From Expectation to Aspiration: Breaking the chain of inter-generational conflict

Creating the Future Today

If we want to make the world a more beautiful place, if we want to evolve as the human animal, living with more consciousness, and if we want a future that is better than the present, then how we raise that future – our children, is perhaps the most important factor that will decide the next era of humanity.

In twenty, thirty, or forty years’ time, the people that will be taking decisions about how we live, interact with each other and with the natural world, are the children of today. It is what we model, what we teach, that will decide the direction that we travel.

This is why I am so passionate about what I have termed ‘aspirational parenting’. It’s why I have taken on the cause of helping parents to raise a generation that is not only less traumatised by family conflict and conditioning, but also a generation who will in turn raise their children with even more self-awareness and understanding, breaking the cycle of dysfunction and damage that has been passed down through our ancestral lineage.

Childhood

My father didn’t have a great start in life. He lost his own dad, when he was just twelve. With no father-figure, he struggled with feelings of isolation and a lack of support. This was immeasurably compounded when soon after, he was struck down with Polio, leaving his left arm withered and partially paralysed. These traumatic events affected him his entire life.

When I arrived in 1964, my twenty-six year old father was emotionally unprepared to handle a small and energetic child. I was generally well-behaved, but often felt scared and insecure. This triggered in him his own similar emotions and the only way he could manage those feeling was to react in anger. The more fear I expressed, the more triggered and consequently enraged he became, which then made me more afraid.

I suffered from his physical and verbal abuse and was also often punished for small things like clumsiness or risky curiosity. My mother, eventually overcame her own fear of his intimidating moods and sent him a letter in which she told him that, if he continued to beat, yell and threaten me, I would grow up hating him.

Something cut through, because at heart he was a loving and caring man, playful, funny, and a very talented artist. So much more than his wounds and his frustration.

I was never physically abused again by him but damage was done. My fear of conflict and violence left me vulnerable and wary. At school, other damaged and hurt kids smelled my fear and I experienced chronic bullying throughout my formal education, despite the fact that I was a well-built and strong child. I seemed to attract violence.

A turning point came in the early 1970’s when Osho came into our lives and my parents, in their own ways, both began a journey of self-discovery. This allowed some healing and my relationship with my father deepened, especially when at fourteen we travelled as a family to Pune. We became very close, and by the time he died in the mid 90’s, aged just fifty-seven, he had become my best friend. We worked together, hung out, and even travelled together.

I had experienced in my very early years how it felt to be an abused child, but for most of my childhood and into my teenage years, I felt that I was enough; I was allowed to be me. I was accepted completely and yet, something was imprinted in me. A shadow remained.

Fatherhood

I was also twenty-six when in 1990 I became a father. First as a step-parent to a feisty four-year-old girl, and the next year to the first of my own two sons. I was sure that I would be a great father, and in many ways I was, but in those early years I discovered that I had inherited a lot of the impatience, frustration and rage that had been modelled by my father. I would lose myself in fits of fury and acted out in ways that terrified my children.

But the years with Osho and the wise people around me helped to bring me to my senses. Wracked with remorse and shame, knowing how it felt to be a little person full of fear and dread, an awakening happened in me, as it had in some way with my dad.

I decided from that moment, that I would find another way to deal with my anger and frustration. That new way was based on the profound principal of taking full responsibility for the emotions that arose within me. In short, I started to own my shit.

This did not mean that all those feelings and emotions dissolved. I still felt them and the impulse to lash out, but what happened inside me was a growing understanding of the source of all that frustration. It was disappointment in myself as a failing parent. Disappointment born out of the one thing that creates all disappointment: expectation.

This was what lay beneath my anger. The belief that if I don’t get my children to act and behave and respond as I expected them to, I would have lost control and had no power. And beneath that, was the fear that my kids would never manage in life, that they too would fail at being human. And that terrified me, because their failure meant my failure – and that was too much for me to bear. So I chose unconsciously to protect myself, to protect my reputation. I saw that I was trying to heal my inner child, by controlling and demanding from the children in front of me.

