Raising Children

Excerpts from Conversations with God An Uncommon Dialogue Series:

I believe this to be sacred spiritual material. I see now that this is true of the entire trilogy,
and that these books will be read and studied for decades, even for generations. Perhaps,
for centuries. Because, taken together, the trilogy covers an amazing range of topics, from
how to make relationships work to the nature of ultimate reality and the cosmology of the universe,
and includes observations on life, death, romance, marriage, sex, parenting, health,
education, economics, politics, spirituality and religion, life work and right livelihood, physics,
time, social mores and customs, the process of creation, our relationship with God, ecology,
crime and punishment, life in highly evolved societies of the cosmos, right and wrong, cultural
myths and cultural ethics, the soul, soul partners, the nature of genuine love, and the
way to glorious expression of the part of ourselves that knows Divinity as our natural
heritage.
My prayer is that you will receive benefit from this work.
Blessed be.

Neale: Human beings are "children themselves" for 40 or 5O years?

God: From a certain perspective, yes. I know this is difficult to hold as your truth, but look around you. Perhaps the behaviors of your race might help prove My point. The difficulty is that in your society, you are said to be "all grown up" and ready for the world at 21. Add to this the fact that many of you were raised by mothers and fathers who were not much older than 21 themselves when they began raising you, and you can begin to see the problem. If child-bearers were meant to be child-raisers, child bearing would not have been made possible until you were fifty! Child bearing was meant to be an activity of the young, whose bodies are well developed and strong. Child raising was meant to be an activity of the elders, whose minds are well developed and strong.  In your society you have insisted on making child- bearers responsible for child raising—with the result that you've made not only the process of parenting very difficult, but distorted many of the energies surrounding the sexual act as well as.

Neale: Uh ... could You explain?

God: Yes. Many humans have observed what I've observed here. Namely, that a good many humans—perhaps most—are not truly capable of raising children when they are capable of having them. However, having discovered this, humans have put in place exactly the wrong solution. Rather than allow younger humans to enjoy sex, and if it produces children, have the elders raise them, you tell young humans not to engage in sex until they are ready to take on the responsibility of raising children. You have made it "wrong" for them to have sexual experiences before that time, and thus have created a taboo around what was intended to be one of life's most joyful celebrations. Of course, this is a taboo to which offspring will pay little attention—and for good reason: it is entirely unnatural to obey it. Human beings desire to couple and copulate as soon as they feel the inner signal which says they are ready. This is human nature. Yet their thought about their own nature will have more to do with what you, as parents, have told them than about what they are feeling inside. Your children look to you to tell them what life is all about. So when they have their first urges to peek at each other, to play innocently with each other, to explore each other's "differences," they will look to you for signals about this. Is this part of their human nature "good"? Is it "bad"? Is it approved of? Is it to be stifled? Held back? Discouraged? It is observed that what many parents have told their offspring about this part of their human nature has had its origin in all manner of things: what they were told; what their religion says; what their society thinks—everything except the natural order of things. In the natural order of your species, sexuality is budding at anywhere from age 9 to age 14. From age 15 onward it is very much present and expressing in most human beings. Thus begins a race against time—with children stampeding toward the fullest release of their own joyful sexual energy, and parents stampeding to stop them. Parents have needed all the assistance and all the alliances they could find in this struggle, since, as has been noted, they are asking their offspring to not do something that is every bit a part of their nature. So adults have invented all manner of familial, cultural, religious, social, and economic pressures, restrictions, and limitations to justify their unnatural demands of their offspring. Children have thus grown to accept that their own sexuality is unnatural. How can anything that is "natural" be so shamed, so always-stopped, so controlled, held at bay, restrained, bridled, and denied?

Neale: Well, I think You're exaggerating a bit here. Don't You think You're exaggerating? Really?

God: What do you think is the impact on a four- or five-year-old child when parents won't even use the correct name for certain of their body parts? What are you telling the child about your level of comfort with that, and what you think theirs should be?

Neale: Uh...

God: Yes ... "uh ..." indeed.

Neale: Well, "we just don't use those words," as my grammy used to say. It's just that "wee-wee" and "your bottom" sounds better.

God: Only because you have so much negative "baggage" attached to the actual names of these body parts that you can barely use the words in ordinary conversation. At the youngest ages, of course, children don't know why parents feel this way, but merely are left with the impression, the often indelible impression, that certain body parts are "not okay," and that anything having to do with them is embarrassing—if not "wrong." As children grow older and move into their teens, they may come to realize that this is not true, but then they are told in very clear terms about the connection between pregnancy and sexuality, and about how they will have to raise the children they create, and so they now have another reason for feeling that sexual expression is "wrong"—and the circle is complete. What this has caused in your society is confusion and not a little havoc—which is always the result of fooling around with nature. You have created sexual embarrassment, repression, and shame—which has led to sexual inhibition, dysfunction, and violence. You will, as a society, always be inhibited about that over which you are embarrassed; always be dysfunctional with behaviors which have been repressed, and always act out violently in protest of being made to feel shame about that over which you know in your heart you should never have felt shame at all.

