by Gerrit Gielen

The world is changing rapidly; a new time is coming. The era in which man considered himself to be omnipotent and master over nature is coming to an end. When it happens, it will leave us not only wiser but more in position to return to paradise, a more harmonious world where there is harmony between people and between people and nature. And oh, how we need to return to a world where people are no longer alienated from their own souls.

It begs the question₋₋what are the ramifications for children who are being born now? What do they need and how will they wish to be raised? If the world is at a tipping point, which is quite evident to most people, then our existing educational formula is too. Children follow their elders. If we shift our thinking to envision the world in a completely unique way, our children will surely follow suit, but for this to truly and genuinely occur and for it to make lasting changes on earth, it rests on parents to raise their children differently.

In the past, the goal of educators was to teach and prepare students to survive in the existing society. Once they accomplished that, after a couple of decades of instruction, the child would graduate to adulthood, and in most cases, I’m sorry to say, were more or less alienated from themselves and their dreams. Education was a slow, grinding process, which in the end managed to separate the child from any knowledge or relationship he or she had with their soul. School’s main function was to prepare children to fit into society and after years of this wearying, deadening process, the child was more than trained in their transition from a world of love into a world of fear.

In this present time, the new, refreshing goal of education is to ensure that the child’s soul flourishes. This time around, if we decree it, the mature, educated personality would be taught how to act as a channel through which the light of their soul could radiate into the world to nourish it with love and to create more beauty.

Parents have it hard these days because they sense that their ideas are worn out and of little use to their children. They know their approach is not working. They know that to push old ideas onto these new souls coming into the earth plane would only result in making the child rebellious, even sick, and depressed. Increasingly, we read about the rise of mental and psychological problems in kids who cannot find meaning in their lives, nor fit into the existing system. Inside, they are uninterested in a world they can’t relate to, so why would they want anything to do with it? It is from this strong stance that they will force their parents, and entire societies to change their thinking, and thus, their behavior.

In this article, I will delve deeper into this subject and share some suggestions about parenting in a new age.

Education – how it used to be

There was a time when people lived on Earth in small groups and roamed at will. They owned few possessions but were deeply connected to nature. Men and women were absolutely equal and the children were raised by the entire group. When they met up with other groups, of which there were many, it was a festive event. People easily mingled and were free to choose to stay with a different group if they wished because they felt connected to all of them.  Everything indicates that people were happy with their lives, were connected to nature and enjoyed good health at this time in our history.  

Eventually, people began to permanently settle in areas where agriculture, livestock farming, and eventually cities began to emerge. This move affected what they ate, going from hunter gatherers to eating meat. This era also gave rise to a new idea called ownership. You could own anything, land, houses, even people. Owning property brought with it a sense of power. Power relations came into play reinforced by new ideologies that denied the idea of an inner unity, or oneness, and equality for everyone. Unfortunately, this chapter of life on earth brought on disaster.^[1]

Livestock farming led to diseases that spread from animals to humans causing widespread havoc. This, together with an unbalanced diet caused humans to suffer from poor nutrition which affected their growth size. People lost their robust health, were born with smaller bodies, and life expectancy fell dramatically. Lack of good nutrition affected women to the point they were born smaller in stature. This resulted in a hellish experience for mothers giving birth, often leading to their deaths and the baby’s as well. The solution was to have as many children as possible for as long as possible and hope that one would survive.

As man’s power over women emerged on the scene, women became the property of men who crushed their right to speak their minds and express opinions of their own. This new concept of things as property, including women, made this possible. In addition, it was ratified and supported by the idea of a God who blamed women for everything and punished them with hellish torments forever, (“In pain you shall bring forth children,” Genesis 3:16) and subjected them to a life of male domination. Who knew where one bite of the apple would lead?

The introduction of this new way of thinking about power into the consciousness of society caused war to become inevitable. If someone owned something that you did not have but wanted, you had every right to declare war on them to get it. It is impossible to tally over these many centuries how many deaths resulted from war, much less describe the horrific suffering it caused.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, along came an even bigger, insidious problem, an economic system that viewed the earth as a thing. Along the way, human beings lost complete touch with nature and did not see themselves as part of Earth’s ecosystem. When this new economic system emerged, raw materials were extracted from nature without humans giving anything back to Earth in return. This new system was responsible for creating pollution, for one, but was justified by an ideology that touted power as central, an ideology that placed humans above all other life forms.

