TOPICS: Helping children set limits – short or long-term desires – each child is unique – no system for how to raise children – physical punishment – difficult teenager born at the age of two – never punish a child – don’t take your frustrations out on your children – great opportunity for spiritual growth – you do not own children; you serve them – set limits for yourself – the most dangerous trap of parenting – no ideal family – parenting is a learning experience – forgive your children and yourself – opportunity to balance karma – use spiritual tools to protect your family –
Question: I have been through different understandings concerning children, raising, correction and or punishment. The Old Testament of the Bible supports the rod or physical punishment, I can’t find anything in the New Testament. What is your teaching on these subjects, Jesus.
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
Do unto your children, as you would have your children do unto you. That is the answer from the New Testament.
How does that relate to physical punishment? The simple fact is that one of the obligations of parents is to teach the children how to set limits for their own behavior. If you think about this, you realize that one of the characteristics of children is that they have to learn the proper balance between their short-term, self-centered desires and the long-term desires whose fulfillment depends on their ability to get along with other human beings. This means that the children need to learn how to limit their short-term desires in order to avoid making it impossible to fulfill their long-term desires. One might say this is the basic lesson of life—do you want a temporary reward in this world or an eternal reward in heaven?
When the children are young, they simply cannot learn this through the reasoning faculties of the mind, because these faculties and not yet sufficiently developed. Therefore, they need to learn this by their parents taking on the role of loving guides who set appropriate and firm limits for their children’s egotistical behavior. When you think about it, this is what you would have wanted your parents to do for you, and therefore it is what you should do for your children.
Teaching a child limits must start at the very earliest age, in fact it starts while the baby is nursing. You need to teach the baby that the mother is not at its disposal 24 hours a day. Yet the challenge is to do this in a loving way, so that the child never feels abandoned. I realize this can be a very delicate balance, and I realize there is no black-and-white rule that can be applied.
The most important thing parents can understand about children is that each child is a unique individual. A child is not a new lifestream but an old lifestream with a very complex psychology formed over many lifetimes. Therefore, you simply cannot create a system for how to raise children, and you cannot set up a black-and-white rule for how to deal with all children. That is the great fallacy of some modern child psychologists and educators. They are pursuing the holy grail of finding the ultimate system, a kind of mind control machine that you can run all children through and have perfect citizens come out the other end. Such a system simply does not exist, and the reason is that God has given every lifestream a unique individuality.
As a result of this, each child must be treated as a unique individual, and ideally this can be done only when the parents have a strong sense of intuition, which means that they have reached a certain level of Christhood. Thereby, the parents can tune in to their own Christ selves and therefore receive the inner directions for how a particular child should be treated in a particular situation. The parents can then fill their intended role as spiritual teachers who lovingly guide the child’s evolution until the child can begin to do so by its own inner attunement.
In the context of physical punishment, the important point is that the parents need to set appropriate limits for the child’s egotistical behavior. For some children this will necessitate physical punishment, yet there are many children who will never need to be spanked. If necessary, this can be done from the age of two and forward, in some cases a bit earlier. There is a reason why people talk about the terrible twos, and it is that at this age the child needs to learn to set limits for its own behavior. If the child does not learn at this age, it will be extremely difficult for the child to set these limits during puberty—and at that age the parents have lost their opportunity to teach the child limits. A difficult teenager is born at the age of two.
Obviously, I am not advocating that young children be spanked harshly. I am not advocating that children of any age be punished harshly in any way, be it physical or not physical. The important point to understand is that the role of the parent should be to set limits for the child’s egotistical behavior. It should never be the goal of the parent to punish the child.
There is a fundamental difference between setting firm limits and punishing the child. Setting limits is done from a pure and loving motive of helping the child grow up. Punishing the child is done from and impure and unloving motive, whereby the parent takes out his or her own frustrations upon the child. This is never appropriate, and I mean NEVER. It is your personal responsibility to learn how to deal with your own frustrations without taking them out on other people.
