How to Help Your Child Follow Their Own Path

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I examine two fundamental mistakes parents make in raising children. It is about seeing your child as a separate individual and learning to interact with them without trying to live their life for them.

How can you raise a child so that they truly realize themselves and live their own path? What should you do if your child wants something completely different from what you want? How do you choose a school and activities? Should you develop what is not yet present in the child? Where does parenting end and the attempt to make choices for them begin?

No. 1: Where a parent should begin in raising a child

– You say that a child comes into this world as a spiritual being, and that a human being in general is a spiritual being. And it often happens that parents and society in general pile things on top, and a personality takes shape. Can a parent preserve, as far as possible, this pure spiritual being that has come into the world, without imposing anything of their own, at least from their side? Obviously, society will impose something anyway. But what is the best a parent can do for their child so that the child truly lives their own path — how can they guide them along that path?

– There are two very clear aspects to observe here.

However hard a parent tries to find what is best for the child on the outside, if they treat life as a social, social-material construction, if they think that all causes and effects are material and social — what is there even to discuss? Fundamentally, the number one influence a parent has is their own actions.

We don’t say this for nothing: a child comes into a particular family because they themselves, as a spiritual being, chose it, and so did the spiritual world and the spiritual hierarchies.

A child resembles the parents not because the parents wanted it that way, but because the child wanted to resemble them.

The child wanted it this way; they chose this family. Or the spiritual world chose this family for them in terms of causes and effects. This is natural and normal.

How should people behave from then on if they want to improve the development of their relationship and interaction with this spiritual being who has come into their family? At the very least, they themselves should live in accordance with the law of the Universe, with spiritual impulses, with a spiritual perception of the world. And, among other things, convey this to the child through their own actions, their own examples, their own way of perceiving the world.

Not necessarily through their own experience, I repeat, because all of this is read at the level of energy. Here, probably not seventy or even eighty percent, but ninety, maybe even ninety-five percent of the influence will be purely energetic: what state you are in, in terms of your energetic influence on your child as you raise them.

This is the first area, the first vector — very clear, precise and stable. Without it, any action is very difficult, and very little gets realized.

Parents’ influence on a child and the development of the child’s spiritual being

We recently recorded a video together about nutrition. Imagine: which is easier — for the whole family to eat well, or for one person? Of course, for the whole family. If, for example, the parents eat well, the children will mostly eat well too. They may eat something at school here and there, go out with friends, something else may happen, but for the most part their diet will be good. It’s surprising, but it’s a fact.

The child won’t have to spend a huge amount of energy separately to make up for a proper diet. And how could they even do it? They open the fridge, and certain kinds of food aren’t there. Or they have an impulse not to drink Coca-Cola, but their parents put Coca-Cola or some other drink on the table, say it’s cool, and create a certain psychophysical dependence in them.

And of course, the physical body then gets used to everything: it very easily gets used to sugar, to an unbalanced diet. Just as it gets used to a certain pattern of behavior.

The child is taking shape. First their physical body forms well, then the connection with the etheric body, the connection with the astral body, the full connection with the “I.” The soul and spirit come fully into being; during the first seven years there is a separation from the mother’s physical body. It is generally considered that during the first seven years the child is the mother’s physical body — not even their own physical body that they inhabit.

And what if from the very beginning they take shape amid egocentric motives, insults, a closed view of the whole world, an inability to perceive the world broadly, in all its facets, truly? When they see the spiritual world, they are told: “There’s nothing there, just a wall.” They say: “I can see, I can feel what will happen tomorrow.” They are told: “You can’t feel what will happen tomorrow. That doesn’t exist, it’s all untrue, there is no such thing. It’s your imagination.” Of course, they will go on living and be convinced that it’s their imagination.

Who brings this in from outside? The parents do. You asked how a parent can do this. This is the only way a parent can do it; there is no other.

Who a parent should be for a child

Waldorf education describes very well how a teacher should be a prophet. The teacher looks at the child and sees who the child is meant to become as a spiritual being, what they are to realize during their life — and lays down certain impulses and processes for that life and gives those processes attention. If you can see that the child will always lack self-confidence, you will, for example, praise them.

If you see that a child is capable of a certain range of actions, you redirect energy toward other actions, if those are needed. The first actions will arise automatically anyway.

There are children who don’t need to be taught mathematics or told about it: a system will form in them by itself, and they will live and create through it. There are children in whom, for example, creativity in music doesn’t arise. It needs to be instilled in them, they need to be told about it, shown more. And there are those in whom it will arise automatically. Not because they are gifted or not gifted, but because such energies are present in them.

The world simply calls the presence of certain energies giftedness.

Some people in everyday life nowadays really like to call it a freebie. No one calls it giftedness when a person is born into a family and immediately has a billion dollars in their account. But actually, let’s call that giftedness too. For some reason, that’s not a good kind of giftedness. But if a person has musical talent from early childhood — say, from the age of five they hear music differently — that is giftedness. Yet it is the presence of certain energies that brought them into a space and into a particular perception. That is how they perceive the world.

