Discipline As an Act of Love

Disciplining children is often the most daunting task that parents and teachers face. Avatar Adi Da provides invaluable insights into how to meet this challenge positively and effectively, by offering detailed guidelines that take into account the developmental capabilities of children at each age and stage of life. At the core of this instruction is Avatar Adi Da’s admonition that effective discipline must be an act of love.

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The most effective form of discipline is to attract children to happiness—through the intimacy established through loving human relationships, and through their own direct intimacy with the Divine Mystery that sustains them. When children are restored to relationship this way, when they feel loved and supported, they are naturally happy, and that happiness is then demonstrated in their actions.

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As examples:

 

Rather than demanding attention, children can be helped to learn the pleasure of giving attention and love to others.

 

Instead of complaining, they can learn to communicate in positive terms about what they value.

 

Instead of hurting other people or animals, they can act in moral, serving ways that value other living beings.

 

Instead of collapsing in the face of practical challenges and life demands, they can demonstrate the creative strength that comes from knowing they are not threatened.

 

This kind of positive change in children does not come about when we focus on negative behaviors and try to suppress them, as if they were a problem to be overcome. Instead, Avatar Adi Da calls us to practice tolerance, forgiveness, and love as we attract children out of negativity:

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Human maturity necessarily manifests a high tolerance and forgiveness level. Therefore, this is the character that you must demonstrate with your children, as well as with everyone else. Be free of the blaming game, the lapse into an attitude or a reaction to anything. Meet with them, be with them, think about them, think with them, talk to them—really, in the present moment. And be very tolerant of them, forgiving of them, intelligent with them, able to get down to what is really going on with them. Do not increase their reactivity, “Narcissism”, “self”-contraction, and “problems” with relationship, but (rather) enhance their relational capability and their freedom from “self”-consciousness through tolerance and forgiveness. Always let tolerance and forgiveness be an arm of your general influence in their lives to draw them into relational patterns and responsibilities.

 

However, tolerance and forgiveness independent of responsibility is just a way of releasing somebody from a threat or a punishment and giving them license to do it again. . . That kind of forgiveness and tolerance is obviously nonsense. It is not an extension of right human motivation or of the ego--transcending disposition. But tolerance and forgiveness are a leading aspect of a truly human, non--hypocritical, free, balanced personality.

 

In your tolerance and forgiveness of your children, you distract them from “Narcissus”. You attract them into relationship and into the responsibilities that are naturally part of full relatedness. Full relatedness is equanimity. It is balance. It is the contraction from relatedness that destroys your balance and confuses you and sets you up like an insane machine full of internal argument and conflict with others as well as with yourself.

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It is through love and tolerance—and the creative application of discipline and demand in that context—that we ensure that our children, as Avatar Adi Da says, “are simply equipped in the truest and best sense for the process of living”.