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300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
When you parent, it’s crucial you realize you aren’t raising a “mini me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own signature. For this reason, it’s important to separate who you are from who each of your children is. Children aren’t ours to possess or own in any way. When we know this in the depths of our soul, we tailor our raising of them to their needs, rather than molding them to fit our needs.
Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2010), 2-3.
Whether our children are artistic, academicians, risk takers, into sports, musical, dreamers, or introverts, it need have no bearing on how we regard them. On a grander scale, it isn’t our place to approve or disapprove of whether our children are religious, gay, the marrying kind, ambitious, or manifest any number of other traits. While a child’s behavior is subject to modification that brings the child more closely in line with its essential being, their core must be unconditionally celebrated.
When our children choose a religion other than ours, a different profession than we dreamed of for them, are homosexual in orientation, or marry someone out of their race, how we respond is a barometer of how conscious we are. Are we able to respond to them with the realization that they have the right to manifest their inner being in their unique way?
Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2010), 26.
What do you have a right to expect from your children? I identify three elements: respect for themselves, for others, and for their safety. Beyond these basics, your children own the right to manifest who they want to be, even if this isn’t what you wish for them. Anything more presumes ownership of who your children should be. Your expectations are yours to keep and yours to know, not for your children to hold just because they were born to you.
Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2010), 172-173.
Conscious Parents trust implicitly their child’s intuition concerning its destiny.
Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2010), 264.