Date: 10/04/2025 10/05/2025
Location: Star Ocean Meditation Center
Teacher: Sara
Dharma Knowledge
The Dharma and Parent–Child Relationships
Parent–child relationships are often framed as matters of emotion, moral duty, or educational technique. From the perspective of the Dharma, however, they are first and foremost issues of causality and cognition. The Dharma does not offer prescriptions for being a “good parent.” Instead, it analyzes how attachment, misunderstanding, and suffering arise within close relationships, and how these patterns can be understood without generating further suffering.
The foundational position of the Dharma is that all relationships are dependently arisen. Parents and children are not possessions of one another, but life processes that intersect under specific conditions. Biological connection does not establish ownership; it only marks a conditional encounter. Failure to recognize this distinction is a primary source of conflict.
In parenting, a common distortion occurs when responsibility turns into control. Parents often treat children as extensions of themselves, projecting expectations onto their identity, choices, and future. This impulse usually stems not from malice, but from ignorance—mistaking conditional relationship for inherent authority. Once attachment forms, suffering follows as a structural consequence.
For children, suffering often arises from a complementary form of attachment: grounding self-worth in parental approval and judgment. When identity depends on another’s expectations, conflict and pressure become unavoidable. The Dharma does not side with either parent or child; it identifies a shared root—misconceptions about self, other, and relationship.
The Dharma does not deny parental responsibility. It fully acknowledges the practical obligations of care, guidance, education, and protection. What it distinguishes is responsibility versus dominion. Responsibility responds to conditions; dominion asserts control. The former reduces disorder, the latter intensifies resistance and harm.
Methodologically, the Dharma offers not emotional techniques, but cognitive training. With right view, parents recognize that children are independent outcomes of conditions, not products of personal design. With mindfulness, both sides observe how fear, expectation, and comparison trigger emotional reactions. With right action, behavior is guided by the reduction of harm rather than the demand for compliance.
Compassion in the Dharma is neither indulgence nor self-sacrifice. It is an attitude grounded in clarity. Loving-kindness wishes for stability; compassion understands that others, too, are constrained by conditions. This allows parents to relinquish authority rooted in suffering, and children to relinquish rebellion as a proof of autonomy. Stability arises from understanding, not emotional struggle.
Over time, the Dharma points toward a transformation of the parent–child relationship—from dependent binding to functional companionship. During childhood, guidance predominates; in adulthood, mutual respect between independent individuals becomes appropriate. Clinging to outdated structures prolongs conflict; recognizing changing conditions allows the relationship to loosen naturally.
Thus, the Dharma does not idealize parent–child relationships. It demystifies them. Such relationships are neither inherently harmonious nor inherently justified; they are simply one form of conditioned interaction. When the demand for how they “should be” is abandoned in favor of understanding how they actually function, flexibility and space emerge.
The Dharma does not teach how to love better. It teaches how to stop turning love into suffering.
