the husband, wife, father, or mother.
If you want your children to listen to you, you must have that kind of friendship that whatever they want to say, they will first say it to you because you are the best friend. And you have all the opportunity to do that because you have them captive till 8 or 10 years of age. You should have built that bond instead of acting like a father or a mother. Because, as I said, the only qualification you have is you came here a few years earlier.
So, do not be a bully. It is all right they are your juniors. But being human and friendly helps. If you build that friendship with people around you, whether it is your family or whoever, if you build that bond, that you care and you are there to do your best for them, if they see that you are smarter than them, they will come to you for everything. Otherwise, they will do their own thing; it is fine.
Whether you are smarter than them, or they are smarter than you – it is their judgment. You must leave it at that. You cannot assume to be smarter than someone else. That totally destroys any relationship. If they see you are smarter than they are, they will come to you. So, do not think everyone should listen to you. No one has to listen to you. You must make yourself worth listening to. There is no condition in the world that everyone should listen to you, no matter who you are. If you speak even two words senselessly, no one will listen to you.
Especially the people you are exposed on a daily basis – your husband, your wife, your children – are observing you all the time. They are seeing the coherence between what you say and how you are. Children are not listening to you at all, but they are observing you from their childhood. They know who you are better than you know yourself because they have focused their full attention on you at one time. They saw how you sit and stand, how you do things, how you get irritated or angry – they know everything.
You yourself may not know, your psychiatrist may not know, but your children know exactly what your weak points are, and that is why they put their finger on it whenever they want to. Because they have observed you more closely than anyone else. As an infant, did you see how your baby looked at you, like you are everything? They have paid that level of attention to you. Do not try to fool them with your advice. If you really want things to change, just look at what should change with you, and change that. You will see it will be deeply appreciated.
