— Why don’t children hear their parents?
You know how often you say to your son: “Danila, do this or do that”? Or very often—using your own family as an example and not only—adults say: “I repeated it to her 30 times, she doesn’t hear me. I repeated it 20 times, she doesn’t hear me”—do your homework, clear your dishes, tidy your room, or read a book. And the child doesn’t react at all. Moreover, they don’t react even to shouting. Or they do something only after the shouting, but completely unconsciously. How should a parent respond in such moments, how should one behave correctly when children don’t hear you?
— Let’s start with the fact that we need to look at both sides here: what is happening with the parent’s perception and what is happening with the child’s perception.
Let’s start with the parent’s perception. When you tell a child, for example, to clean the room, take out the trash, or study, from what inner state is this done? Why are you saying it? Do you say it because it’s your personal wish, or because it’s a normal action from the standpoint of society, life, truth, the law of the Universe, or because it’s a specific rule you and your child agreed on, or a rule of this building, this school?
In other words, it’s important to understand exactly why you are taking this action; otherwise we drift into abstraction.
There are reasonable situations. For example, you ask your child to mop the floor. He asks: “Why should I mop the floor?” You answer: “I mopped today, Dad mopped yesterday, Uncle mopped the day before yesterday, and today it’s your turn.” Here the request is adequate. But imagine another scenario: you say to mop the floor, and the child answers: “Why should I mop the floor, I’ve already done it 48 times. Four times today, 20 times yesterday, 15 the day before yesterday.”
This article will be read by different people. It’s very important that this not turn into a deception, that we don’t stay in a mode of false delusions and constructs; we need to understand that there are different inner impulses at play.
For example, when we say: “Do your homework,” what is happening? We might be speaking from the position of:
- A school rule—doing homework is mandatory.
- We believe that doing homework is right and useful.
To some this may seem strange, but the story is simple. I live in the USA, and at no parent meeting have I heard the notion that homework is obligatory. There are cases where they say: we won’t assign homework, or we will assign it and you can look at it once a week. Some teachers advise: “Make sure your child reads for 40 minutes every day.” I have four children, a wide range of perceptions. Some teachers give no instructions at all—the child is in a state of freedom.
💡Two of my children studied under the Zhokhov system. Once they told me: “Why help at home with homework? If you correct the mistakes, the teacher won’t understand what the child did and what the parent did—so how can they teach the child then?” This became a key construct for me. Now, if a child brings work, I never correct the mistakes, even if I see them.
Recently my daughter in 10th grade came up and asked: “Dad, did I solve this correctly or not?” The situation in chemistry was difficult. I didn’t know the answer myself, I checked via ChatGPT, and it turned out she had made a mistake. She got upset, left, came back, and said: “Something’s off here, I solved everything correctly.” And she turned out to be right: when checking in ChatGPT I had entered the data incorrectly.
So I act from the position: I don’t know how to explain it correctly to the child, and I follow the school’s internal rules. You know we lived in Minsk. There they often say that parents must sit with the child and do homework. That’s more of a social setting than a school requirement, and I don’t agree with it. It is not my duty to do homework for the child. But you need to be able to explain, observe, and so on—and that should be done by the teachers. Therefore, if I’m going to tell a child at home: “Do your homework,” I first become aware of the reason for my request. This is where we start when discussing what to do if children don’t listen: first you need to understand the reason.
If I begin demanding that the child do homework only because the teachers require it, and if the teacher’s opinion matters more to me than my son, more than the true rules of life—if for me the main thing is that God forbid the teacher says my child studies poorly, because that could affect my reputation, or so that other parents don’t think something bad—then all this becomes more important than truth.
And truth is knowledge, understanding my child, truth from the standpoint of life: does homework need to be done, in what volume, and why. Maybe my child isn’t doing it because he can complete it in two minutes and considers it a pointless waste of time. Or maybe he’s not doing it because every time he tries, the teacher scolds him, throws a gradebook, or devalues him.
I remember very well how at school I was sure I had problems with Russian, literature, and Belarusian. They constantly scolded my handwriting, threw my gradebook, gave me failing grades for essays. Now, if you look at me, it’s unlikely you’d think I’m incapable of writing an essay. I can write one on any topic and in any length. There are no limits. But back then that was the situation. And if someone came and asked: “Why do you have 3/3 for your essay?” the parents could only ask a question—no one helped me figure out what an essay is, how to write it. I never met a single person who would explain it. So it’s always important here to understand the motivation—the impulse driving us when we demand something. This is where everything begins.
— Let’s return to the kind of impulse when a parent truly has a request for the execution of normal, right actions—true, good rules. When they speak to the child not from ego, not from fear, but simply ask for understandable things, and the child still doesn’t hear them. A very common situation: the child seems to be in their own world. They can agree, promise to do something, but in the end they truly don’t hear it. How should an adult react in such a situation?
