The child is the teacher of what is alive and unworked in you. His behavior is often the ‘score’ of the pain of the parent's unworked emotions. The child is an expert at shattering your structures and beliefs. All suffering and conflict are always a source of information, an informant of what still captivates, what has not been released or honored.

Parent-child relationship

I see a similar observation about the shaping of children by both parents and educators. In Europe, we often live in a culture shaped in the past by the strong influence of communist collectivism, which dictated upbringing through the use of hierarchies, enforced obedience, or the imposition of one's views. As a result, children are still socially assessed and diagnosed from the point of view of the problems they cause, i.e., symptomatically, e.g., a child is not learning well, has behavioral problems, gets into bad company, or shows a lack of initiative in life.

Problems are looked for externally, in the school, teachers, and youth influence, when they are often at hand, and focused internally, in our self-reflection and retrospection. The object of diagnosis is most often, unfortunately, the child; when he or she is inherently neutral, the appearance and the manifestation of his or her behavior is usually a mirror of someone's systemic, that is, family emotions (including those that are silenced).

From my many years as a teacher, I have gained a lot of observations in which the main point has always been to see the deep synergy between child and parent. Many times, I saw in my pupils a reflection of their parents' gestures, beliefs, and expectations. I also found certain spheres in which the children were carrying out tasks that were no longer their own, such as fulfilling the parents' needs. I also encountered the children's feelings, which were difficult for me; sometimes I felt and listened to their longing for their parents, who were working all day. When, on the other hand, the parent avoided meeting with me, then so did the child avoid responsibility when they provoked some conflict in the classroom.

When the caregiver had a belief in the superiority of their child over others, the student, too, took on the attitude of an uncompromising class leader. I have seen relationships in which the child reflected all the characteristics of the parent, e.g., being late, forgetting appointments and arrangements, having time management problems, arranging similar priorities, ignorance of authority figures, etc. Needless to say, if the parent was empathetic, cooperative, and reflective, the same attitudes manifested in the child.

Are these synergies also visible to parents? In my opinion, they are often not visible to carers at the school level because, from the ego level, it is most difficult for parents to see into their inner self presented by the child. Therefore, any educational problems occurring at the school level are often identified with the wrong attitude of the teacher or the whole educational system, thus leading to a decline in the authority of the teacher. Only apparent problems with the child as an adolescent can awaken the parent's reflections on his or her mirrored attitudes. Unfortunately, often, and here too, the parent pushes these problems onto the problem of adolescent rebellion, the environment, etc., with the consequence that proper recognition is lacking, and thus the parent fails to learn the lessons of parenting, designed by the Universe to show him or her that something is needed to work on themselves.

Parental responsibility

Responsibility for parents' unprocessed traumas often begins to shift to the child. On the one hand, he may try forbidden things, provoke, make mistakes out of naivety, etc., to get your attention. His subconscious voice may communicate with you in the way of these behaviors—hear me! But you don't hear it in conscious life either; you are both disconnected after all until the escalation of behaviors grows and grows to the point of your awakening and your working on yourself. There can be a second scenario, too: you do nothing. You don't see the analogy, and you continually place the source of all problems in the external environment. Then the child, as part of his or her responsibility, starts to work on himself or herself.

He can go to therapy; he can invest in personal development, of course, and make dozens of mistakes, but he learns from this, building his life without the holes that you did not see. If you didn't know how to manage your life, it chooses and pursues its priorities perfectly because it has found that ‘hole.’.

The responsibility to shape yourself, to understand yourself, to fulfil yourself, and to read your emotions and your needs, which we often mistake for desires, is the key to shaping others. This is why it is so important to take responsibility in the process of raising and teaching children, first and foremost, for themselves. Only if we open the doors of self-reflection for ourselves can we open the doors for others. We cannot shape and diagnose others without first shaping ourselves—without going into the deepest recesses of what is hidden within us, without closing what we regret, what we have not said goodbye to, loved, honored, or tasted. This is why it is so important to duly experience partings, to mourn, and to thank others for shared experiences. It is equally important to try the new and to give ourselves opportunities to grow.

It is worthwhile for every parent to ask themselves, What have I learned from a relationship, a bereavement, a move, or a journey?" It will allow the dimension of our personal experience to close naturally, leaving it saturated, relieved, and completed. Only in this way does it not pass on in the form of distortions and exaggerated problems and characteristics of the child who subconsciously wants to show you these problems.

Life is your ritual and your work, not a conglomeration of events. Life is not easy to interpret; it is not superficial. The meaning and significance of what happens to you is a mosaic leading to your highest cognition and the liberation of what has not yet been grasped. Your transcending is the completion of full cognition; e.g., you live the stable life of an accountant, so your child has become a traveller who writes a blog. Your union is a fullness of experience; you are stable and secure, and he is in motion and in flexibility. This is why you both had to experience each other so that there is a full recognition and letting go in the lightness and acceptance of the fullness of experience.

