Setting Children Up for Self-Actualization
One of our main aims at the Kalavan Retreat Center is now to create conditions in which it is healthy and sane to raise children who are not subject to cultural coercion and compulsion, and to all the things we sought to escape by creating the lifestyle we did here, away from mainstream society. The greatest difficulties continue to come from those around us, who often do a great deal to try to interfere with our self-chosen values and lifestyle, and who would certainly disapprove of any unconventional way of rearing children into the world.
Procreation itself is easy. Having children is the most natural thing in the world. People have been doing it for millions of years. Under normal conditions, feeding and caring for them is quite straightforward. The hard part is avoiding interference with the process from others. As we welcome more traveling families and parents with children at the Kalavan Retreat Center, I am moved to reflect on the unique benefits our lifestyle offers them.
Parenting today is both harder and easier than it has been in any generation prior. Parenting is the conscious raising of the next generation to sustain human life and society. This occurs either unconsciously, as caregivers follow the path of least social resistance and push their children to become whatever society demands of them, or consciously, as parents strive to give their children every opportunity to discover who they are on their own terms, with minimal interference.
From early childhood, people are often treated as vessels for inherited fears, assumptions, and obsolete beliefs. This conditioning quietly constrains independent thought and limits the range of identities one feels permitted to explore. As people age, their sense of self tends to harden. The internal narratives they rely on, who they are, what is acceptable, and what is realistic, become increasingly fixed, making authentic change feel risky or even impossible. Exposure to multiple cultures and distance from oppressive ones offer alternative models for living, thinking, and assigning value. Rather than being trapped within a single cultural framework, young people gain the freedom to discern what genuinely appeals to them.
Every generation carries information forward with it, both in the unique mixing of its genes and in the conscious and unconscious content of its mind, expressed in its choices and actions. Most young adults are like recently launched rockets, running out of fuel just before reaching escape velocity and entering their own stable orbits, free from the planet's gravitational pull. Their ambition, curiosity, and enthusiasm from youth carried them forward for a while, but now inhibitory forces are beginning to outweigh the positive emotions once associated with change and growth. What stifles them is being conditioned to have negative reactions to positive change, which most often manifest as fear, stress, anxiety, and trepidation about the unknown. The unknown is defined by whatever has not been accepted into the local cultural set of self-expression. Even the best-intentioned parents contribute to these comfort limits by encouraging familiar behaviors and discouraging unfamiliar ones. The totality of what a human child can grow to be is much greater than what is common in their environment at birth, and if parents fail to appreciate this, they stifle intergenerational evolution.
Human self-actualization is not a mystical or supernatural process, despite its common portrayal. It's entirely natural, a basic part of the design of a functioning human mind. All we need to do is provide the conditions that allow it to happen, just as we give a plant the conditions that enable it to grow and flower. If we want children to grow into adults who are fully self-expressed in their authentic individuality, rather than just products molded by their culture, we must be conscious of the conditions under which they are raised from as early in their development as possible. They need as much self-confidence and enthusiasm for discovery and self-expression as possible, and as little as possible of the opposite emotional qualities that inhibit this natural process. Promote the positive; eliminate the negative. As much as humanly possible.
Each new life is an opportunity to set aside the baggage, sins, harm, and expectations of past generations when they are no longer useful (if they ever even were), like deleting bad data from a computer program. Cultural baggage is the concerns of the culture around you transplanted into you before you were conscious enough to accept or reject it. Parents and caregivers play the most significant role in enabling children to resist adopting another person's sense of what is good, bad, urgent, or important. If the parents' values are worth preserving in the next generation, parents should be willing and able to help their children arrive at those values through authentic inquiry rather than through unconscious cultural conditioning. Then, no matter what happens to those children, even if they face extreme hardship, even if there's social pressure to act a certain way or be a certain thing, if their emotional associations that preceded the hardship are stronger, they will maintain something greater as their standard for self-identification.
Mindful parents can be living monuments for their offspring to look up to, to guide them through the hard times ahead, to teach them to master themselves, and to offer shining examples of what they can and should become when they are ready to choose. They will see the trials they must overcome to find and keep their freedom, including the tragedy of falling short along the way or failing to pass on the right lessons to the next generation. The wisdom of prior generations is concentrated and sustained by future generations if they are raised well.
Genuine self-knowledge does not come from adopting the worldview you inherited by default. It stems from recognizing which environments, patterns, and values enable you to flourish mentally, emotionally, and creatively, rather than merely endure. The greatest barriers to a passionate and authentic life are rarely material. They are psychological in nature, rooted in conditioning, fear of deviation, and unexamined assumptions, rather than in any real external constraint.
Parents do not develop their children's character for them. They provide both the foundation and the inspiration for them to create it themselves. They give them a starting point and a conception of where they are going, but they do not walk the path for them or dictate their experience. By maintaining maximal control over the setting in which the early years of child-rearing unfold, we aim to give children the best chance of self-actualization in the years that follow.