— So you’re saying that the parent asks the child to do adequate things, and the child doesn’t hear? Doesn’t hear—in the sense of having problems with hearing? Health problems? Or they simply don’t want to hear?
If you look at your own life—colleagues, employees, bosses, relatives, friends—you’ll see exactly the same number of people who don’t hear. They don’t want to hear, they can’t, they have no strength, no desire to perceive. There are simply endless such cases. How are they different from a child? By the fact that we perceive our own child as property. He must obey. We feel we can influence him. This is a person to whom we have access to exert influence.
If someone tells you: “This person’s child has died,” you can sympathize, direct love, feel sad. But your system will most likely not react deeply. But if, God forbid, your child died—that would turn your whole world upside down. Why is that? What kind of connection is this?
💡 This is a very important point. I always say: one of the most important tasks of a person is to learn to perceive other people’s children the same way as your own. Many people literally feel ill at this idea: they don’t want to hear it, they don’t accept it. But it’s worth thinking about why I’m voicing this. Because all children are children, they are human beings.
And a person’s task is to treat all people equally, not to divide, not to put your own above others’. This is a huge, mature task. This doesn’t mean being unemotional. If you love your child—radiate love to other children as well. Can you love only your own child and not another? Then the question is: is that really love? Or just some state?
— Are you saying that if you don’t love another child, then you don’t truly love your own?
— To some extent, yes. From the standpoint of knowing love as a broad, spiritual energy—yes. Because true love extends to all people. It cannot be limited to one person. If you limit it—then it’s a different form of love. It’s love-attachment: to a mother, to a son. But not all-encompassing human love.
If we reason from the position of this love, then of course when you speak to your child and he “doesn’t hear you,” it may be not so much disobedience as a blockage at the level of energy. He can close off emotionally, can block the perception of your words. Sometimes a child simply has such an innate energetic structure that he doesn’t perceive certain signals from parents.
I have seen many descriptions in Vedic astrology where they said, for example: “These children will have a difficult relationship with their mother,” or “until 40 there will be conflict between them.” There are many factors there: the child’s spiritual nature, the parent’s spiritual nature, their past experience, hereditary ties. Therefore your task as a mother, and mine as a father, is to try as much as possible to sort out each specific situation and understand what is really going on.
💡 Because in society you often hear—especially from grandmothers: “This one is cheeky, this one is smart, this one is a bit duller,” “this one is strong in math, and that one in design.” This is all the imposition of labels, putting a person in a box. It forms a limited perception of the child.
Just as I was short until I was 18, and then I suddenly shot up. Or I couldn’t memorize poems, and then suddenly began to memorize them perfectly. As a child I studied well, but I wasn’t a straight-A student like you, for example. You seemed to me like a grind, although that was only my perception. And then, at some point, I began to memorize a huge amount of information. Children are the same: they change, go through their inner processes, live in different states, different energies.
And before drawing conclusions—why the child doesn’t hear or doesn’t do something—you need to understand what state they are in now, what is happening in their inner world. And in general, who said that they want to do the action we expect of them?
For example, there are things I’ve asked my wife not to do all my life. I’ve asked again and again, and she still does them. As she did, so she does. That is her right, her choice. From a social point of view, I don’t like it. But, obviously, it doesn’t matter much to her. If it did, she would stop. But she doesn’t stop. Is there a chance that someday she’ll stop? Of course. It’s just that at some point she herself will want to change it. Her inner state, inner disposition, value system will change—and then she will begin to behave differently.
It’s the same with children. When you ask your son to do something, it’s important to look from both sides. On the one hand, there are things you simply ask for—and he doesn’t do them. On the other hand, there are things you demand, where it seems to you that you know what’s right, where you long for him to act exactly as you think necessary. And here a completely different layer begins.
— That’s when it seems to us that we know better than the child how they should act. We are sure we understand which university they should choose, where to go to work, whether they should marry this person. We rely on our experience, on our authority, and it seems to us that we’re doing it out of love. But perhaps we’re simply realizing our own desires through the child. We want to give them the very best—money, opportunities, education. And the child may not need it at all: neither money, nor university; he just wants to plant cucumbers on a homestead.
Very often this contradiction arises: the parent sincerely wants “what’s best,” and the child internally rejects it. What to do in such a case? Never advise anything? Even out of love not to show how to take the next step more correctly?
— I don’t think this question should be approached in the categories of “never” or “always.” What’s important here is sound judgment. You need to understand why you are offering the child this or that option, why this particular university, this action, this choice.
For example, you were applying to a university. Was that your choice?
