On Parenting, Pressure, and the Courage to Let a Soul Be
By Harshna Chandolia
Most of us are either already parents, or will become one someday. And even if we are not, every one of us has been a child, which means we’ve lived, in some form, the experience of being shaped by someone else’s expectations.
Over the past year, I’ve found myself pausing more often than usual while reading the news. There has been a quiet but deeply unsettling rise in stories of young children and teenagers taking their own lives, many of them under some form of academic, social, or parental pressure.
According to recent data from the National Crime Records Bureau, thousands of students in India die by suicide each year, with academic pressure, fear of failure, and family expectations being among the leading causes. Globally too, the World Health Organization identifies suicide as one of the leading causes of death among young people.
These are not just statistics.They are signals that something, somewhere, is not being held with enough awareness.
The moment we become parents, something subtle begins to shift. The child is no longer just a being, they become “my child.”
And in that “my”, something else quietly enters: expectation.
Expectation of who they should become. How they should behave.
What they should achieve. What will make us feel proud.
And slowly, without even realizing it, parenting becomes less about the child… and more about the self.
This doesn’t come from a place of harm. It comes from conditioning, from insecurity, from love that has unknowingly taken the shape of control.
There was a case recently that stayed with me. A young lawyer who took his life, leaving behind a note that directly blamed the pressure he felt from his father. This is not an isolated story, it is part of a pattern we are only beginning to acknowledge.
And it brings up an uncomfortable but necessary question:
What is the role of a parent, really?
The Chandogya Upanishad offers a perspective that feels almost radical in today’s world. It reminds us that a parent is not the owner of the child, but a medium through which a soul enters this world. A womb is not a possession, it is a passage. A child, first and foremost, belongs to the universe. They come with their own karmas, their own tendencies, their own path to walk. So why do we attach so much of our identity to them? Why do we feel the need to shape them into something that fits our understanding of success, respect, or security?
As parents, we often ask:
Should we not guide our children? Should we not teach them what is right and wrong?
But what is right, and what is wrong? These are not absolute truths. They are shaped by culture, time, and personal belief. What one generation sees as success, another may see as limitation. What one family values, another may question.
So if certainty itself is fluid, then what can a parent truly offer?
Perhaps the role of a parent is not to decide the path… but to hold the space.
To offer love without condition.
To teach empathy, kindness, and resilience.
To create an environment where the child feels safe enough to discover who they are, not who they are expected to be.
Every child carries a natural inclination, a quiet intelligence, a way of being that is uniquely theirs, but that uniqueness is often lost under layers of comparison, pressure, and expectation. We don’t allow them to explore, we instruct them to perform.
And in doing so, we slowly disconnect them from their own truth.
To parent consciously is not easy. It requires stepping back from the strongest form of ego, the idea of “mine.” It asks us to see the child not as an extension of ourselves, but as an individual consciousness passing through us.
You are not here to create them. You are here to support their becoming.
To notice what lights them up, to understand how they see the world, to help them find what truly works for them, not what worked for you, or what the world expects of them. Because anything imposed will always feel like a misfit.
And perhaps that is where the deepest shift lies. From control to trust, from expectation to awareness, from ownership to responsibility.
Because in the end, the question is not:
Did your child become who you wanted them to be?
The question is:
Did they feel free enough to become who they truly are?