A Child Needs No Instruction Manual

“Any normal child has come as a complete being. You can only nurture the child to his or her full potential.”

—Sadhguru

Q: Somebody said that when a baby is born, it does not come with an instruction manual. If, hypothetically, one had to write a manual of how a human being should be, from birth to death, what would such a thing be?

Sadhguru: Empty book would be great. Now you are trying to turn everything into machinery. There are other dimensions to a human being than just “operating” him in some way that you think is useful. A human being need not be useful to anybody. It is just that the bullocks which are yoked to a cart look at the wild deer romping about in the forest and think, “Oh, how they are wasting their lives, not useful to anybody. No good.” But there is joy in the deer. You are yoked, and there is no joy in you.

If you become a joyless human being by just trying to be useful, then all the purposes of life are defeated. What you are doing will not mean anything. Socially, maybe they will give you an award for the miserable face that you carried and the things that you did in the world, but in life it does not mean anything.

Drop the Instruction Manuals

Stop looking at life through someone else’s intelligence. Learn to look at your life with more intelligence. Everyone has the necessary intelligence to look at their life sensibly if other influences are taken away. The problem is, you are too influenced by past and present heroes. In the end, your mentality is just that of a fan club. Fan club is a very rudimentary mentality.

Any normal child has come as a complete being. You can only nurture the child to his or her full potential. You cannot make something else out of them. If your ideal tree is a coconut tree, and a mango tree sprouts in your garden, what would you do? Because it does not look like a coconut tree, you will chop off all the branches and just leave one. That would be a very poor mango tree. The only thing you can do is nurture the child to its fullest intelligence, physical well-being and emotional well-being. This will happen only when you just nurture it, not tamper with it. 

Creating a Conducive Atmosphere

Children have come through you, they do not come from you. Do not ever think they are yours. It is a privilege they have happened through you. Your business is just to provide them a loving and supportive atmosphere. Do not try to impose your thoughts and emotions, your philosophies, your belief systems and nonsense upon the child. He has enough of his own intelligence to find his way. If you create the necessary conducive atmosphere for his intelligence to grow fully, he will handle it the way he knows. 

“Will everything go right?” It may go right, it may go wrong – that is not the point. But the chances of it going wrong are minimal. When the child grows up exercising his own intelligence, if he makes one mistake, he has the intelligence to correct it. As long as they are working towards their wellbeing and they are not doing something negative against their own life, you must wait. For the entire time until the child becomes twenty-one, you must feel like you are still pregnant. Just wait. When the child was inside, you did nothing, right? Just nourished yourself well and waited. Just like that – provide the atmosphere and wait.  

Editor’s Note: Download the e-book "Inspire Your Child, Inspire the World" for more of Sadhguru’s wisdom on parenting in . Enter ‘0’ in the price field for a free download.