What's Good Parenting All About?

What more damage can parents do than to spiritually cripple their child so badly that it ruins its life in this world and in the life after death, too?

- Yoginder S. Sikand

A good way to define good parenting is that it is the art of seeking to help fulfill all the essential needs of one’s child so that it can go on to fulfill the purpose of its creation. Human beings have several types of essential needs. These can be classified into broadly three categories: physical or bodily needs, mental (including emotional and intellectual) needs, and spiritual needs. Good parenting is the art of seeking to provide for all these three sets of needs of one’s child. Fulfilling these different needs of one’s child is not an end in itself, though. It is, rather, a means through which the child can go on to fulfill the role and purpose for which God has created it and has sent it into the world. This purpose—which is nothing other than the very purpose of human life as such— is described in various religious traditions in different ways: as self-realization, as God-realization, as union with God, as surrender to God, as the dissolution of the false ego, as liberation from the cycle of birth and death, and so on. Despite their seeming differences, these definitions have one thing in common: the insistence that the purpose of one’s life is one’s spiritual evolution.

Fundamental Spiritual Purpose of the Child’s Life.