As parents, we often think we know what’s best for our children:

Which choices they should make, what suits them best, what they should or should not do, which educational path or career choice should be made, and in some cases, it even extends to the choice of hobbies, sports, or life partners.

As parents, we seem to be all-knowing when it comes to our children. I’m not referring to the motherly feeling or maternal instinct here. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with giving advice or adhering to rules of conduct, but that’s not the same as pushing our ideas onto them.

To give our ideas a little extra weight, we use phrases like, ‘I’ve been young too,’ or something like, ‘I’ve already walked that path before you,’ or… ‘I have more life experience than you, or I possess more wisdom because I’ve been through more and am older.'”

What we often fail to realize is that we’re imposing our model of how life should be or how our own lives should have been on our children without their consent. This model is, among other things, shaped by the era in which we grew up and not by the era in which our children are growing up. We seem to be unaware that life cannot be squeezed into a model at all.

Our model of life is constructed from various unconscious beliefs and repressions, something we often don’t acknowledge. We also don’t recognize that this model doesn’t actually serve our inner growth and is, in fact, a constraint. Often, this model serves our unconscious fears, insecurities, and the discomfort we don’t want to confront and feel. We go to great lengths to avoid this and focus on the model of being a “good person.” Anything that doesn’t fit into this model is pushed into our shadow, our unconscious, and from now on, we project it onto our environment. Our emotional reactions and judgments lead us back to our OWN shadow aspects.

But there’s also a significant chance that our children, in particular, pick up on these shadows and repressions and act them out. This is how dynamic processes and family systems operate. The work of Els van Stein and Bert Hellinger can provide more insight into this.

If you leave your valuable items and clutter lying around, someone else is bound to stumble upon them! This is actually how it works with everything we, as parents, don’t want to confront, experience, or develop in life; we unintentionally leave it for the next generation. You can read more about this in the article “The Illusion of Equal Parenting.”

It’s indeed very possible that what you, as a parent, disapprove of is reflected (as a projection) in your child. Not because it represents your child, but it represents your own shadow that you haven’t confronted but have repressed. And suddenly, it seems like we know what the child should do with what we’ve left unattended in ourselves or haven’t even dared to face.

This is primarily an unconscious process, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it, but by examining it, you gain more awareness. And this is the start of change.

Even if your children’s experiences seem to overlap with your own life, they are still not the same life. Your life and your child’s life are two different lives. Unless you are exact duplicates, you really don’t know how your child experiences the seemingly similar situations. However, we unconsciously project our inner world onto them. In doing so, we unintentionally burden our child with our own emotions. Again, you’re not guilty but not aware.

Back to Wisdom,

There are people who believe that age equates to wisdom. However, if you pay close attention, this is far from the truth. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age.

In everyday life, we encounter very young children with tremendous wisdom or a high level of awareness. They vibrate at a higher frequency and radiate a lot of light and love. At the same time, we come across elderly individuals and adults who are, emotionally or psychologically, less mature or wise. Or they engage very little in self-reflection and have elevated judgments to an art form. So, age is not a guarantee of wisdom.

So, what is wisdom? And how do we attain it? I believe that knowledge is often confused with wisdom, and you can find other people’s wisdom and knowledge in books, but your own wisdom is found in:

The experience that is fully felt and integrated. And unfortunately we do not learn this at school.

If you experience something and suppress the feelings, avoid self-reflection, and draw incorrect conclusions, you won’t gain wisdom from that experience. When you notice that an experience keeps your mind running in circles, it means it hasn’t been fully accepted and integrated. When you find yourself wanting to immediately address and solve a situation, often there’s no room for integration or acceptance.

The solution lies in relaxing into what IS. Acceptance of the present moment, fully allowing the experience with an open heart. Only then can it release you, and until then, you hold the situation tightly, locking its pain in your heart. This stored pain can be triggered because it has found a place. The pain is now stored there as an energetic charge, and the right button only needs to be pushed. Alternatively, the current experience may connect with a previously stored emotion, causing you to react disproportionately as the earlier stored charge or suppressed emotion comes into play.

You can let energies pass through your open heart as vibrations, allowing you to accept the experience without leaving imprints.

But how can very young children possess wisdom?

These children appear to be in touch with an intelligence and knowledge that, given their age, they shouldn’t be able to know. This is related to the vibration or frequency that is still attuned to unity consciousness. This unity consciousness has its own all-encompassing intelligence. It can see everything because it is the very principle itself, the beginning or the carrier of existence. It has been there from the beginning of time and has missed nothing. In essence, we are unity consciousness, now in this reality we are still a part of it. We can attune to this wisdom through our heart.

As parents or adults, we are often so conditioned and programmed that our consciousness is quite narrow. We navigate life with a set of beliefs, assumptions, and conclusions (our model of life) responsible for this constriction. They have sealed our minds shut. When consciousness blows through us, it blows against the sealed mind full of assumptions and beliefs and a heart full of pain points. No new information can enter. Young children often don’t have this to the same extent; they are still fully open.

When we consider the above, we may understand that we can learn a great deal from our children. By living, developing, and experiencing our own ideas and potential, we give our children the space to do the same.

If we think children need to become faster because they are too slow, perhaps this is an invitation for us to slow down.

If we believe children need to toughen up because they are too soft or sensitive, this might be a signal that we should allow ourselves to feel more. We can soften and become more vulnerable.

In a world characterized by the zeitgeist of fear, division, and dominance, where power, haste, hardness, and oppression prevail, we primarily encounter lower emotions: fear, hatred, jealousy, greed, etc. Lower emotions have a lower vibration.

So, we need these children with a lot of light and a high vibration to lift us out of lower vibrations. They bring so much love and light because it’s desperately needed.

Maybe these kids don’t need to be pushed into the rat race, but it’s an invitation for us to step out of the rat race a little more.