You are conservative; it is visionary, avant-garde, or liberal; you are in science; it is in passion, in feeling—together, you can create an infinitely beautiful collective of understanding and tolerance. You can also be stuck in separation if there is not enough lightness and agreement in you to privilege the opposite and that which overemphasizes attachment to a particular point of view. In this stuckness, everyone can bet more and more strongly on their rightness of perception or allow these differences to dissolve in acceptance of this cognition.

The child is a mirror of their parents

Imagine also a situation in which your child shows aggression or ignorance towards himself, you, or others. You wonder where it comes from, you explain to yourself—probably the influence of the school environment, the specifics of the generation, etc. It probably has an influence, too, but pay attention to how you treat your body. Is it a temple to you, and do you treat it with fast food? Or do you work long hours every day and devote a few hours to sleep, a book, or simple rest? If, then, you are not treating your body or mind devoutly, not nurturing your passions, dreams, or healthy habits, relegating them to the role of a task-fulfilling machine, are you not doing violence to yourself? Isn't this ignoring your own needs and inner voice?

Depriving yourself of the right to have a voice is a lack of self-respect and therefore violence and ignorance. So submit to reflection: what needs or desires are you ignoring in your body or mind? What are you forbidding yourself? What are you repressing? Why are you not giving yourself a chance? What are you fighting against? Can such a distorted mirror of my ignorance of my needs trigger the ignorance around me?

When you act, it is worth asking yourself, ‘Does this belong to me?’, ‘Am I thinking about myself here?’, ‘Am I putting too much on myself?’, and ‘How do I feel about this?’. These and many other questions are worth asking ourselves, especially when we do something after being influenced by other people; it could also be advice, a request, or an opinion we have given ourselves. Of course, compromises are part and parcel of life, but what if they don't belong to me but are just an agreement to give up an important part of me? What do I feel if a particular compromise takes away my fundamental needs?

Emotions should be treated like a foreign language, learning to read them word by word, meaning by meaning. If left unread or unattended, this gap can return in the form of problems in interpersonal relationships or in the relationship with oneself. Not being in touch with yourself can also foster the development of half-measures in your life. Half love, half life, incomplete enjoyment of life. Considering a beggar as Prince Charming to marry, considering your work as your only destination.

Superficial friendships, superficial relationships. All these half-measures come from the link of emotional deprivation, i.e., disconnection from feelings. Cutting ourselves off from the source of feeling prevents us from recognizing what is authentic and valuable. The ability to build satisfying relationships with other people in different areas of life is the most important indicator of how much we allow ourselves to feel about ourselves.

The parent as observer

To observe yourself properly is also to observe your child properly. Being a companion and mentor to him or her, rather than a judge or critic, is one of the challenges of parenting. How do you talk about emotions when the child does not want to talk about them and turns away? When emotions get tangled up in interactions, it's hard to have a dialogue. But also how to talk about emotions when we often succumb to excuses—‘I don't know about emotions,’ ‘what do I know about it,’ ‘it's too late,’ ‘what will it change,’ ‘who has time for such things.’. It is never too late to open up your personal emotional space to others. Freely relaxing into what you allow to show up in front of others.

This kind of simply being with yourself and showing up for others is also conscious parenting. I allow myself to be vulnerable at times. I allow myself to be helpless. I allow myself to be disappointed. I allow myself to personally show you my doubts, my hopes, and my meanings. Talk about it; peel back layer after layer of myself. In a relationship with a child, this ‘hollowing out’ of masks and illusions is very powerful because it encourages the other party to do the same. Parent before child, child before parent, teacher before student, student before parent. Stripping away layers of fear of being judged, stripping away expectations, throwing away regrets, releasing shame or regret. The most acute, vulnerable, and hidden corners of you are those ‘buttons’ where the blocks of mutual misunderstandings hide; when you speak them out, throw them out, and acknowledge them, relaxation will come.

It doesn't matter if you write a letter to yourself or say something out loud. It doesn't matter so much who throws out the ballast first in a relationship—parent or child, student or teacher; just verbalizing the problem is half the battle. There, around the corner, just acknowledging, accepting, releasing, thanking, honoring, and letting go await. You can do all of this on a simple piece of paper; that's how you process the miracles and milestones of what has been waiting to be released from silence.

The subconscious needs to be brought up again, like a child. Unworked emotions and the problem of setting new boundaries can make our life an act of sacrifice, a factory of endeavor, an endless therapy instead of living it in a sensitive and conscious way, and our children will reproduce these attitudes after us.

Are you then ready to take responsibility for your life? Are you allowing yourself to live your life fully and consciously?