Parents, nurture your children

Last week, I was tending to my garden that had become a real mess. I was just wondering what it was that made it so cluttered. I looked right in the middle of this mess and I noticed that it was the dried-up Morning Glory that had created the so called junkyard in my lovely garden. While I was clearing this up,
a thought just crossed my mind. I was trying to figure out why the Morning Glory didn't survive. And then I realized that I should have taken good care of this climber from the beginning.

A climber needs support to grow in the right direction. If it’s planted and left to grow on its own, it strays away and makes a mess of the garden and in the process also obstructs the growth of the other plants. It is possible to get a wandering climber to move in the right direction only when it’s tender. But once, its shoot has gained strength & structure of its own, it can never be rectified. What is the result? We can’t do anything but cut it off.

This is exactly how a human behaves. We are all climbers. When we are brought into this world, we need support to guide us in the right direction. In the absence of proper guidance, we will grow to be an adult but never a responsibly behaved citizen. And who needs to give us this guidance? The answer is simple – Our parents. It is widely believed that parents shape up the future of their children. I have seen children being taught not to speak to their neighbor or play with their neighbor’s children just because they belong to a different caste, creed, sect or religion. Why is it so? Why do we spread hatred instead of love? Why do we give our children an opportunity to treat everyone as unequal? What is the reason for wide spread corruption? What is the reason for war between families, between nations, between a husband and his spouse? It’s truly the lack of proper guidance.

The children of concerned parents are more civilized than those of the ignorant. Every child has to be nurtured with the right ethical values and, over time, these values become moral principles. If a child is taught never to smoke right from childhood, and his actions are monitored until he is a full grown adult, then a cigar is going to be his worst enemy. Even if you force him to take one, he will never do it. And on the contrary, if he learns to smoke at a young age, he will not be able to easily quit it. It’s because this teaching, whether right or wrong, has become a part of his behavior and it cannot be easily changed once he is an adult.

Why is the world so cruel? It’s because majority of the people in the world are not in a position to judge what is right & what is wrong. Just like any management guru says, ‘There is a right & a wrong to every situation’. What the common man does not realize is that being right is good but being right with morally accepted principles of behavior is the essence of virtuous living.

The Bible says “Sow & you shall reap”. So indeed, you should sow what you want to reap – responsible children, better citizens and eventually a better world.