This resulted in the systematic destruction of both animal and plant life, and ultimately the destabilization of the climate. It is a phenomenon that can easily be compared to the growth of cancer cells in a body. As long as the cancer remains small, it is not a threat nor does it have a deleterious effect on your life. However, left to proliferate, it is ultimately catastrophic. We humans on planet Earth have reached the point where we face catastrophe.

What does it mean for a child to be raised in this soulless environment? To stay with the cancer analogy for a moment, we can think of the child as a single cell, and education as the cancer, a disease designed to change the child from a healthy cell into an actively voracious cancer cell. That sounds harsh and dramatic, but think about it. What parent doesn’t want their child to earn a lot of money when they grow up? With money, the child can buy anything it desires, a big house, new cars, trips. So it goes that the child is brought up to make an enormous contribution to the further destruction of the ecosystem and this develops into the out of control growth of a cancerous tumor that is destroying the Earth.

Key to instituting this kind of education and upbringing is to instill fear and insecurity in the child at every turn. The next stage is when the human being, now an adult, finds he or she is terrified of the world, with no deep knowledge of who they really are. They decide to follow the path of their parents; make a good deal of money, acquire heaps of belongings and property, and try to assuage the fear eating them up inside. After all, a “good” job is one that earns you a lot of money, which is what it’s all about. Once the child has internalized this, he or she will become a perfect participant in the system its elders have created.

Education is designed to teach children buy in to a doomed fear-based system. To accomplish this, the school room indoctrinates the child to plan and live a life based on fear instead of love. We think we surround a child with love, and of course, to some degree we do, but without being aware of it, we also fill the child to the brim with fear. From the womb, a child can sense this and immediately takes it in and conforms.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he finds himself in chains,” writes the French philosopher Rousseau. Freedom is love; chains are fear. Education is the chaining of a child. How obvious it is. We lock a child, who has done nothing wrong, in a school building where they look out the window and dream of running outside to play. This is lesson one of education. When you grow up you can no longer do what you would like to do and to top it off, your natural inclinations are forbidden and subsequently suppressed.

Lesson two.

The fact that you have a rich inner world that supports you to freely enjoy your own dreams, fantasies, and creations, is not explained to you or acknowledged at all. In lieu of it, you are to focus on working hard so you can find a job, do well, and make a living. You are taught that the only knowledge of value comes from outside yourself. It is in this way that your true self becomes distorted, relegated and locked up in a prison cell somewhere deep inside you. However, this true self that is ignored and suppressed is alive in you and goes by the name of the “inner child.”

We are completely scarred by the energy and ideas brought forth from this kind of system. We know things have to change, but how? For one, we have to be aware and acknowledge that the old system is based on fear. This is a crucial step. Fear underlies most everything. It is why people stopped going on big adventures and enjoying life. They could not trust in life, they invested in fear causing them to build protective inner walls. They came to rely on the animals of the Earth for their food. They created a system based on fear.  

Why would you want your children to procure degrees, have a career that insists they over work to the exclusion of any joy, join a rat race to earn a lot of money, and in the end be miserable?  The answer is fear, and the pursuit of wealth, possessions, and career all serve to allay that fear.

When we no longer believe in the goodness of life, we no longer believe in the world and because we no longer believe in these two things, it is easy to destroy life. We adapt our children to these outdated ideas because we think that is what parents do. It is what our parents did. In truth, we educate children to take part in a system that is doomed, and by doing so, we disconnect them from their own souls. We support them in living a life of fear. Why do we want to be famous and known all over the world? Fear.

We have lost our bond with nature, for when we choose to dominate it, we break the bond of love. To compensate, we try to gain recognition from others, but that is a dead end. Those who seek recognition on the outside, will never be done with their seeking. It will never be enough.

The problem we now face is that it’s over! The new generation of children do not want to participate in the old ways. Every child is born with an inner compass. They know what is coming, they know the future, and they no longer want to go in the direction of their parents. They feel that route is a dead end.

To educate your children meant to immerse the child in a system of fear and an ideology of fear. (If you don’t behave completely unnaturally, you will go to hell). The child’s education was considered successful when as an adult, there was absolutely no contact with their inner child. Dreaming, playing, enjoying – adults don’t do that.