And then they will either be able to use it or go mad. Just as with money: they will either be able to use it, or go to prison together with that money, or squander it all, or harm other lives. It’s the same thing.

That is the first side. Once again, it is the external influence.

No. 2: Where a parent should begin in raising a child

The second side — of course, it is important to look at your child straight away as an individual. If in the first case you look at yourself and work on yourself in terms of spiritual development and spiritual perception of the world, the second is to perceive the child as a spiritual individual. To understand that this is an independent spiritual being, connected with you only relatively, who most likely had more influence on coming to you than you had on them.

And they certainly have more influence. They chose you. Although, of course, it is all very relative to discuss who spent more effort or energy here, who achieved what.

When you look at the child as a spiritual being, understand that they are not your property, that your second child is not a copy of your first child, not a copy of you, not your mom or dad, and that their upbringing is not the same as that of the neighbor’s children — when, with this approach, you understand thoroughly from the start that this spiritual being has their own life, their own causes and effects and their own karmic path, then of course you will make your further decisions on this basis.

For example, which school the child should go to. Do they need this or that after-school activity? Why do certain health issues arise or not arise for them? You will build this on the basis that they have their own spiritual life, their own spiritual structure and their own spiritual consciousness. Perceive it with that understanding: does the child need to live through such states or not?

For the most part, if a person were shown the child’s future — the real future, what will fundamentally happen to this child in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years — then of course that person would behave fundamentally differently.

This combination of two parameters — understanding that the child is an independent spiritual being and, on the other hand, understanding that you have a spiritual foundation and that your life is fundamentally spiritual — together will provide a very good basis for perceiving the child, for their development, for what to do or not to do together with this person. And you will have to look at it and perceive it this way all your life. But it should be the foundation.

If all of this together becomes the foundation, life and your interaction together will become incredibly vivid — of a completely different order.

The role brothers and sisters can play for one another

– Look, there are several children in a family. I, for example, have a younger brother, and he is at an age now when Mom often says: “Talk to him, he only listens to you.” I do talk to him, but I want to understand whether I’m disrupting some system of upbringing here. I’m not a parent, after all, I’m a sister, and maybe I should be in some other role.

– When you talk about particular roles — roles are all a relative story. For your brother you can be much more of a “parent,” in quotation marks, and much more important in terms of causes and effects, in terms of the spiritual knowledge of the world, than the parents themselves. And there may be a need for this — a truly spiritual, real need for it to happen this way.

You may be connected with him structurally and causally in exactly such a way that you need to invest in him as much as possible: through effort, through love, through your attention, through the time you set aside for him, to give him additional, positive aspects of perceiving life.

It has nothing to do with what role you play in this case — that of a sister or of an acquaintance. This is exactly where you need to calmly and completely let go of this perception of particular family ties and try to relate to this person and interact with him exactly as I have just described. You understand that you interact with your brother just as with all other people: on the one hand, through a spiritual perception of the world, and on the other, understanding that your brother, like any other person, has his own spiritual structure and his own causes and effects.

This is a good addition to what I said before.

Of course, there are other causes and effects here, a huge number of factors. But the thing is, you may meet a person in life who will be much closer to you than your child in terms of energetic structure, karma, spiritual worlds and every possible connection. Of course, this is guaranteed. It is not a question of having to allow for it or thinking it might happen. It is entirely natural and normal: some people are very strong for you, some less so. The same goes for children.

Some children, as I have always said and still say, may be in your family conditionally by chance. They, for example, were not supposed to be in this family. You, for example, won’t even be able to give them anything. For them it is like a temporary place, a temporary stay. Can this happen? Of course.

But of course, it is very hard for everyone to comprehend, because everyone perceives children, brothers and sisters as personal property, as some kind of attachment. This shows that this is what matters to them, and not spiritual connections. And acknowledging spiritual connections is critically hard. How can a wife acknowledge her husband’s spiritual connections with another woman with whom he has, for example, spent centuries together? How will she acknowledge that? To acknowledge such a thing, people need to be very seriously developed.

We live in a distorted, possessive space, under the damage of the ego-computer, under the damage of Lucifer’s energy, in Ahriman’s grip — we simply live in insane captivities. This is the only way to free ourselves at all — of course, “only” in a conditional sense — to free ourselves at least from inner delusions in order to set out on the true path.

It is a very good foundation to perceive all people equally, as spiritual beings, and to understand that they all have chains of cause and effect that you don’t know.

You send your child to school, you arrive — and there is a whole class of children who are fundamentally connected with this child karmically. But you don’t perceive that. You don’t know which of these children will play what role in their life. If you knew, you would interact with everyone in a completely different way.

It turns out that you want to interact differently not because it is natural from the point of view of the spiritual world, but because you want to get some benefit from correct social behavior. And then people need this: “But he harmed me — so I’ll behave like this.” Or: “I’ll treat him well.”