— Enrollment in a specific university—yes, that was my choice. But the very decision to go to university as a life step—that was a social model. At the time I simply couldn’t imagine there was another way.
— Yes, we grew up in a family where another option simply wasn’t considered. No one told us we could live differently, no one explained or discussed it. But now, having four children, I understand—there is another way. And you yourself understand this too.
If you look at different scenarios, you can always invent a “better” version. For example, imagine that my daughter gets into Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley, chooses the “right” major. And then the ramping up begins: Harvard alone isn’t enough—let her be the best student. Let her win hundreds of Olympiads. Let her be accepted by dozens of universities at once, and she’ll choose herself. You can always layer more expectations on top, raising the bar higher and higher.
Or you can do the opposite—completely let the situation go. There are parents who don’t interfere at all: they don’t discuss, don’t invest, don’t watch over it. They simply say—“whatever will be, will be.” But often that’s not conscious acceptance; it’s detachment. They distance themselves not because they trust, but because they don’t want to spend energy, to delve in, to figure it out, to truly understand what is happening in the child’s life.
And yet the main thing in all situations is sound judgment from the standpoint of agreement with the laws of the Universe.
- The first—don’t manipulate.
- The second—remember that another person’s life belongs only to them. Not to you as a parent, not to society, not to the school. The child chose to come to your family, not you who chose them as property. But we often live as if the child is our thing until they turn eighteen. The law says: “After 18 they’re free.” But from a spiritual point of view they have always been and remain a separate soul, regardless of age.
What difference does it make how old they are?Do you remember we recently discussed: what will you do if your daughter, upon becoming an adult, decides to get married, move abroad, and not go to university? From my point of view, age doesn’t matter here. What matters is how you talk with her, how you discuss her decisions. How you look at her future, at her inner states, at the world she lives in now. Is she deluded? In an illusion? Or is it her true choice? Maybe not going to university is not weakness for her, but honesty? And if she enrolls “under pressure,” that will be a trauma.
I, for example, grew up in a family where no one ever truly discussed relationships with me—neither with girls, nor with friends, nor with people in general. No one sat down with me calmly to talk, explain, help me sort things out. Perhaps for that, parents needed to understand, to want to figure things out—to have knowledge, experience, simple humanity. Because you need to see when a child is getting lost in something, and not judge, but help. I truly had difficulties—with communication, with confidence, with my inner state. Not catastrophic, but significant. And my mother, of course, would have said: “You’re complaining about your childhood again.” But I’m not complaining. I had a lot of good. It’s just that there were also enough problems—those no one talked about.
And this is the essence of the parent’s role: to act not from your own goals, but from an understanding of balance—between your life and the child’s life. Not to dissolve in them, but also not to replace their choice with your own. Balance this.
For example, I have four children, and from time to time one of them wants to sign up for some club or extra classes. We live in a society where it’s considered the norm that a child must do literally everything: programming, cutting and sewing, design, jumping, biathlon, triathlon, swimming, English, math—and of course English again. It feels like the child should start these clubs still in the womb. And I wouldn’t be surprised if courses soon appear on “how to teach your future child English before they’re even born.” Society is ready to consume this.
But in our family, we try to treat this calmly, not to chase everything at once, and to let the children live out their childhood. Although, of course, every parent has their own inner choice here.
Why am I telling this? Sometimes the children themselves ask—“we want a club,” “dance,” “swimming.” Because some of their friends have it, and they want it too. My wife, for example, says: “Let’s sign them up, I’ll drive them.” And I answer: “Hold on. If you’re going to drive them to these clubs as well, we’ll become dependent. We won’t have weekends left when we can spontaneously, as a whole family, just go to the ocean, walk in the park, watch a movie, take a stroll, go to the pool—do something without a schedule.” This is my personal limit—I consciously choose not to overload the family. And Polina, for example, on the contrary, is ready to invest more. Although later she herself says: “Driving to three schools is hard.” And I ask: “And how were you going to drive to eight clubs?” Here lies the key point: it’s important for a parent to be aware of the boundary—where they are acting from responsibility, and where already from personal ambitions or manipulation.
It’s the same with money. As a child I remember saving up for certain purchases, putting something aside, calculating something. Although we lived well, I had the habit of “stashing” something. Now I understand that the ability to save is not related to a healthy relationship with money. The amount of money in childhood does not determine how you will manage it later. I know one thing: I don’t want my children to connect with the energy of money too early. Everyone will learn to count money—just as everyone learns to read and write. It’s a basic part of life.
💡 My approach to purchases is simple: if you can buy it—buy it; if you can’t—don’t buy it, even if you really want to. Because “really want to” is not an argument. Someone really wants a Hermès or Bottega Veneta bag, and someone else wants to go on vacation with their children, or invite their parents and pay for their tickets. Every person has the right to choose, but that choice must be conscious.