I am aware that I am putting things in extremely black and white terms. You may think that much has changed for the better in the area of a child’s upbringing and education since the Second World War. Yet, when your child deviates from the beaten path, is your first reaction fear, or joy? Parents usually react out of fear because they want the child in the system they lived in and graduated from. The system that they know, the one based on fear. It is rare for parents to say to their child who leaves school early or suddenly quits his job, “Good for you for quitting, for releasing yourself from prison! Trust in life, trust in new experiences. They are so important to you.” Usually, the response to a child who wants to quit and take a different path is fear, and by reacting that way we turn our children into prisoners.

Parents and new children

As I said, things are changing. More and more children are refusing to be pushed into the old system, but it also increases the tension between the new generation of children and those still operating in the outdated version of society.

Those children are standing up to their parents and forcing them to make one of two choices: either choose the old way of thinking or go along with the new energy that is coming in and change the way you perceive life and how you make choices. Choosing to change has far-reaching psychological consequences. It demands we go along the path that the child sees unfolding before her or him. A new path. If we go along, we must approach life very differently. The question is how do we do it? I have put some suggestions below.

Tip One: Unconditional love

When we look inside the trunk of a tree, we see how its annual rings grow and increase around its core. This growth is similar in humans. The core in a human is one’s original soul impulse, think of it as the inner child. If we live and act on that impulse, there is a possibility we realize ourselves. We grow and expand and awaken to who we truly are, and we choose to act from love, creativity, and leave fear behind.

This is the new way of going forward, but most adults have lost touch with their inner child. Their inner child is stuck in a box instead of at the center of their consciousness where it belongs. When you trust your child’s path and the choices that are available to them, you create a psychological space which allows movement. When this happens, you can become more conscious of your own inner child and feel closer to it, thus, allowing it to grow its rings outward and upward.

For parents struggling to raise a “problematic” child, remember that a problematic child is a healing child. This child is a gift to you from the universe. They have come into your lives in an attempt to heal you and coax you out of your prison of fear. They are in your lives to help you restore contact with your soul, with our own inner child.

Unconditional love is the first step; it is the key. It is what a child needs. As long as love is conditional, there is coercion, for example, trying to mold the child into someone you find desirable. Only unconditional love gives the child the space to grow according to his original nature. If we do this, we begin our own process of healing as well and begin to let go of our fearful thinking. This is difficult to be sure. The healing process is very painful when we let go of the old ways yet continue to cling to our old fears. The secret is to let go of all the old ideas when parenting a so called “problematic child.” To let go always begins with the simple decision to never approach any child from the standpoint of fear, but only from unconditional love.

When you come from fear, you unconsciously send a message to the child that what they are doing and thinking, and how they are acting is wrong. In other words, the child is not okay the way he or she is. They must change or else nothing in their lives will work out. But what if the child cannot change? In the old system, children changed to fit parental and educational guidelines, but they cannot adapt to them anymore.

If you approach the child from unconditional love, you acknowledge them and give them the life-giving message that they are perfectly fine exactly as they are. Then, they will know there is a place for them in this world.

Tip Two: Self-knowledge

To be aware of your fear is to gain self-knowledge. We internalize our fears to the point we regard them as self-evident truths. Only if we are fully aware of them can we choose not to act on them. Learn to recognize the voice of fear and not to listen to it.

As long as you remain unaware of your fears, you will not be capable of trusting life. I’ll give an example. How easily do you take on the belief that countries have borders, despite the fact that those boundaries are a construction based on fear, an unnatural division of the world we live in. We live in fear of our own fellow human beings. If we abolished borders people would be terrified that just anyone could walk into their country. They think it would be disastrous. The truth is that even though there are manmade boundaries, we cannot ultimately control who walks in. We see it to this day. It is nigh impossible to control.

This is one example of how fear turns our thinking into actions and choices that are accepted as rational or normal. In reality, if people were free to travel wherever they like, they would migrate less. When a border is put down people obsess about crossing it. If boundaries did not exist, tensions would relax.

Children of the new age have a deep sense of the unity of life, the unity consciousness behind everything. In truth, we encourage and instruct the child, whether consciously or not, to compete, achieve success and acquire possessions, which we see as the hallmark of a successful life. Which parent is not proud when the child is “doing well.” Yet the idea of “you are what you possess” is based on a denial of consciousness. Your consciousness is the most valuable thing you possess. This clash disrupts the child’s sense of unity. The child – your child – has a living memory of the world of the soul, a world in which everything is alive and equal.

