What children Teach Us

Recently I read book which I had purchased in Bangalore Book Fair- `What Our Children Teach Us` by Piero Ferucci. It is a fascinating book.



The author is a psychologist and incidentally I am also interested in psychology since my college days. I have written a book on dreams and another on sexual psychology. I wrote an article about why children cry. It was through a psychological perspective. I had a lot of theories about children, their upbringing, their thoughts etc. etc. Well that was all before my marriage and before I had children of my own! After my children were born, my theories were humbled and my theories were gone with the wind!
And now, about the book- the author says,
`Living with our children allows us to grow. I am convinced that this is so for everyone. With children we have the opportunity to cultivate patience and humour, deepen the intelligence of the heart, learn to find hidden richness in ordinary life, find unexpected happiness.
`Nevertheless, this transformation is not always painless. Alongside moments of joy there are also challenging trials, in which our weaknesses, our lies and hyprocrisies, our doubts and contradictions, our shortcoming, are all brought under the most pitiless light. And yet this is how change often happens.
`Like every parent, I have been stung, squeezed out, wounded, reprogrammed, turned inside out, never let off the hook. How often have my children, with a diabolical instinct, touched those weak points, I kept carefully concealed! These episodes have transformed me. In a hard and painful way, they have made me different from the person I was before, like no course of psychotherapy, no spiritual retreat, no meeting with an Oriental guru could have done.`
I close this small post with an anecdote of my own. I have also written this in the Introduction of my Kannada book `Neenemba Naanu’. When my son was seven years old and while watching a TV programme where a dead was burnt on pyre, he asked why they do it. I explained him about life and death and after death why they burn or bury the deceased. I also told him that every living organism ultimately has to go back to soil. I told him philosophically that we all come from soil and ultimately we go back to soil. He attentively listened my lecture. I was watching his face for any expressions. He thought for a while, then asked, `You tell that we all come from soil and go back to soil. But why do you scold me when I play in soil?`
Frankly, I had no answer.