Your child is not yours
Today my daughter is celebrating her 14th birthday. So that’s fourteen years in which I have loved her with a passion unimaginable to those who are not parents. But although I call her ‘my daughter’ she is very much her own person – and always has been. At times like this, I re-read the words of Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet ‘On Children’:
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.
During the past couple of years there have been so many instances of parents killing their children due to the parents’ jealousy after the breakdown of the relationship with the children’s other parent. I can understand how distraught a parent may feel about losing their partner and not seeing their children as often as they might like. But killing any child, particularly your own flesh and blood, can never be anything other than a selfish, wicked action.
Every time I hear a parent speak about what they will or won’t allow for their child, I want to shout “they are not a possession, they are a living human being, a person in their own right”. You have a duty to nurture and care for them, but not to control them or live your life vicariously through them. All parents are guilty at some point of doing what they want, rather than what is really best for the child, or what an older child might want. We a;; need to take a deep breath and remember who that child really is.
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- A mother's guilt is never done
- Are we in danger of breeding battery children?
- Don’t let tomorrow be too late
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