If we could honestly face our fears, they would not stand in the way of the child’s natural development. The seed of inner knowing could then grow according to its own nature, allowing the child the freedom of not conforming to the path of fear, and giving the child the freedom to follow its inner light.

 Tip Three: Trust

Trust that your child has knowledge of the future that you do not have. Trust that the world of the future will help the child. Trust that the energy of the future is attracting the child. If you do this, you radiate confidence, and they will feel safe. Trust means that we act on what we know deep within us.

There is constant talk about a new era that is coming. The children being born now are the seeds of this new era. These children don’t want the old ways; it is impossible for them. They know the seed cannot grow backwards.

What the child needs in order to grow is the energy of the parent’s soul.

That statement brings me to the core of it. What does it mean to raise children in the new era?

The soul as educator

A child begins life on earth in its mother’s womb and consciously seeks out the energy field of its parents. That was the case in the past, and it is the case now. But what is different now? In the past, children incarnated to work on a personal theme on Earth. They consciously absorbed the energies of this world in order to gain experience and to investigate karmic themes. To help them with this, they chose parents with personalities that fit into this theme.

Children of the new age no longer seek parents based on this, but on the energy of their soul. It is this soul light of the parents that gives the child space and allows it to grow. There is a different mechanism at play. If a parent acts on the basis of personality, that is, on the basis of fear, it creates resistance in the child and will cause problems.

The cry of the child

The child calls to the parents to let go of the past, to come with them into the future, to come with them to the new world, to follow the light of the soul. In the past, the call of the soul only sounded at the end of life – and often went unheard. Now it resounds when a child is born. To listen to that call means to choose love and trust, and to let go of old fears. It means to allow change to happen. It means taking a step towards a new world.

People wonder if there even is a future for today’s children. Yes, there is, and that future is now, at least, if we allow it to be now. Our children are that future. These children invite us to let our soul’s light shine so that this future can be born. When we truly allow our own light to be there, no longer distorted by our fears, we allow the future, the new earth, to come in and flourish.

Saying yes to our children, to who they really are, is to create the future. If we allow the light of our own souls to come forth, we give them that light and the space they need to grow.

The web of light

The new earth isn’t about solving problems, it is about allowing a new light, a new energy to come in. If we give our child the space to experience unconditional love and trust, the child will fill that space with light. This light becomes a shining star in the world. Together, all these stars will form a web of light. From this web of light, the new earth is born. Ultimately, a new physical reality will emerge in which everything is imbued with a living consciousness, and nothing is made into a thing, an object of possession. That is paradise. The harmony between heaven and earth, between man and nature based on love.

Decision

In the past, parents had a clear view of how to raise their children because the direction was fixed. The world of the child was not going to be essentially different from the world of the parents. Children sensed this and conformed to the existing order; they sought their personal development within the existing boundaries. The aim was to be one step higher on the social ladder than the parents. Parents were satisfied if that was so. If the children had more property and prestige than they did, that was good.

Now humanity is changing course, children sense this new course internally and attune themselves to it. Educators often do not acknowledge that the world is changing, and those types will try to force children back onto the old way. That, in short, is the problem we face.

We are travelers on the way to the future. The children who already carry a seed of that future with them are our guides. These guides are telling us that we are on the wrong path and have to take a completely different one. It is not easy; everything is suddenly different. We walk through a completely different landscape, yes, we walk in a completely different world. A world that no longer revolves around fear, possessions, power, and status. It now revolves around love, connection and trust, a world in which power relations are replaced by a sense of unity.

How can you agree to take this new path that your child wants to take if you still cling to a past based on fear – even though you were not aware of it. How can you trust your child’s inner knowing if you see the child as someone to be raised according to your outmoded parental ideas?

The key is to choose unconditional love. If we do, our thinking is no longer dominated by fear and light starts to flow within us once again. It is this light that the child longs for. It is this light that the child within is trying to evoke.

It is this light that attracted the child to first incarnate on Earth, and it is this light that gives the child space to grow and develop as she or he chooses to.

When you embrace this light, and embrace yourself, you will know how to raise your child. To be a parent is to feed your child the light of your soul.

© Gerrit Gielen

Edited by Suzy Conway

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[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race