On Raising Children:

How important is it for a couple to be married before having children?

It's common for most children these days to be raised by two working parents or by a single parent who works.  Is this dynamic good for children and parents?  What do the Records show about this trend?

What is the nature of children being born at this time?  How are the changes humanity is going through affecting these new beings, or are they affecting or reflecting the path humanity is taking?

How important is it for a couple to be married before having children?

From the perspective of the Akashic Records, if you are defining marriage as a legal or social contract, it is not very important at all.  If you define marriage as a soul contract and a commitment that has been made between the two people, an energetic bond, then it is very important. 

Every child that comes into the world has a Divine, all-knowing soul and therefore every person in the world has a Divine, all-knowing soul.  Each of you chooses where to be conceived, how to be conceived and where and in what situation to be born.  You negotiate with your biological parents before you are even conceived.  At a soul level, you understand what their lives are meant to bring them and therefore, what being their child will involve for you.  Each of you sets yourselves up with a “perfect mess” -- the perfect situation that will bring your gifts, your strengths, and will also bring to you the sacred wounds and challenges that will lead you to those gifts and strengths.  Ultimately when a child is conceived you can trust that child chose to be conceived into that situation and that environment.

That being said, it is vitally important that the adults who are conceiving a child work with as much integrity as possible.  Meaning that as you choose to conceive a child, or choose to maintain a pregnancy, it is vitally important that you mindfully and consciously set up relationships that will support the child's life.  Those relationships are vitally important not only in regard to the fellow biological co-parent, but it is also true in regard to the relationships you have in your life that form the fabric of the life the child will come into.  It is vitally important that you be just as mindful of the other adults that you invite into the child's life as you are with the relationship with the co-parent or co-parents.  If you have a relationship that is unhealthy with a mother, a brother, a friend, then it is vitally important that you bring yourself into alignment with that relationship before conceiving the child or remove that relationship from your life before conceiving a child.  In a sense you could say that the choice to have a child creates a calling for you to live your life with more intention and integrity.

So in a sense, the question about marriage is actually a question about community.  It is the responsibility of every parent, either biological or adoptive, that you ask the same questions of all your relationships and you adjust those relationships so that what you might look for in a co-parent you also look for in the fabric of community that will surround you as a parent.  Make sure that you are an integrity and that you have asked for appropriate commitments from your friends and loved ones to support that child, or to stay out of the way or to cause as little harm as possible to the child.  Ultimately the legal contract of marriage matters far less than the energetic and social contracts that you make and hold together in your life in general and how those will affect your child. 

It's common for most children these days to be raised by two working parents or by a single parent who works.  Is this dynamic good for children and parents?  What do the Records show about this trend?

As with all things, this trend is occurring for a divine purpose and this trend is both a result of and a driving force for helping you expand and evolve as a human family.  You are in the midst of questioning and dissolving the aspects of the traditional marriage model that no longer work.  The traditional marriage model was not the original model for humanity.  Your original model was communal.  The earliest human beings favored communal rather than the biological relationships.  Community members may not have even remembered conceived the child because ultimately a child belonged to a community, and all of you belonged to each other. 

The model that favored the biological parents as being the primary caregivers evolved out of necessity when human beings met times of hardship that created isolation or dissolution of communities.  At first this happened only in great traumas when tribes were disbursed.  Over time that biological connections became privileged in different parts of the world among particular groups or communities. 

Over the process of tens of thousands of years, that biological connection became more and more privileged in some cultures, and eventually that biological privilege helped plant the seeds that eventually grew into patriarchy. 

Over time, as patriarchy evolved, as the oppression of women evolved in different ways throughout different societies, you eventually led yourselves to the model in which men were expected to fulfill a certain role in child rearing and women were expected to fulfill a different role in childrearing.  Men and women felt a great deal of pressure to fulfill those norms and therefore were unable to ask themselves that they as an individual unique and gifted individual, wanted most to bring the world and what role they most wanted to play. 

The focus on biological rather than community connection led to a set of limitations that worked well for many generations.  As you grow beyond those limitations, you eventually feel trapped -- whether it was trapped in the role of going away to earn money rather than being with your children or trapped in the role of being with your children rather than going out and doing other work in the world.  (The limitations you have grown out of are mostly based on sexism and it will serve you to listen to the Healing Sexism channeling on Ascension Radio in order to help you understand the potential benefits of dissolving the nuclear family model.)  The benefit ultimately is that it frees men and women to begin to resolve sexism as it has oppressed them in their lives and to find again, their unique individual power, their personal sense of worth and their personal calling in the world. 