I realize that bringing up children is not an easy task, and it can often lead to frustration. Nevertheless, when people take on the responsibility of bearing children, they should approach this as a unique opportunity to advance their spiritual growth. There is hardly any human activity which affords you greater opportunity for spiritual growth than having children. The reason being that having children gives you a unique opportunity to learn how to set aside your ego and put yourself in the role of being the servant of another human being. This truly is a unique opportunity to free yourself from the slavery of the human ego and rise to the level of Christhood I talked about in the following quote:
46 Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be greatest.
47 And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child, and set him by him,
48 And said unto them, Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me: for he that is least among you all, the same shall be great. (Luke, Chapter 9)
The point being that the person with the greatest level of personal Christhood sees him/herself as the servant of all, including your own children. It would be extremely valuable for parents in today’s age to make a sincere effort to let go of the old culture that parents own their children. Your children are not your property, and you cannot treat them any way you want.
However, your children are your responsibility. In order to fulfill the responsibility toward your children and toward yourself as a spiritual seeker, you need to learn the lesson that I said you must teach to your children. You need to learn how to set aside your egotistical desires and set limits for your own ego. Obviously, this does not mean that you make yourself the slave of your children’s egos, and that is why you need to set limits for them. This can be done by realizing that you serve your children best by serving God within both yourself and them. Therefore, the very purpose of your relationship should be the spiritual growth of all. The head of the household truly should be the mind of Christ.
If you can approach parenting from this perspective, you can avoid many of the frustrations caused by parenting. You can avoid the most dangerous trap of parenting, namely that you build up negative feelings and negative energies in your relationship with your children. The most dangerous aspect of parenting is that you create at downward spiral with your children that lead you to gradually build up so much negative emotional energy that you cannot get beyond it to have a normal relationship with your children.
Yet if you can stay above such negative spirals, and you can do so only by being spiritually alert and by using appropriate spiritual protection LINK for yourself and your children, having children can be a wonderful opportunity for growth. To take full advantage of this opportunity, you need to start by disciplining yourself and learning how to set limits for your own egotistical desires. You then need to use that foundation to set appropriate limits for your children. When this is done successfully, you can enjoy a positive relationship with your children for most of their lives.
I am not saying that it is possible to be a parent without experiencing frustration. This is hardly realistic in today’s age where few parents have reached personal Christhood and where most children are born with psychological wounds from past lives. So I am not trying to set up an ideal that is so lofty that no one could possibly live up to it. I am simply trying to give you some hints that can help you meat the challenge of parenting. My point here is that so many Christians have sought to use my life to create and idol about the ideal family that no human being can possibly live up to. I have no desire to see the perpetuation of this idol, because I do not want my life to be used as a way to make other people feel inadequate or guilty.
My parents were not the perfect parents, and I was not the perfect child. Parenthood is a learning experience, and if you were perfect at the beginning, why would you need to learn? So you need to approach parenting with a lot of forgiveness toward yourself and toward your children. Do not expect yourself to be a perfect parent, and do not expect your children to be perfect children. In fact, if you could get rid of all man-made standards for how you should be as a parent and for how your children should be, then you would make the job a lot easier for yourself and for your children. Expectations are the seeds of frustration.
Finally, I would like to say that many parents choose to give birth to lifestreams with whom they have severe karma from past lives. This karma makes it highly likely that a negative spiral will emerge, and you see this in many of today’s families. To overcome the karma between themselves and between themselves and their children, all parents should make a diligent effort to transform negative energy in the family. The most efficient way to do this is to use Mother Mary’s invocations and the decrees.
It should also be noted that in today’s world the family is under severe attack in most nations, especially in the West. This attack is engineered by dark forces who want to destroy the family, which for thousands of years has been the nucleus of society. Therefore, it is extremely important for all parents to invoke spiritual protection for themselves and their children.
Copyright © 2004 by Kim Michaels