I attempted to manipulate them, to literally scare them into compliance. And when I realised that I was putting my needs to be seen as in control before their needs, as the children that relied on my love and acceptance to survive, it completely broke my heart.

I knew then, that I could no longer truly be the parent, truly be the adult, until I could drop all expectations that I had of my kids. For better or worse, they were here to fulfil their story and their destiny, not some projected dream I had for them.

But then a new fear arose. If I expected nothing of my children, did that mean I no longer cared? Was I now indifferent to their suffering but also to their hopes, their dreams and their passions? Inside myself, I knew that I cared about them more than anything in this world. I cared that they would be healthy, creative, happy and fulfilled. It meant everything to me, so how could I just ‘give up’ on them?

What is Aspirational Parenting?

We all have aspirations – the hopes and wishes for our children’s future, for their well-being, their happiness and success in their endeavors. This is a beautiful thing and it’s because we love them and care about them, often more than we do about our own success and fulfillment. The difference between parenting from expectation and parenting from aspiration, is not about trying to be a ‘better parent’. It’s simply the arising of an inner acceptance in us, that their lives may not turn out the way we hope and coming to terms with that reality.

If we are trying to engineer their lives to meet our hopes and wishes for them, we are attempting to manipulate and control their fate, because we think it’s our responsibility to create that future. We are then sending the subconscious message that if they don’t turn out happy, healthy and self-reliant, then we will have to suffer the guilt and shame of feeling like we have failed. The irony is that when we approach parenting from that place of expectation in an attempt to avoid  our own feelings of disappointment, it disconnects us from our children, because they feel the motive of fear and self-preservation within us.

Taking ownership of our own need to control the future changes everything. In fact, I discovered that in aspiration I was even more able to be the parent that I always wanted to be. Because I was now, for the first time, taking responsibility for my insecurities and fears about life and its inherent unpredictability. Because of that taking ownership, my energy changed and my language changed. Not through effort, but through expressing myself from a new place of understanding. Acting and communicating from a more aware state of mind.

My children witnessed the change. They felt the difference in me on an energetic level and as their trust grew, so my credibility and therefore my influence over them began to grow as well. The amazing thing I discovered was that because of that growing trust, I was able to guide, protect, encourage and support them – to create boundaries and protect them from harm, more than I ever could before. What parent would not want that?

At that time I had no concept or label to identify the change in me. All I knew was that my relationship with my children was becoming wonderful, peaceful and mutually respectful. I still had authority but without authoritarianism. I was still their father, but now they felt accepted, safe, loved and seen. That remains the case to this day and I believe it will as long as I live.

Breaking the Chain

Thirty years on, my kids are all adults and are their own people, living their lives as they have designed them. I remain a source of support and encouragement, and give advice when requested. We enjoy each other’s company, and a sweet harmony and rapport marks our communication and time that we spend together.

The fact that I was able to break that chain of trans-generational fear and frustration has in turn freed them from the damage that could have been. Of course, we have our moments of disagreement or difference of outlook, but that’s what happens when people feel safe to express themselves in respectful, authentic relationships, so it never becomes conflict, resentment or bitterness.

I now watch my daughter raise her daughter with patience, humour, friendship and love, but also with guidance, boundaries and a benevolent authority.

Seeing this arc of life, from being a small child to being a grandfather, inspired in me a calling. I saw that the depth of awareness that we bring to parenting is the defining quality that will decide how we evolve as humanity. I decided then that I wanted to help other parents to experience freedom from family conflict, abuse and trauma. Breaking a chain linked from generation to generation, passing on the pain and suffering of our ancestors.

Many parents today may have as children, felt unloved, unwanted, or never enough in the eyes of those they relied on for love and survival. The expectation on them to fulfil the needs of their parents was the heaviest weight, because to win love and to be cared for was not a given. They had to perform, to compete, they had to be what their parents expected. They were left feeling invalidated and abandoned.