Neale: Then Freud was on to something when he said that a huge amount of the anger in the human species might be sexually related—deep-seated rage over having to repress basic and natural physical instincts, interests, and urges.

God: More than one of your psychiatrists has ventured as much. The human being is angry because it knows it should feel no shame over something that feels so good— and yet it does feel shame, and guilt. First, the human becomes angry with the Self for feeling so good about something which is supposed to be so obviously "bad."  Then, when they finally realize they've been duped—that sexuality is supposed to be a wonderful, honorable, glorious part of the human experience—they become angry with others: parents, for repressing them, religion for shaming them, members of the opposite sex for daring them, the whole society for controlling them. Finally, they become angry with themselves, for allowing all of this to inhibit them. Much of this repressed anger has been channeled into the construction of distorted and misguided moral values in the society in which you now live—a society which glorifies and honors, with monuments, statues, and commemorative stamps, films, pictures, and TV programs, some of the world's ugliest acts of violence, but hides— or worse yet, cheapens—some of the world's most beautiful acts of love. And all of this—all of this—has emerged from a single thought: that those who bear children, bear also the sole responsibility for raising them.

Neale: But if the people who have children aren't responsible for raising them, who is?

God: The whole community. With special emphasis on the elders. The elders? In most advanced races and societies, elders raise the offspring, nurture the offspring, train the offspring, and pass on to the offspring the wisdom, teachings, and traditions of their kind. Later, when we talk about some of these advanced civilizations, I'll touch on this again. In any society where producing offspring at a young age is not considered "wrong"— because the tribal elders raise them and there is, therefore, no sense of overwhelming responsibility and burden—sexual repression is unheard of, and so is rape, deviance, and social-sexual dysfunction.

Neale: Are there such societies on our planet?

God: Yes, although they have been disappearing. You have sought to eradicate them, assimilate them, because you have thought them to be barbarian. In what you have called your nonbarbarian societies, children (and wives, and husbands, for that matter) are thought of as property, as personal possessions, and child- bearers must therefore become child-raisers, because they must take care of what they "own." A root thought at the bottom of many of your society's problems is this idea that spouses and children are personal possessions, that they are "yours." We'll examine this whole subject of "ownership" later, when we explore and discuss life among highly evolved beings. But for now, just think about this for a minute. Is anyone really emotionally ready to raise children at the time they're physically ready to have them? The truth is, most humans are not equipped to raise children even in their 30s and 40s—and shouldn't be expected to be. They really haven't lived enough as adults to pass deep wisdom to their children.

Neale: I've heard that thought before. Mark Twain had a take on this. He was said to have commented, "When I was 19, my father knew nothing. But when I was 35, I was amazed at how much the Old Man had learned."

God: He captured it perfectly. Your younger years were never meant to be for truth teaching, but for truth-gathering. How can you teach children a truth you haven't yet gathered? You can't, of course. So you'll wind up telling them the only truth you know—the truth of others. Your father's, your mother's, your culture's, your religion's. Anything, everything, but your own truth. You are stiil searching for that. And you will be searching, and experimenting, and finding, and failing, and forming and reforming your truth, your idea about yourself, until you are half a century on this planet, or near to it. Then, you may begin at last to settle down, and settle in, with your truth. And probably the biggest truth on which you'll agree is that there is no constant truth at all; that truth, like life itself, is a changing thing, a growing thing, an evolving thing— and that just when you think that process of evolution has stopped, it has not, but only really just begun.

Neale: Yes, I've already come to that. I'm past 50, and I've arrived at that.

God: Good. You are now a wiser man. An elder. Now you should raise children. Or better yet, ten years from now. It is the elders who should raise the offspring—and who were intended to. It is the elders who know of truth, and life. Of what is important and what is not. Of what is really meant by such terms as integrity, honesty, loyalty, friendship, and love. I see the point You have been making here. It is difficult to accept, but many of us have barely moved from "child" to "student" when we have children of our own, and feel we have to start teaching them. So we figure, well, I'll teach them what my parents taught me. Thus, the sins of the father are visited upon the son, even unto the seventh generation. How can we change that? How can we end the cycle? Place the raising of children in the hands of your respected Old Ones. Parents see the children whenever they wish, live with them if they choose, but are not solely responsible for their care and upbringing. The physical, social, and spiritual needs of the children are met by the entire community, with education and values offered by the elders. Later in our dialogue, when we talk about those other cultures in the universe, we'll look at some new models for living. But these models won't work the way you've currently structured your lives.

Please read Conversations with God to be continued...