How to Help Your Child Follow Their Own Path | Two Mistakes Parents Make

OSOlga Stolyarova

You say that a child comes into this world as a spiritual being, and that human beings in general are spiritual beings. Often parents and society impose things on top of that, and a personality forms, and so on. Is there a way for a parent to preserve, as much as possible, this pure spiritual being that has come into the world, without imposing something of their own, at least from their side? Obviously, society will impose things anyway. But what is the best a parent can do for their child so that the child can truly live their own path, to guide them along that path?

AVAlexander Volchek

There are two aspects to consider here.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

Two very clear aspects. The first is this: before a parent does anything at all, the number one thing is to work on their own spiritual development and have their own foundation in spiritual perception. However hard a parent tries to find what is best for the child outside themselves, if they treat life as a social, material construction, if they think every cause and effect is material and social, what can we even discuss here? Fundamentally, the greatest influence a parent has comes from their own actions.

We do not say this for nothing: a child comes to a particular family because, spiritually, the child, the spiritual world, and the spiritual hierarchies chose it. A child resembles the parents not because the parents wanted it that way, but because the child wanted to resemble them. The child wanted this and chose this family. Or the spiritual world chose this family for the child in terms of cause and effect. That is natural and normal. How should people behave if they want to improve the development of their relationship and interaction with this spiritual being who has joined their family? At the very least, they themselves need to live in accordance with the law of the Universe, with spiritual impulses and a spiritual perception of the world.

That includes conveying it to the child through their own actions, examples, and way of perceiving the world. Not necessarily through their own experience, I repeat, because all of this is read at the level of energy. Probably not seventy or even eighty percent, but perhaps ninety or ninety-five percent of the influence here will be purely energetic: the state you are in as you energetically influence your child while raising them. It is a very serious energetic influence. That is the first area, the first direction: very clear, definite, and stable. Without it, any action becomes very difficult, with very little coming to fruition.

We recently recorded a video about nutrition. Imagine: which is easier, for the whole family to eat well or for one person to eat well? Of course it is easier for the whole family. If the parents eat well, the children will generally eat well too. They may eat something at school or go out with friends; something else may happen. But for the most part, their diet will be good. Surprising, but a fact. The child will not need to expend a huge amount of energy separately to achieve a proper diet. How could they do that? They open the refrigerator, and certain kinds of food are not there. Or they have an impulse not to drink Coca-Cola, but their parents put Coca-Cola or some other drink on the table, or say it is fun, creating a certain psychophysical dependence in the child.

And of course the physical body gets used to everything. It gets used to sugar very easily, to an unbalanced diet, just as it gets used to a particular pattern of behavior. The child is developing: first the physical body develops well, then the connection with the etheric body, the connection with the astral body, and the full connection with the I. The soul and spirit are developing fully. In the first seven years, there is a separation from the mother's physical body. It is generally considered that, for the first seven years, the physical body the child inhabits is the mother's, not even their own. The child is taking shape. But suppose from the beginning they develop amid egocentric motives, insults, a closed view of the world, and an inability to perceive it broadly, in all its facets, as it really is. When they see the spiritual world, someone tells them, “There is nothing there, just a wall.”

The child says, “I can see, I can feel what will happen tomorrow.” They are told, “You cannot feel what will happen tomorrow. It is not real. None of it is true; it does not exist. It is your imagination.” Of course they will go on living, convinced that it is their imagination. Who brings this in from outside? The parents. You asked how a parent can do this. This is the only way; there is no other. Waldorf education describes it very well: a teacher should be a prophet. A teacher sees the child, looks at them, and sees what they are meant to become as a spiritual being, what they are to realize in their lifetime. Then the teacher lays down impulses and processes for that life and gives those processes attention. If you can see that the child will always lack confidence, for example, you will praise them.

If you see that a child can perform certain actions, you can redirect energy toward other actions if they are needed, because the first ones will emerge on their own. There are children who do not need to be taught mathematics or have it explained to them. The system will take shape within them; they will live and create through it. There are children in whom creativity, say in music, does not arise. You need to nurture it, tell them about it, show them more. For others, it will emerge automatically. Not because they are gifted or ungifted, but because these energies are present in them. The world simply calls the presence of certain energies “giftedness.” Certain energies are present. In ordinary life, some people today like to call it getting something for nothing. Nobody calls someone gifted because they were born into a family and immediately have a billion dollars in their account. But let us call that giftedness too.