There are a thousand experts out there to help heal those early wounds and to recover the inner child, but I wanted to get ahead of the cycle to give the next generation and all those that follow them, a chance to live unencumbered by the feelings of inadequacy and the desperate search for missing love and safety that has ravaged families and communities for generation after generation.

Spreading the Word

It was in this effort that I articulated the concept of expectation to aspiration. To reassure parents that releasing their child from expectation, and in so doing releasing themselves from disappointment, guilt and shame, does not mean indifference or neglect. That in moving from expectation to aspiration they can in fact be the best parents possible, because they re-connect with their children authentically. It is a game changer and a life changer.

The wonderful clinical psychologist Dr. Russel Barcley, a somewhat radical educator on children diagnosed with ADHD, recalled something he called the ‘Shepherd approach’ to parenting. He states:

“I like the ‘Shepherd’ view. You are a shepherd. You don’t ‘design’ the sheep. The idea that you are an engineer makes you responsible for everything that goes right or goes wrong. This is why parents come to me with such guilt! Because they believe the child’s success is all about them. Rather step back and say to yourself, ‘I am a shepherd to a unique individual’. Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they are nourished and protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn’t design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog! Yet this is what we see parents trying to do all the time.”

The Backlash – Hidden Expectation

Since the beginning of the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, a new type of parenting began to emerge that has continued to grow within what could be called ‘alternative’ or ‘new age’ idealism.

As children of ‘turned on’ parents, many kids of this era and subculture were ‘allowed to be themselves’ no matter what they said, no matter how they behaved or what they destroyed. However much they pushed and demanded and screamed, they were never contained, never taught to accept that life does not offer endless possibilities in which we can be and do whatever we want. They were not given boundaries and values that would develop in them the resilience to change and disappointment. This left many children of that era insecure, neglected, unregulated, and unprepared for the real world. It proved disastrous.

This new ‘enlightened idealism’ was still just the desire in the ‘liberated’ parent born out of expectation. Still a subtle attempt to engineer the child. Instead of being controlled and demanded upon, the child was left to run ‘wild and free’. This is like letting the sheep roam anywhere without being contained and protected. Without clear boundaries and direction. These children became insecure and many ‘free’ kids became what I call ‘boundary hunters’, desperate to be contained within safe limits and to feel protected from their own inexperience and curiosity. They were starved of healthy guidance and structure.

These are the two ends of the spectrum of raising children that can damage our kids for life. On one side we model what was imposed onto us by our parents, in turn attempting to engineer our children to either fit into a mould cast by the past, or on the other extreme, a retaliation against it, against all demands and authority, against the system. Befriending children to the point that they felt energetically as if they had to look after us, whilst they fulfilled our need to see them enjoy the acceptance and love we had craved so much as children. Either way, it is projecting our trauma onto the child. And either way, the two extremes of parenting styles are still an attempt to get our needs met. Conventional old school or alternative ‘free spirit’ approach.

Two sides of the same coin of appropriation and projection.

Children are super sensitive energy radars. They ‘feel’ the truth no matter how much we tell them that ‘we want the best for them’. They sense the place we are coming from. If it’s fear and expectation, our attempt to avoid shame and guilt, or humiliation and embarrassment, the child just ‘knows’ it, even if they don’t articulate it in their own minds as a thought.

When they feel this disconnection between our words and our energy, they retreat into their own space because they don’t sense in us the grounded emotional anchor that they crave to feel safe and secure, to be seen and accepted as they are. They smell the hypocrisy behind our words.

Identity Built in a Dysfunctional Environment

An identity begins to manifest more and more as the child matures. By the age of fifteen, almost all parental influence is gone, because all credibility is gone. Desperate for a sense of identity and a dignity of self-realisation, many children begin to rebel against the demands placed on them. This rebellion is way beyond a natural desire to move out of the nest and forge their own path. It’s a desperate attempt to feel some sense of agency and autonomy set against a headwind of demands and expectations. Even if it means to underperform or ‘fail’ at life, to act against their own interests and better judgment, the young adolescent will subconsciously destroy their own potential in order to not conform.

