We are in conflict bringing up our son. My husband wants to be stricter and I want to be more loving.
Osho - So let him do his thing and you go on doing your thing; there is no problem. The child needs both, because this is how life is: if a child only gets love he will suffer; if he only gets hardness, then he will suffer. He needs both. That’s the function of the mother and the father: the mother should go on giving love so the child knows that love is possible and the father remains hard so the child knows life is not so easy. It is how life is!
There are thorns and there are roses and the child has to be prepared for both. The world is not going to be a mother; the world is going to be a hard struggle. So if you just go on giving him love he will not have any bone. When life is there in reality he will simply collapse, because he will wait for the mother and [she] is not there; life does not bother about him. Then he will be grateful to [his father] because life will put him out the door many times, will shout at him, and then he will know that he can tackle that too; he has been prepared for that too.
A child has to be prepared for both softness and hardness, yin and yang both, and that’s the function of the father and mother. The feminine and the masculine both have to be given so the child is ready: whatsoever the situation he will be able to respond. If life is hard, he can he hard too; if life is loving, he can be loving too; he will not have any fixation.
Now if [his father] alone is training him he will be fixed. He will be a hard person, he will be a perfect German, but he will never be able to love and he will never be able to accept love because he does not know what love is. He will be a soldier, he will be ready to fight, to kill or be killed. That will be his only logic, he will not know anything else. That too is dangerous. That’s what happened to the German nation, that’s what helped Adolf Hitler. Two world wars have proved that German mothers have not been as loving as they should be and German fathers have been too disciplinarian. That’s why the whole world has suffered because of Germany.
So if the child is left alone to him [his father], the child will become a victim of any Adolf Hitler any day; that is dangerous. If the child is left to you, the child will become too Indian, so wherever there is any fight he will simply escape, he will surrender; before even fighting he will surrender! He will be a slave. Both ways he will get fixed, and a really alive person has no fixation. He is liquid: he can move and be hard when the circumstances are such that he needs to be hard like steel, and when circumstances are such that he needs to be like a rose flower, soft and vulnerable, he can soften.
This whole expanse should be available to the child’s consciousness so that he can move easily. So both are good; I will not say to choose any. And there is no need to be in any conflict: just go on doing your thing and let him do his thing, and sometimes even if the conflict is there that too is good! But sometimes too much of anything becomes ugly.
Sometimes the child should know this too — that his father and mother can fight — because some day he will find a woman and there will be fight; he should know that fight is natural. In fact whatsoever is natural is good. And now that you are both becoming alert things will change.
Good read..
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