For some reason, though, that is not a good kind of giftedness. If someone has musical talent from childhood, hears music differently from the age of five, for example, that is giftedness. It is the presence of particular energies that brought them into a particular space and perception. That is how they perceive the world. They will either be able to use it or go mad. Just as they will either be able to use money, end up in prison along with that money, squander it all, or harm other lives. It is the same thing. That is the first side: the influence from outside. The second is that, when we are talking about your child, it is important to see them as an individual from the outset. In the first case, you look at yourself and work on your own spiritual development and spiritual perception of the world. In the second, you perceive the child as a spiritual individual and understand that this is an independent spiritual being, connected to you only in a relative sense, who most likely has more influence over having come to you than you have over them.

In fact, that being certainly has more influence. They chose you. Although, of course, it is all very relative to discuss who expended more effort or energy, or how each arrived at this. When you see the child as a spiritual being, as someone who is not your property, when you see your second child as someone who is not a copy of your first, or a copy of you, or your mother or father, and whose upbringing is not the same as your neighbor's children's—when you take that approach and fully understand from the start that this spiritual being has their own life, their own causes and effects, and their own karmic path, you will naturally base your subsequent decisions on that.

For example, which school should the child attend? Do they need this or that extracurricular activity? Why do particular health issues arise or not arise? You will approach this on the basis that they have their own spiritual life, spiritual structure, and spiritual consciousness. You perceive it with that understanding: does the child need to experience these states or not? In most cases, if someone were shown the child's actual future, what would fundamentally happen to them in ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years, that person would obviously behave in a fundamentally different way.

It is the combination of these two things: understanding that the child is an independent spiritual being, and understanding that you have a spiritual foundation and that your own life is fundamentally spiritual. Together, these understandings provide a very good basis for perceiving the child, for their development, and for deciding what to do or not do together with this person. You will have to look at it this way again and again, throughout your life. But this should be your foundation. If these things together become that foundation, your life and interaction together will become incredibly vivid.

It can become something of an entirely different order.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Suppose there are several children in a family. I have a younger brother, and he is at an age now where my mother often says, “Talk to him. He only listens to you.” I do talk to him, but I want to understand whether I am disrupting some system of upbringing here. I am not a parent; I am his sister. Perhaps I should be in a different role.

AVAlexander Volchek

When you talk about particular roles, all of that is relative. For your brother, you may be much more of a “parent,” and much more significant in terms of cause and effect in his spiritual understanding of the world, than his parents themselves. There may be a need for that, a real spiritual need for it to happen that way. Your structural and causal connection may be precisely one in which you need to invest as much as possible in him: through effort, love, attention, and making time, give him additional, positive ways of perceiving life.

More ways of perceiving life. This has nothing to do with the role you happen to play, whether you are a sister or an acquaintance. Here, you need to calmly let go of that particular way of viewing family ties and try to relate to and interact with this person exactly as I have just described. On one hand, you understand that you interact with a person, including your brother, just as with anyone else, through a spiritual perception of the world. On the other, you understand that your brother, like any other person, has his own spiritual structure and his own causes and effects.

That is a good addition to what I said earlier. Essentially, interacting with your child is no different from interacting with anyone else. Obviously, the causes and effects differ, and there are a huge number of factors involved. But you may meet someone in life who is much closer to you than your child in terms of energetic structure, karma, spiritual worlds, and every possible connection. Of course, that is guaranteed. It is not merely a matter of allowing for it or thinking it could happen. It is perfectly natural and normal that some people are very powerful for you and others less so, just as with children. Some children can, as I have always said and continue to say, be in your family somewhat by chance. They were not necessarily meant to be in that family, for example.

You may not even be able to contribute anything to them. It is a temporary place for them, a temporary stay. Can that happen? Of course it can. But it is very difficult for people to grasp, because everyone sees children, brothers, and sisters as personal property, as an attachment. They treat that as what matters, rather than the spiritual connections. Acknowledging spiritual connections is extremely difficult. How can a wife acknowledge her husband's spiritual connections with another woman, for example, with whom he has spent centuries? How can she acknowledge that? People need to be quite highly developed to acknowledge it. Very highly developed.

We live in a distorted, possessive space, under the damaging influence of the ego-computer and Lucifer's energy, in Ahriman's grip. We are caught in extraordinary forms of captivity. This is the only way to free ourselves—“only” in a qualified sense, of course—to free ourselves at least from our inner delusions and find the true path. It is a very good foundation to perceive everyone equally as spiritual beings, understanding that all of them have chains of cause and effect that you do not know. You send your child to school and arrive to find a whole class of children who are fundamentally connected to your child karmically. But you do not perceive that.

You do not know what role each of these children will play in your child's life. If you knew, you would interact with everyone in a completely different way. It turns out you want to interact differently not because it is natural from the standpoint of the spiritual world, but because you want some benefit from behaving correctly in a social setting. Then people say, “Well, he harmed me, so I will behave this way,” or, “I will treat him well.” People often want to treat someone well if they learn that they owe that person a karmic debt. But that is an ego-driven motive. You should treat them well not because you owe them karmically, but because they are a human being, and you should treat every human being well. Calculating how much anyone owes anyone else is impossible in today's world, with the present consciousness of human spiritual beings.