People often want to behave well if, for example, they find out that they karmically owe this person. But that is an ego motive.

Because calculating who owes whom how much is impossible in the present world, with the present consciousness of spiritual beings, of people.

And who owes more to whom: the child to the parents or the parents to the child? If we say that past lives exist, that a spiritual path exists, that there will be future lives — how then do you even want to calculate anyone’s debt? And what will you measure it with? Social parameters — sausage, potatoes, money, your working time? Or will you measure it with a true view? Or what is a minute of love, and what can it be exchanged for — some money? For what exactly, and for how much?

I watched a funny reel like this on the internet. On the street they went up to young women and men and asked: “Would you leave your boyfriend for an iPhone?” Some said “yes,” some said “no,” and someone joked: “I’d leave my wife, but for a BMW, not for an iPhone.”

But here you need to look more deeply at the fact itself. And for a trillion dollars, would you leave? Remove the iPhone barrier right away — because for some people an iPhone is laughable: what do you mean, for an iPhone? — go straight to the maximum to see how this person thinks: how they will answer, what they will say, what thoughts will arise in them at that moment. First, none will arise at all. Or the person will think: “What a strange question, what does one have to do with the other?” Because, in essence, it is a strange question.

What connection does this have in my energy? I don’t understand the connection between a trillion dollars and my wife being with me. There is no connection. I don’t see a connection, so there is no answer. Or the answer is negative: of course not, because there is no connection. But if there is any connection at all — for example, through money, or “would you do it for the sake of this move” — you need to grasp that connection very clearly for yourself.

That is why it is dangerous to bargain with people, and when raising children it is very dangerous to bargain with children. It is downright dangerous to say: “If you do this, I’ll do that.” Or: “Let’s agree: you do this, and I do that.” You need to keep watching whether you are upsetting the balance of energies, what you are getting into, what you are trying to trade. Is this really something to be traded or not?

How to give a child a choice

I recently tried to come to an agreement with my daughter — the younger one — about one thing: that she would do an additional program. And she was categorically against it. She says: “You told me — only the summer. I don’t want anything beyond the summer, and that’s it.” And I tell her: “All right. Listen, I don’t really like the business of making certain deals. Let’s make a deal: you do this one thing here, and I’ll do pretty much whatever you ask.” She says: “I’m not interested.” I say: “You can choose the range of what you’ll ask for. I’ll do it.”

Notice, Olya: in terms of common sense, any normal person would make the exchange. Common sense says you should make the exchange if you are sincerely, genuinely told: choose the actions. I would generally have been ready to trade even for things of unequal value. Why? Because I saw an energy that perhaps it was worth trying, worth going into it lightly.

But she refused. Why? Because she was given a pure choice. There is such a concept — a pure, independent choice.

I allowed her to remain who she is, to make the choice herself, rather than making the choice for this person.

What would it have meant to make the choice for this person? If I had made some manipulation: looked at what could have a very serious influence on her and led her into a certain manipulation. But that would have been manipulation.

And what did freedom of choice show? That she is critically unwilling to do it. And the only thing left for me in this case is to let it go, because, in essence, with such an offer I had tried every way, the last way. I simply have no other options at this point.

When you make a person such an offer, there are no options left. Then you truly see the truth: does the person really not want it, or are they bargaining with you? You know the story when someone says: “I don’t work here for the salary, but for something else”? You — hop — offer them a little more and you see: money does have an effect after all. And you understand where the manipulation is. But here there is none. You see very clearly that the person has completely different attitudes, views and positions.

Now you simply need to let them go calmly. Many will say that it takes all your time, that it’s very hard to do, and that you have to set aside such time for every person. But that is the whole point: you have to set aside such time for every person.

And you will have to suffer yourselves, including in your interaction with children. What has to suffer? Your ego, your personality, your ego-computer, the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic energies.

In terms of life, nothing has happened. What difference does it make whether she does it or not? My life hasn’t changed because of it. The question is my state, my perception of it. How I really, honestly relate to this reality.

Two fundamental mistakes parents make

So parents make two fundamental mistakes.

• The first is that they do not see themselves and their life as spiritual, as a spiritual world, or themselves as spiritual beings. And the less they do this, the more mistaken their path. Although, again, from the point of view of spiritual knowledge of the world, no mistake exists here: it is a natural development of circumstances.
• The second, of course, is that they look at their child as their property, as something placed in a box, rather than as something completely independent of them.

And believe me, the dependence of a person’s spiritual being on their parents is microscopic — from the point of view of the whole spiritual being, of the spiritual universe, of the universes of worlds, of everything at all.

It is enough to think about how dependent a person is on the influence of the sun in everyday life. You obviously understand that the sun influences your life far more than your parents do. You can go without seeing your parents for six months or a year. But if you don’t see the sun for several days, you will have problems. So who, then, is a person’s greatest parent?

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