Our children are born in a complicated world. Although food and living conditions in the western world are mostly ensured, other factors make it difficult for our children to manage and to find their way in daily life. Why is that so? What kind of messages are embodied by the child when he or she appears in this world? And mind you, as representatives of a species, which is often referred to be no less than the crown of the creation.

Children are an expression of the natural cosmic laws. They are miniature images of the universe, unity in diversity. This is the explanation proposed by scientists who describe the unfolding of the universe from the fields of energy and matter into a manifestation of nature. Children embody interconnectedness, belonging together, universal integration. They are product and expression of what we call individual and cosmic love. Love is the fundamental law of evolution. For this reason our children look forward to a world where they can spontaneously live in harmony with this fundamental law and develop, grounded  in this security and certainty. But whom and what do they encounter in their environment?

At first they see us, their parents who even if we carry within ourselves the same basic and fundamental laws, we are pushed and  formed by mutual agreement with the collective values of our society, we run into the demands of performance and competition in our daily work; to the ups and downs of our desires and obligations. Children are finely attuned to the ways their parents cope with this field of tensions and the feelings they emanate and the children react accordingly.
 
Then the little ones go to school, where the individualization and integration process is written in capital letters, but at the same time, everyday life is ‘criss-crossed’ by mixed messages and practices, such as: “You must achieve success that will be measured and compared to the others”; “your performance assessment will be based mostly on exams”, “you have to endure the selection pressure”, etc. and all this while you’re placed in a forcedly multicultural and formalized community of individuals from most diverse families, with different styles of parenting and widely divergent levels of social skills.

Subsequently, we the adults are surprised when our children, living in this ever faster moving world, struggle sometimes through their daily lives and are increasingly scared, frustrated, obstreperous, overexcited, aggressive , belligerent  and stressed. To watch sometimes speechless when our children disregard the “do’s and don’ts” and don’t pay attention to what they do or how they behave. Sometimes we must deal with their destructive actions when the children are under pressure.
 
Simply put, children and youth are increasingly in stress mode and do not understand why they have to know or learn something, and more important, they don’t care about the consequences. They don’t think about the future in hoping that the parents will save them again in difficult situations. We are destroying still too much of the youth’s development potential within our society and educational institutions.

And we, the adults, are torn between caring support and pressure, between loving behaviour and frustrated intervention Tensions in the individual’s environment put stress on the entire mind-body-soul system. This fact is proved by statistics and is increasingly valid also for our children. For this reason our human system is trying everything possible to free itself of these internal tensions. The process often leads to frustrating actions when nothing else works anymore. We see these excesses in the headlines of the media.

It’s our responsibility and duty as adults to provide the children with tools that will help them purposefully overcome their own anxieties. It’s an essential precondition to be able to accept this challenge also for us if we don’t want to go into a dangerous downward spiral involving the entire planet: personal stress accumulation leads to collective stress that may end in strife, struggle and war. If we follow the fundamental laws of nature consistently we can build a world where our children can live in security and peace according to their own destiny. This is our most important mission regarding the future of our world.

More about this issue in the following essay.

Photo by: Franziska Mayr Instagram @franzi_85