Curiosity

Question: My 4-year old daughter is very curious about how the body functions. She asks questions about how the brain works and how the veins function. A lot of these I don’t even know the answer to. Should I try to find out and answer her accurately or should I just tell her not to be curious? What should I do?

Sat: When a child asks you a question, it doesn’t matter if it is worldly or not, it needs an answer, so we need to answer it. We either know the answer to our own capacity and we say, “This is what we think.” We don’t say this is the fact, we say, “This is what I know at this time.” If we don’t [know], we just say we don’t know. If they ask a really important question that is important for their lives, when we don’t know, then we should find out at best and then tell them later. But if they ask a question that is really irrelevant to their life and it doesn’t make much difference and we don’t know the answer, we just say we don’t know the answer and we leave it at that.

Question: Sat joon, for older kids like my son who is 12 now, how should we act to keep them as empty as possible when the world is bringing all these imaginations and all these attractions? Because You said after some years, our role is different. Can you help us with this?

Sat: Pretty much what happened to My life - with My two boys - I meditated with them in My arms while I’m nursing them, I chanted the name, I recited Gayatri, we had candle light in the house all the time with good music, and on and on and on. The worship of Baba, trips to India - sometimes twice a year.

By the time of Balvika - at that time it was Education in Human Values - but at Balvika, at age 12, I asked one of the members in Sai Center to take over the Balvika instead of Me because one of My kids was 12 the other was 10. Right after the class, My older son who was twelve pulled Me aside and said, “Mom, You’ve done Your job. Now allow me to experience life and put to practice what I was taught.”

I never, ever taught them again, or talked about ways of life or this and that. It was finished. They went out - and naturally that’s the best way to do it, to leave them alone. The mother was fired by the child saying, “Okay, now back off.” So I did and they finished studies - and they went into the world of business. But I don’t believe they ever forgot their base because of whatever every so often I would hear. And they are raising their kids as if it was their life with Me in childhood.

So this is what I'm bringing to you. That whether you know it or not, whether the child admits it or not, which is very rare that they do - they see the mother. This is why it’s so much emphasized on raising your own consciousness. They see the mother devotional, they see the mother righteous, they see the mother charitable, they see meditation happening in the house, they see the chanting happening in the house, by the time they are 12 - your job should get less and less.

Now, having said that - if you see that he’s too much on the computer - you have the authority to say no and mean it and take it away. If he’s concentrated too much in the room with imagination, it’s your right to kick him out of his room and say you need to run in the neighborhood. These are the things you guys can do for your child. But to say the child is being nourished only by you? No, not anymore.

Question: The curiosity that he has, there are some subjects that he is too much fascinated with like politics, like about all the civilizations, and things like that. I don’t know if it is obsession, if it is too much? If there is a subject like that is there anyway to kind of change it or we just have to be open and let them go through this phase? Or maybe it’s just the way they are.

Sat: Yes, you let it go. You don’t want to control his way of thinking, you let it go, it is not by controlling or making him go in another direction, it is not about that at all. Because he has come with certain tendencies and just the fact that he still has it, we need to leave that alone. But at the same time, we cannot forget to have quiet time daily, if anything will be effective, it would be that, where He has some quiet time, real quiet time, not sitting and imagining things. So, if he can have a few minutes a day like this with your encouragement, that should bring a balance to it.

Parenting Call
10/31/20 & 06/26/21