Being a non-attached parent

How ‘non-attached’ can parents be? While we love our kids so much, we want everything that we believe is the best for them. We nurture desires for them to achieve, we support them in striving towards these and feel extremely proud and happy of their accomplishments. Nothing wrong with it at all. Yeah, there is a possibility that they may not come right up to our expectations of them but we continue to re-align our expectation so the we don’t get disappointed. One little problem though, who is our real child? What are their real characteristics?

Essentially what we are doing is that in the name of love, we are binding our children into an ‘image’ of them that sits in our minds. We build this ‘image’, know it much better than what’s ‘out there’ which happens to be our real child. We nurture dreams about this ‘image’ that’s within us, ‘support’ or try to transform our real child to fit into this ‘image’ that we have created. If they do something that does not necessarily belong with this ‘image’, we get upset and angry, especially if this happens unannounced. A simple example could be that this ‘image’ of our growing child is a willing helper at home and if he refuses to ‘mow the lawn’ for whatever reason, we get upset and angry about it. Because what we have done, is gotten attached to this ‘image’ of our child that sits in our mind. To make things worse, we have unknowingly attached ourselves to this ‘image’ as well. So now, we have trapped ourselves with the ‘image’ of our child. We now take ownership of the expectations that we set, get anxious about these and suffer if they don’t get fulfilled. Ever wondered why children are not as often disappointed in their parents as parents are in their kids? May be, because children love their parents in a non-attached manner. Because they don’t attach themselves to the tangible and non-tangible things about their parents. They expect less than what they love . Similarly, if we are able to have a non-attached view of our children as individuals, we not only nurture their real characteristics but also liberate ourselves from the emotions that attachment is usually associated with.

While we strive for this ‘non-attached’ extreme, which is almost impossible, we can hopefully find a comfortable midway where only the positives of attachment stay with us. We as parents can still feel happy in their success and proud of their accomplishments but liberate ourselves from the negatives such as annoyance, disappointment and suffering. While we get busy finding this mid-point, our children find ways of growing up and building skills that really define who they are. While we are willing to give up something that we believe is vital to our happiness, our children find personal ways of staying happy. The end result, I have to admit, is much more satisfying – a learned non-attached happiness that is not perceived as ‘forced upon’ by the kids.

Perhaps this is why non-attachment is now recognized as a management/leadership skill besides already being an essential ingredient of medical training and other life-saving professions. It is about time parenthood recognizes the importance of this skill to nurture and sustain healthy growth which is free of selfish desires.