Who owes more to whom: the child to the parents, or the parents to the child? If we say there are past lives, a spiritual path, and future lives, how do you propose to calculate anyone's debt? What will you measure it in? Social parameters, sausage, potatoes, money, your working hours? What will you measure it in? Or will you measure it through a true perception? What is a minute of love, and what can you exchange it for? Money, or what? What exactly could you exchange it for, and how much? I saw a funny reel online where someone approached women and men in the street and asked, “Would you leave your boyfriend for an iPhone?”

Some said yes, some said no. Someone joked, “I would leave my wife, but for a BMW, not an iPhone,” and so on. Look more deeply at the question itself. Would you leave for a trillion dollars? Remove the iPhone limitation right away, because to some people an iPhone is a ridiculous proposition: “What do you mean, for an iPhone?” Remove that barrier and go straight to the maximum, so you can see how the person thinks, how they answer, what they say, and what thoughts arise in them at that moment. Perhaps no such thoughts will arise at all. Or the person will think, “What a strange question. What does one thing have to do with the other?” Because it is, essentially, a strange question.

In my own energy, what connection is there? I do not understand the connection between a trillion dollars and having my wife in my life. There is no connection. I see none, so there is no answer. Or the answer is negative: of course not, because there is no connection. What does being together have to do with it? If there is any connection, for example through money, or “Would you do this in order to move there?”, you need to recognize that connection very clearly for yourself. That is why it is dangerous to bargain with people, or with children when raising them. It is dangerous to say, “If you do this, I will do that,” or, “Let us 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, and what you are trying to trade.

Is this really something that can be traded or not? I recently tried to reach an agreement with my younger daughter about doing some additional work in a particular program. She was completely opposed. She said, “You told me just for the summer. I do not want to do it beyond the summer, and that is that.” I said, “All right, listen. I do not particularly like these sorts of deals, but let us make an agreement. You do this, and in return I will do what you ask.” She said, “I am not interested.” I said, “You can choose from a range of things to ask for. I will do it.” Look, Olya, from a commonsense standpoint, any reasonable person would make that exchange.

From a commonsense standpoint, you should make the exchange if someone sincerely and honestly lets you choose what they will do. I would have been willing to exchange things of unequal value. Why? Because I saw an energy suggesting that perhaps I should try, approach it lightly. But she refused. Why? Because she was given a pure choice. There is such a thing: a pure, independent choice. I allowed her to remain who she is and make her own choice, rather than choosing for her. What would choosing for her have meant? Manipulating her: looking at what could have a powerful influence on her and drawing her into a particular manipulation.

But that would have been manipulation. What did freedom of choice reveal? That she was completely unwilling to do this. Completely. All I can do in this case is let it go, because with that offer I have essentially tried every approach. I have tried the last one. I have no other options at this moment. What options are left? There are none. When you make that kind of offer, there are no other options. Then you see the truth: does the person really not want it, or are they bargaining with you? You know when someone says, “I do not work here for the salary, but for something else”? You offer a little more and see that money does have an effect. Then you understand where the manipulation is. But here, no. You can see very clearly that the person has completely different attitudes, views, and positions.

Now you simply need to let them go calmly. Many people will say that this takes time, that it is very hard to do, and that you have to devote that much time to each person. But that is the whole point: you need to devote that time to each person. You yourself will have to suffer, including in your interactions with your children. What will suffer? Your ego, your personality, your ego-computer, the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic energies. You will have to suffer. In terms of life itself, nothing has happened. What difference does it make whether she does the program or not? My life has not changed. The question is my state in relation to it, my perception of it. What is my actual attitude toward this reality, honestly? If I look honestly, how do I really feel about it?

So parents make two fundamental mistakes. First, they do not see themselves and their lives as spiritual, as part of a spiritual world, or themselves as spiritual beings. The less they do this, the more mistaken their path is. Although, again, from the standpoint of spiritual knowledge of the world, there is no mistake here. It is the natural unfolding of circumstances. Second, they see their child as property, their property, as something placed in a box, rather than as someone completely independent of them. Believe me, the dependence of a person's spiritual being on their parents is microscopic in relation to the whole spiritual being, the spiritual universe, the universes and worlds, everything. Microscopic.

Just consider how much a person's daily life depends on the influence of the sun. Obviously, the sun influences your life far more than your parents do. You can go six months or a year without seeing your parents. But if you do not see the sun for several days, you will have problems. So who is a person's greatest parent?