Parents & children - a bonding for life

"Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world" - every mother feels the same when she holds her baby in her arms - that her whole world is in her arms... and that she is responsible in keeping that world safe, secure, loved and cherished.

But after growing up how many children will develop such a feeling towards their mother or for their father for that matter?

Earlier, this question never arose because children considered parents as the integral and important part of their families.

Now it is not so and hence parents too seem to develop a strange mindset to suit the stranger life situations which make them feel like outsiders or strangers in their own children's homes - they prefer to be on their own till their physical and mental energies sustain them and once they get depleted, they prefer to be in a facility or a community with geriatric support and environment rather than be a burden on their children - those very parents who slaved most of their waking hours to provide comforts and future security for their children. What an irony!

A leadership professor opined - "If you do everything for your children, what will they do for themselves?" How pertinent and incisive!

Instead of trying to accrue material wealth for their children, from their tender age parents must teach them and guide them into harmony, not just give loads of money.

The cardinal rule is that parents must imbibe familial values and contentment in children - "Wealth enough to support one's needs, health enough to make work a pleasure, humility enough to accept mistakes, love enough to move the heart to be loving and helpful to others, strength enough to battle and win over hurdles, hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future and that how much we enjoy what we have is more important than how much we have!"

With these strong mottos in place, the bond between parents and children will not break in life's rat race.