So too should a parent act toward a child. When you say: “I want my child to go to university,” ask yourself—what’s behind that? Is it truly a desire for good? Or is it fear? Or a social program? Or the realization of your own dream? I’m not saying I don’t want my children to study at a university—not at all. But it’s important to understand: not all parents are given the same experience.
Our parents, for example, didn’t encounter a situation where the children said: “We don’t want to go to university.” We studied well, followed a clear trajectory—school, university, work. That was natural. But now many parents have different children and different circumstances. And here it’s important—not to act from fear, but from awareness.
Because for many, especially for our father, it would be frightening if both children suddenly said: “We’re not going to university.” I think it would be very hard for him; it would be fear. This is a very important construct and, of course, one’s own desires.
I recently gave an example. When people say: “How can you leave? You must help your mother. How can you leave your parents? You must be nearby, fulfill certain duties.”
But I try to live in a different paradigm. I have four children, they are growing up in Silicon Valley. I recently heard an interesting phrase that the largest number of future billionaires are here; they study in high school in the Bay Area. That’s grades 9–12, south of San Francisco. And I thought: “So my children also study and will study here. There’s a chance that in five years they’ll earn more than I have earned, am earning, and possibly will earn in my entire life.”
And you know what? I will be sincerely happy if they want to help me. I will gladly accept their help—even money, if they offer it. Moreover, I would happily go to work for them, help them, if they need me to. And is there a chance that, on the contrary, I will help them all my life? Of course there is. Maybe all of them at once. Or maybe they’ll all work with me—and that will be happiness. If there is mutual respect and wisdom between us, then working together will be a joy. Without wisdom—no. We would simply devour each other.
But that doesn’t mean I now tell the children: “Look how the Chinese do—still in the womb they learn math, jumping, music, and swimming. So march off to clubs for 14 hours a day!” No. Sometimes I simply don’t understand the situation.
And here’s an important point—what to do when you don’t understand?
Imagine your son says: “Mom, I’ve met a girl, I love her, and we’ll most likely get married.” And you don’t know how to relate to that. What does it mean not to understand the issue?
— That is, when I don’t understand what it will affect. And I don’t understand what it means for him.
— Yes. When you don’t understand how it will affect life, and what kind of experience it is. But look—truth will happen anyway. You can resist, disagree, and he’ll get married anyway. And then his wife will know that this woman—his mother—didn’t want them to be together. That’s what I’m talking about. When you don’t understand, it’s important to grasp: how to act in this zone of not understanding?
— Probably to think about the other person: what matters to him, where he is going, what this choice means to him, to support him. You can advise something if he himself has come for that advice.
— Yes, the main thing is to try to figure it out. Because there are different situations. Sometimes you see that a person is moving within a false construct, that it doesn’t work.
People often come to me—for consultations, coaching, mentoring. They listen a lot, ask questions, receive recommendations. And, you know, a huge number of recommendations they don’t take. How do I react to that? If it’s a stranger—it’s simple, they remain a stranger to me. But if it’s my daughter, and she doesn’t hear, that’s different. That will be next to me, in my life. And here it’s important to understand what exactly will remain nearby.
Do you remember, recently you had a situation: you didn’t know whether your son had been admitted to the university. And you were anxious. And I asked you: “What are you really worried about?”
— About the unknown—both mine and his.
— You see, you say “mine and his,” but essentially it’s all—your unknown. He can say: “Mom, I’m not worried, I’m fine, don’t touch me.” So you’re not worrying about him, but about your inner state. About the fact that it’s hard for you to be in uncertainty.
When a person has been ill for a long time, why do those around sometimes say: “Let him go already, so he doesn’t suffer”? In reality, they want certainty. It’s unbearable for them to live in anticipation. It’s the same mechanism: fear of the unknown. Because of it, people destroy businesses, spoil relationships, make false decisions—just to “exhale.”
I recently talked about the “false opening of a business”: when a person hesitates for a long time, doesn’t know where to go, and then at least some opportunity appears—and he grabs it. Although it’s obvious to everyone that it’s a failure. But he opens the business to exhale.
And here lies—the most important thing in the whole conversation. What actually triggers a person in relationships with another, especially with a child?
— A person wants certainty, guarantees, wants to control life, to protect themselves and their child from some negative factors, which again is about certainty and about controlling life. They want to be what they essentially cannot be. But that’s basic, like a firmware. Can you imagine what a colossal effort it takes not just to change that firmware, but what a colossal effort it takes just to begin to become aware of it?
— Therefore, good luck to all parents.