From Child to Adult

By Rami Abdo

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have even the remotest inkling of knowledge on the fundamentals of raising a child in this day and age. It is in fact a huge task to undertake, especially for blue-collar parents working full time jobs with barely enough wages in this crisis to cover their own needs much less a totally dependent third person. For single parents it’s even tougher; they have to carry out the lion’s share of the overwhelming duties ahead without the emotional and physical support of a partner by their side. I tip my hat off to them and in no way strive to demean their choices. I’m merely broaching the subject from a different angle, so humour me for a moment as I divulge into a philosophical debate.

Reading Carlos Castaneda during my impressionable years opened my eyes to the infinite horizons of reality and left my mind staggering at the truths I uncovered based on his views on existence. One of these harsh ‘realities’ I came face to face with was his inescapable dilemma on the concept of raising a child. Here was a free thinker, his mind opened to the stars and beyond by the teachings of Don Juan Matus, a man of knowledge, caught between his basic instinct to pass on his legacy to his offspring and his unwillingness to cage a human being with the conditioning of Parenthood. This trap he was referring to is unavoidable in every sense of the word. In order to raise a child, even in the simplest of settings, you must teach him/her how to survive, how to function in society, how to behave, what is right and wrong, what to believe in, etc...The list is endless. That means the child must be conditioned, or should I say programmed, from the start of their life until they are old enough to potentially break free from these shackles placed on their mind and have an independent thought that is not marred by all these past influences.

I’m not blasting specific methods used by parents worldwide on how they raise their children. 

I’m suggesting that whatever way is used, it will always be wrong. There is no right way because no matter what methods are implemented, raising a child means exerting our influence, our rules, and our beliefs on another impressionable human being that doesn’t know any better. He or she has been moulded to believe in certain mannerisms, religions, acceptable behaviour and other such ideas that are as difficult to erase from the mind as trying to forget how to count. The damage has been done and even the most rigorous scrubbing will still leave a faint stain on the brain.

Even if the most well meaning parents raised their child to be the kindest, most loving human being on the planet, it still means they have influenced that person to become that way through their teachings. Did they ask their one day old baby if he or she wanted to grow up to become this person? Obviously not.  But we cannot just give a child complete freedom as soon as they are born so that we wouldn’t influence their mental processes. Not only does modern society not allow that, but we would also be endangering the child’s life.  Parents just have to start making decisions for their baby, as best as they could according to their choices and their upbringing. If you think about it, we are trapped in this vicious cycle where we transfer the bugs acquired from our upbringing onto our offspring, either directly or indirectly. Those stains will always be there in some way or the other.

However, there is a silver lining to every cloud. When we are old enough, and our minds open up to the possibilities of the world and what it has to offer us, we can slowly begin erasing the markings of our parents and start drawing our own. It is a difficult thing to wipe out 18 years of training; the brain is not a textbook and there is no tool good enough to erase these writings completely. But Castaneda himself said: “We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.” if we detach enough from the limits that our minds create, if we accept the fact that everything we ever know and believe in was stamped in there from before, then we can fully perceive this statement as true and use its implicit power to change ourselves in any way we see fit.

 To reject this notion means to reject our very freedom, the freedom to make our own choice on what kind of an adult we want to become.  Our parents relinquish the reigns of responsibility to us when we mature to adulthood, but instead of accepting them with open arms, we pass them on to other bodies of domination because we fear the implications of having to make real choices. We fear change and we fear the unknown, so we hold onto our past which makes us feel safe and secure. But while we latch on desperately to our memories and our old ways, the world around us is moving on, reforming and ageing and ignoring us for the most part.

Unfortunately, it usually takes a major life-changing moment for us to open our eyes to the inevitable realization that we no longer want to be the person we were groomed to be. Being able to shape ourselves into figures of our own choosing is one of the last freedoms we still possess. Buy only if we accept that before nationalities, before religions, before races, before anything else, we are human, and the saddest thing is to live and die not knowing that.