Awareness For Today’s Generation..
By: Dada Bhagwan
Tags: Youth Development, Motivational, Inspiration, Youth, Teenagers

To mould children after fifteen is an uphill task, anyways. And as a parent you are sometimes caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to how much pressure you should put on your young adult and where you should let it loose. A whole lot of wrong beliefs have already piled up in your child and they are misguiding him today. Therefore it is best that you entrust the case to some Enlightened person, who is adept in the art of moulding children by changing their wrong beliefs and opinions and giving them the right direction to bring about sincerity in their behaviour and morality in their character.

A few things that you can try from your side:

1. This world can only be won over through love and patience! Change your child’s behaviour gradually and patiently through love and understanding. Daily spend time with him and lovingly discuss things of his interest too. Maintain immense faith even when your child does dreadful things. The love from parents should be such that their children would not want to leave them. Moreover, prayers have enormous strength. God is present in each one of us in the form of the Soul. Earnestly and devotedly, pray to the Pure Soul residing within your child to help him get the right understanding and wisdom which ensures him a healthy and harmonious way of life.

2. Give your child a sense of purpose. From what you’ve stated, it seems that child has the tendency to get bored rather too quickly. When watching sports or playing video games exceeds it normal limits, he will get bored of these things too. Where there is happiness, tiredness or boredom has no scope to exist at all. Hence, get him to explore what he is passionate for (other than playing video games), what does he love doing. Expose him to environments where he can see how people are happy, irrespective of the amount of hard work they do and no matter how pathetic their living conditions are. Challenge him on one hand and support him on the other to help him rise, listen, learn, dream and work with you to unleash his hidden potential. This will help create a common ground for both of you to talk and respect each other and will help find a common purpose to be around with each other.

3. Watching you, he will follow you and will do whatever you do. Children learn when they see it in their parents. So inspire him to learn from you in a happy environment, the value of being responsible and also the skill of how to meet responsibilities being moral and sincere in life. He will become good and virtuous when he silently observes how his father is fulfilling his duties diligently and willingly; and how every family member is content with my mother’s hard work. This will make him realize one day, “I have all the comforts and facilities given to me, but still I am bored and miserable. If I take interest in my work, I too will be happy then!”

4. Allow his intuition to develop. When any problem arises, the child gets confused, “Oh! What do I do? How do I solve this problem?” At that time, rather than offering an instant help or a readymade advice, ask him to find his basic solutions for himself. When he sees himself surrounded by darkness, not knowing how to solve the problem, suddenly something will flash within and he will see how to solve the problem. That’s called intuition!! It is a vision which is a result of so many past life’s experiences and is present in everyone to help us solve problems. Meditation, yoga, etc. will further enhance his vision and understanding. Educate him, but do not offer direct help and handicap his abilities. You will soon find him get over his favorite saying, “I don’t want to do useless extra work”; and in course of time, he will be offering constructive and creative solutions to others too.

5. Motivate, Encourage and Acknowledge responsible behaviour. Something that you now know he enjoys doing, try entrusting him some responsibility in that particular area or field; but not directly! Motivate him by reverse tactics. For instance, tell him, “I want to give you this responsibility. But how can I hand it over to you, who gets bored in fulfilling his own responsibilities and is totally disinterested and unenthusiastic in carrying out his basic routines.” We are doing this not to scare him or intimidate him, but so that willingly or unwillingly, he initiates and takes the first step forward. Frame value-based moral responsibilities and lure him to grab them one by one, and see that he enjoys them as he tries to implement them.

When he starts liking his compulsory duties, he will automatically get the strength to accomplish his work. And then, watching sports or playing video games will no longer be his prime source of enjoyment. At first he will raise objections, but later, when he will experience how good it feels to live a normal life, he will respond positively.