Society Is Not Perfect – and Neither Am I

An Open Letter to My Kids

Many times I have felt a twinge of failure in this journey we are on together, now is another of those times.
Ideally I would love you to be able to learn what you want, when you want and in the way you want. In truth, you will anyway as it is only experience that teaches. But I’d like to have given you a freedom of scope beyond that which you have.

I know you would not choose to go to school if you had the option. I know one of the options open to us is homeschooling. But then, instead of teaching you to be who you are, I would be sacrificing who I am – and that is not the lesson I intend.

​Like all parents I would like to give you the perfect childhood. But what does that even mean?

Each parent, I think, has some driving force that influences the way they parent. For me it’s about allowing you to be who you are. For others it is about other things, like raising independent children. We are all different.

Allowing you the freedom to unfold as you want to, yet figuring out what that means in a society with many others who feel they have a right to impose their opinion – or worse, control – upon you, is an ongoing process.

I often say that if we lived cut off from society, you would be able to unfold unhindered. Consequences would naturally arise and you would learn and grow. We, however, live in a society of imposed consequences that remove your thinking from the true nature of things.

Like the time I talked to your daycare about the meals they made that you did not want. If we refuse food, it has a natural consequence – hunger. But the daycare chose to impose further consequences designed to make you comply. If you did not eat your meal, they re-presented it at afternoon tea and prohibited you from eating the cakes the others ate.

In this same way, we live in a society that creates parents as upholders of the millions of rules set by others. It creates more reliance on the parenting relationship than you would otherwise have naturally.

The government says you have to attend school between the ages of six and sixteen. The other option is to apply for an exemption and to home school. I have said you can do this when the time comes for college. At that point you will be able to drive your own curriculum and self-learn in a way that will satisfy our government.

In the meantime, you have to go to school. We have chosen the one that is most closely aligned to our values from the options available, but still, it is a square peg in a round hole.

This leaves a hole in my heart, especially when this pathway – that seemed to offer much – does not entirely deliver what I was expecting.

This is life sometimes; we take two steps forwards and one step backward. But what I have learned about holes and backward steps is that I must welcome them.

There is nothing in my past that has not turned out well in the longer run, for the best even.

I think I cannot give you the things I’d like to, but in truth I trust you are being given all that you need.

My own pathway was not one of having freedom to unfold. It was very decidedly of an era that ensured I walked the narrow pathway it prescribed, ‘or else’.

I ate the food I was given. I went to the school I was told to. I learned what I was told to. I treated people the way I was told to… the list is endless.  Yet still, I found the way back to me.

Society has changed a lot since I was young; more people have more freedom by comparison.

The biggest change though, I believe, is in the numbers who are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities for an evolution of our society today.

Imagine health care that pays attention to the whole being, education that caters for individual expression and growth, governments operating with transparency and open communication or science that embraces the metaphysical.  The list and the opportunities are endless.

Most exciting of all, you are the generation born into a society becoming aware of its opportunities and failings. This puts you in the creative driving seat when it comes to solutions.

So life is not perfect my little ones, I don’t think we ever intended it to be or this journey would be fairly dull by comparison.

I, for my part, will always do my best to do whatever I feel is right in each moment; for that is all I can do, all any of us can do.

I love you always; keep following your joy.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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