This is the birthplace of self-sabotage and it can be disastrous, because if success means compliance to expectation, if it means surrender and contrition to what others demand – whatever that demand is and however subtle or benign it may appear – then failure becomes much preferable because at least it’s ‘their’ failure. At least they get to have some control and identity through rejecting and destroying the hopes of those that have attempted to direct and engineer them into a life of their design.

Balance, Authenticity and Energy

Being an aspirational parent requires control and direction. It requires guidance and healthy boundaries. But it is all set in that environment of ownership, respect, and real acknowledgement of the child and their unique life to be lived.

We stop trying to create a future for them based on a projection in our heads, and instead we become present to the being in front of us. Now we are really able to meet their needs because we have begun to integrate and process our own fears and anxieties about being seen to ‘do the right thing’, in both the old school and alternative mindsets. Whichever group it is we choose to belong to.

A New and Unpredictable World

Today more than ever, our kids can just disappear into another world. Technology has created alternative realities that are as, and often far more, influential and important to young people than the ‘real’ world. These are environments that are highly addictive and it’s a mysterious and alien concept for parents brought up on bicycles, sport and ‘real’ physical connection, but we have to realise that the expectation that our kids should experience a childhood closer to the one we lived is simply bewildering to this generation.

Once again, moving from expectation to aspiration allows us as parents to come to terms with the strange new world we now inhabit, and to find new ways to help prepare our children for a world that none of us can predict. Of course it is not just in the family environment that we need to see adaptation. Society itself, and more specifically, the established education system becomes more anachronistic by the day. Virtual and Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Social Media are growing their impact at an alarming rate. As they say, the future is not what it used to be!

In his essay, Craft (1984), compared the two distinct schools of thought regarding the ‘correct’ root of the verb ‘to educate’. Each of these two roots has a somewhat opposing approach to what it means to educate a child.

The first, ‘Educare’ (to train or mould), carries the belief that we should model our children’s development and learning on our own experience and mentality. That we as adults know what is best for the child and what values and principals they should live by. This is a system that is mainly based in the past and is becoming less helpful as we evolve into a new era of knowledge and information. The system of memorising information and passing a test is seen as less and less relevant as are the axioms of grades, comparison, competition and individualism.

The other root ‘Educere’ (to draw out, as in ‘educate’ water from a well), supports the notion that each child is born with an intrinsic knowledge already within them and that this can be drawn out of the child. It believes in empowering children to prepare for a world that none of us can predict. They will need to be able to solve problems that don’t yet even exist.

As with the two extremes of parenting styles, here again, it’s useful to find nuance and balance in the two approaches. The point is to see the good and the problems in both and so create a ‘hybrid’ approach to how we support our children as they grow.

The last few years have shown us that we have all become complacent about change and the unexpected. The next generation will need, above and beyond the conventions of academic knowledge, problem solving skills, independent thought, new methods of learning through collaboration, cooperation and synergy. Most of all though, they will need to become resilient to change. The theory of evolution describes survival not of the fittest, but of the most adaptable and adaptability has been the speciality of the human animal on Earth.

And that brings me back to the start, and why I am so driven to create spaces of learning and support through workshops, retreats and courses, helping to bring more parents from expectation to aspiration, allowing us all to experience greater harmony, trust and connection in our families and, ultimately, in our communities and beyond.

If we want to create a world that is more evolved in consciousness, more adaptable and sustainable, it will be down to how we teach and raise the next generation. It is, I believe, the greatest challenge we face if we are to thrive in this world, and I am convinced that moving from expectation to aspiration will play a fundamental role in that future.

If you would like to find out more about upcoming workshops and events on aspirational parenting, click on the link and register your interest: marcitzler.com