One of the biggest concerns of parents is try to make your children happy. Free and happy The free is relative, because in a way we are all prisoners of the functioning of an increasingly sick society, that of happy, because it also depends, because sometimes, in our attempt to make them happy what we get is precisely the opposite, make them unhappy.
The funny thing is that all children are happy, if we let them be children. If we spend in our role as parents, if we exceed ourselves and try to control their lives, even if it is to achieve happiness, we run the risk of getting them to end up not being it, and that is that happiness cannot be given.
It cannot be given, because as parents and people we cannot give it to anyone. Happiness depends on each one. Let's say that the most we can hope for is to try to create the ideal conditions so that the child can reach happiness, something that can happen or not, something that we can no longer control. It is more or less like the subject of respect. Many parents thought in our childhood that we would respect them based on control and authoritarianism. What they achieved is that we fear them, because respect is not taught or transferred or demanded, you have to earn it yourself with your actions, it is a consequence.
Well, the theme of happiness is similar. If we worry about giving it to our children, we will have more trouble getting it than if we forget about it. We have to worry less, control less and give them more freedom. Let them choose, let them talk, let them play, let them spend time with other children, with their things, their toys and their thoughts.
There are parents who, in an attempt to give them what we did not have (this is usually explained… “I will give him the childhood that I did not have”), offer their children more material things than they need, point them to a thousand extracurriculars and sports so that they receive an exquisite education and training and ultimately try to mold them based on the person they would have liked to be and did not become.
This is a mistake, because children do not come to the world to heal our wounds, our bad decisions or our parents' mistakes. They come to give us an opportunity to do different things and one way to achieve it is by letting them be children, respecting their decisions (if they do not disrespect anyone), taking them into account, making them feel loved (spending time with them, does not missing more) and letting them do their things.
When a person does his things, when he does what at that moment motivates him, when he enjoys and is absorbed in his activities, that person is being happy. When a child plays, when you realize that he spends hours in his room drawing, painting, making towers ... when he passes by your side without saying anything because he is thinking about what he needs to continue with his game, when it seems that he is not, in that moment is happy.
I know that it is difficult to control the children less, because they have always sold us the motorcycle that we have to control them closely, with rope, almost drowning them so that they do not leave us, so that they do not leave the flock. The problem is that control is a fallacy. It is a pleasant feeling that we finally explode in the face, because it is impossible to control everything, because when a child grows up, when he is a teenager, there is no rope that can continue to hold him. If by then the risk of being released from the rope and running off has been drowned, it is greater than if there have been no ropes and the doors have always been open.
That is freedom and that is happiness, be able to be oneself and be able to receive and offer love without conditions. In other words, happiness is a consequence, not a goal. When parents are happy, when we live parenthood in a conscious way, when we spend time with our children and we are there to accompany them along the way we are offering our children the conditions for them to be happy.
