There are two ways to teach a child right from wrong. One is to say you have to do such and such as it is a rule (in the house, or in the Bible, etc.) and the other is to explain why a rational person is serving their own best interest. Often showing what is in your best interest involves bringing something to one's attention, or just as often giving the child some information that they didn't have. If the information and the things pointed out to the child, that they may not have noticed until they were pointed out to them, and if the conclusion is extremely reasonable, the child will see the sense in it. There is really nothing to rebel against, so long as the facts were true, and the conclusions lucid.
However, how children is more often taught is the first way. Some 'rule' is invoked (either the parents or some scripture) and there is an implied threat. The implied threat is usually that the parent will disprove of the child if they fail to follow the rule. In other words no reason is given, only the implied threat.
Now it is a natural part of growing up that an adolescent must break from need of the parents' constant approval. One who cannot make that break never really matures. They remain their parents' child. Hence, it becomes necessary that the child rebel and test the approval of the parent. This becomes necessitated by the implied threat. It is not an option at that point, if the child wishes to mature.
But in the first case, the threat of disapproval was never implied, or need not have been. It was never about approval and disapproval, it was about learning the consequences of actions, having these pointed out in a rational and happy and interesting way. The parent then is seen as a concerned friend, an advocate, not a judge and jury with meaningless 'rules' that have no clear source.
Now let's take an example of the second sort of teaching.
Let us say that child is seven, and the parent wishes to teach the child why street drugs are a bad idea, long before the child faces them everyday in school. Let us say that the way this parent goes about teaching this is to actually show it to them. Assuming the family knows some people who take drugs, and many that don't. It is almost a universal truth that those that take drugs don't have as high a quality of life as those that don't. Once you point out these people that the child knows, they can actually see this correlation. It ceases to be a 'moral rule' and becomes a mere observation of life as it really is.
The same is so of divorce and promiscuity. Point out to the child that their friends who come from a household with promiscuous parents have a lower quality of life, are not as adjusted. Believe it or not any twelve year old can see this if it is pointed out to them with real children they know. Then point out the quality of life of children whose parents are married, and who live with their real biological father. Those children have a better quality of life. Have the child contemplate what they would want for their own children -- to be raised with strange boyfriends and girlfriends of their ever-hunting oversexed parents, or with their biological parents.
The point is that one points out to the child the facts of the consequences, without judging these actions as 'wrong' but as not leading to anything very pleasant. Quality of life is the key. People who marry and don't take drugs have a higher quality of life.
In addition there are many facts that a child ought to know, such as the actual affects of drugs, and about the various physical, psychological, and social disorders that accompany promiscuity.
Now sadly most people in America are raised the first way, with rules and threats. This is to say nothing of the hypocrisy that usually accompanies such child-raising. And hence they project this bad parenting onto God, or if they are raised in a Baba family, onto Meher Baba. God or Baba become the bad parent.
I was raised the wrong way, the first way. The notion was that Baba gave a rule about drugs. It was implied that Baba would not approve if I broke his 'rule.' So naturally, I eventually (to find myself) was forced as an adolescent to 'rebel.' The result was I felt guilty and then felt that all that happened after that was punishment.
I was very lucky, however, to go to India, where I met a better parent, an Indian. This person heard my story and my guilt and sense of God/Baba being angry in heaven at me. The person felt bad that I had been taught so wrongly. The person said, "Oh no! Baba does not punish. Baba is only telling people what is good for them, because he wants them not to suffer." This came as a revelation to me. A whole new way of looking at Baba, as a real friend with more information, who wants me to know to protect me, not a bad parent threatening judgment for disobeying his 'rules.'
I raised my daughter the second way. And she is an adult and has never taken any drugs at all.
Now about the subject of hypocrisy. Many don't understand what the word 'hypocrisy' means. Some think that if they took drugs when they were young, they have no right to 'preach.' Well by all means don't preach, teach. Hypocrisy is pretending to be, feel, or think what you don't. If you once took drugs, realized it was a mistake and why, and now want to explain it right to your child, where is the hypocrisy. Now if I were still taking drugs, that would be hypocrisy of course. But so long as what I express is my honest belief and experience when I tell it (along with the truth about my past, undramatized) there is no hypocrisy. In fact it is honesty, and the child will feel that and respect it.
Now the sad thing is that those who have been raised poorly, rebelled, feel a repressed sense of shame, are stuck in a rut that they may now never be able to untie themselves from. In a way they are cooked. After you cook a meal you can't really take the ingredients apart and make something else. For chemical reactions happen in the cooking. Things are lost, some are intermingled, even on an atomic level. Cooking is not just heating, it is modifying the chemistry of the ingredients. It cannot be reconstituted into the ingredients from which it was made. Similarly, people who have aged have formed a kind of mental chemistry that can't be undone. This is the sense in which once one is brainwashed (cooked) he can't be unbrainwashed. It's sad and I have no right to tease people for it. But it is infinitely frustrating that I must hear the excuses of such people, defending the rightness of their failures, which (as just explained above in talking of parenting) was not their fault.
Yet I hope someone with children might read this and rethink how they raise the next generation of Baba lovers.
More and more evidence shows Baba was right about drugs, promiscuity, and occultism. Baba is only wanting to protect those who love him enough to trust him, or at least who trust his wisdom with no love at all. My experience more and more is that Baba is right. Baba said in his Universal Message that he lays down no precepts (rules or edicts for people). And yet he definitely does inform us of what is harmful and why, and in the case he even includes the spiritual consequences of these actions that I have not even touched on here.
Baba is not Moses laying down the law. He is the concerned father who wants to give his kids who know less than him the heads up on some facts about the consequences of certain actions. Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, accept the consequences and know that God does not judge you. For he even knows your foolishness, and we learn by our foolishness as much as from our successes.
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