Freedom to live, to love, to imagine, to play, to explore….Freedom to learn

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

        You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

It is my pride, my conditioning and my fear that stops me from giving them more freedom.

Pride: The part of me that wants to be able to say “yes, isn’t she so talented” or “look, can you believe she can read that well already” or maybe “yes, he’s certainly an athletic one”

Conditioning: Everything you have been taught about parenting as a child and adult. What you have programed to believe is “normal” and expected of you as a parent.

Fear: Fear that by giving them more freedom they will not be able to function in regular society, go to college, hold a job.  Fear that everyone around you will think you a plum out of your mind..ha! Or, the fear of “what if” my gut feeling is wrong and I completely screw up my kids.

I guess we first have to make sure we are both connected to our inner compass and our children, put aside what everyone else thinks we should do, decide what is really important to us and then…..Trust it

I believe deeply that we as parents need to stop listening to all the voices around us and listen to our children.

“The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best.”

~ Alexander Sutherland Neill

I’m not saying that there is nothing that we can teach our children or that they should live a life free of all structure. However, I think it would serve us all if we could remember, that in many ways they are superior to us in both feeling and thought.  If we would stop filling their heads with our opinions and stop to hear what they think. They might surprise us!

Give them a bit more freedom in life, play and learning and watch them break all molds and AMAZE us all!

~Barefoot Mama

“All I am saying….can be summed up in two words: TRUST CHILDREN. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” ~ John Holt