What is your guidance for navigating the balance between providing structure and allowing for freedom when it comes to helping young kids understand the principles of ECK?

—Laura Blank, USA

Dear Laura,

Someone who has a golden heart, like you—and is alive in their spiritual senses—will guide by example and through their life story.

How did you learn about ECK when growing up?  When did you appreciate structure, and when did you cherish your freedom to choose and explore?

Finding balance in any endeavor is a moment-by-moment process.  The skilled navigator experiments and learns with experience, developing an intuitive sense of what’s needed and when.

Here is a sample of timeless wisdom from our good friend Paul Twitchell on introducing ECK, with freedom, to your children.  Your true contemplation of this bit of treasure will reveal ongoing insights on your parenting adventure:

     ECK is an individual study. Children will, as we all do, experience ECK in their own way and not as their parents or as other children do. So make no comparisons, even in your own mind or attitudes, concerning their actions or reactions to the discourses. Be completely willing for them to do or say whatever is real to them about ECK or the discourses. However, this does not mean that you should let them misunderstand a point or principle. But before correcting their understanding, first agree that their viewpoint is one way to look at the subject, then explain your understanding of the principle.

     This is an excellent way to talk to anyone about ECK. By agreeing with someone and not declaring him wrong, one avoids the resistance of one who feels invalidated. No matter what ideas a person has, to be bluntly disagreed with and flatly told that one is wrong always triggers immediate resistance. So let the other person be right, then with the attitude that one is just going a little further with his idea, tell him how one might view the topic under discussion from the viewpoint of ECK. He will be a lot more willing to listen to and understand what you are talking about. This is particularly true of children. Parents are prone to make their children wrong and validate their own actions and beliefs by trying to form their children in their own image.

                                                                      —Paul Twitchell, Your Children and the ECK Discourses, pp. 1–2

Keep the spiritual lines open to the ECK and the Inner Master to find a happy equilibrium.