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What do we owe our children?
Bunks
Australia Veteran
I have two primary school age children.
Generally speaking, I provide the following four things for them:
1. A roof over the heads
2. Three meals a day
3. Access to a good education
4. Unconditional love and support
Am I missing anything?
2
Comments
Teaching them what they need to know, rather than what it is politically-considered they should know. (#3 on your list.)
Start with the breath, and move on to kindness, peace and generosity.
I would make a list of all the things you wish you had known at eighteen but didn’t find out until much later, and they didn’t teach you in school, and start there. I think the habit of self-development is a good one, and worth teaching early, in a kind of “here’s an hour supplementary to school”.
You don’t have kids @Kerome ?
No @Bunks when I was 16 I thought there were enough humans on planet Earth, and I’ve stuck to that. I could have adopted, but never found the right relationship for it.
A clean unpolluted planet...
Not exactly what you asked for but it seems others have done a fine job with your initial question. I was a single parent. When my daughter turned sixteen, her card explained that there was no store bought gift this year; that I had made her something. The box she opened had sixteen short stories I had written about my sixteen favorite memories of her from her birth through toddler. Things she wouldn't have remembered and could share with her children some day. It took eight years but she told me then that she had taken to bringing it out every year on her birthday and re-reading them and that it had evolved into the best gift she had ever received.
Beautiful @yagr
… perhaps a wider definition of children:
… and now back to the responsible …
Thanks @yagr
We owe them our protection...
We owe them the right to be children...
We owe them the right to be who they are...
All these things, and yet, as someone who doesn’t have children, it seems to me that it is very easy to get caught up in the lives of ones children. It’s like you have a focus on your own life, and your attention is pulled away in caring for and caring about the children and one’s loved one. I wonder what a Buddhist monk might have to say about this…
Perhaps it would depend on whether the monk had children or not?
I always find it funny that people go to monks for parenting and marital advice haha.
And don't get me started on marital/parental advice from Catholic Priests. No, really. Please don't.