Some of you are truly called to raising children; others of you are called to doing other things.  Most of you are called to do some of both.  Because a child requires full attention from adults, yet most of you are called to do things other than raising children, it therefore works best for you to cooperate as adults and raise children in communities or small groups so that a child receives attention, affection, and guidance from a large number of thoughtful, caring adults.  Each adult gives some attention to the child and other attention to their work.    

What you are finding yourselves doing is drawing yourselves back to a communal model of raising children.  The transition from the isolation that you experienced in this patriarchal of the nuclear family toward a communal family model is bumpy.  It involves you having to face the limitations you have been living under, to push up against them and remove them and then have to rebuild or creatively coordinate yourselves to build what is best for children and best for adults as they answer their true callings of the world.  Ultimately, what is best for children is to have enough loving, safe attention from adults that they feel constantly supported and they feel constantly that there is an adult they trust who is available to them. 

Some children find themselves coming to one or two parents who have the resources and the true calling to give that attention to their child all of the time so that some children will find themselves in the best scenario with just a small number, like three or four loving adults to give them attention.  Most children and most adults will find themselves best served by working in a group with something like fifteen to twenty people -- people who are trusted, people who have made true commitments to one another and to the children so that a child at any given moment is surrounded by adults they trust.  But an adult in any given moment feels free to invest in the child or to move in the world and do other work.  This occurs in extended families, it occurs in neighborhoods, it occurs in chosen communities based on a religion or based on some other endeavor or organizing factor. 

This is what all of you are building is both the ability to discern who is safe and who is divinely connected with you and the ability to draw boundaries and eliminate those fellow adults who are not safe for your child.  It is then necessary that you listen to and follow your own true calling, which might involve childrearing and something more to do in the world.  This is true for both men and for women.  Men are not born biologically with less inclination to be bonded with or spend time with their children.  In fact, many men are born with an individual contract and an individual calling to spend most of their time with their children.  Women, in the same way, are not born biologically with a calling to spend more time with children.  Instead, it is different for every individual.  This is why it is vitally important that you work with the situation that evolves in your life rather than trying to force yourself into a two-parent model or force yourself into a community model that does not feel right. 

Work with the people in your life.  Assume that the people that come into your life are there for a reason, and using your own intuition and logic, develop a sense for whether a person is really meant to be connected with your child or not.  Use your interpersonal and negotiating skills to develop a relationship in a commitment with that fellow adult to play some role in your child's life.  Whether it is helping you by spending time with your child, whether it is offering a certain kind of support to your child, you will find that different people come to your life from various directions to be part of the fabric of community that helps you raise your child. 

This is the way that humanity is evolving, particularly in western cultures that operate in the isolation-based model of the nuclear family.  These guidelines are also true for those communities or those cultures where the extended family is the norm.  It is still vitally important that you take a look and find integrity in the relationships that your child will encounter.  Eliminating those people or creating space between you and those people who you sense are not healthy for you and your child.  This is the ultimate information here, is that all of you are moving into what you would call a marriage contract with many people -- with a fabric of community rather than with a single individual.  This is true whether you are raising children or not.

What is the nature of children being born at this time?  How are the changes humanity is going through affecting these new beings, or are they affecting or reflecting the path humanity is taking?

Children today are fundamentally different from children thirty years ago or beyond.  Children today are affecting the path of humanity more than the path of humanity is affecting children today.  For the most part, each new year brings children into the world who are a few steps ahead of where humanity will be as they grow up.  That means more than ever  that children are leading by example.  It is the responsibility of adults to follow the example set by the magical children in their lives.  It would be unfair to ask children to actually lead humanity, for any individual child is fully occupied surviving the particular pressures and dynamics of their childhood. 

One of the particular challenges that exists for children in each progressive generation is that children are born with less limitation inherent in who they are than their elders.  Part of becoming human involves forgetting your divinity; it involves forgetting your true nature, which is what makes you human in the first place.  This forgetting enables you to be uncertain about things and experience suffering, mystery and separation from one another.  The gift of forgetting is that you can then create a path can lead you to rectify all of that and find wholeness.  That is the magic of being human.  The children of today have contracts that do not involve the same degree of limitation or forgetting.  In other words, today’s children have a firmer, stronger, more clear sense of who they really are.  They may not find the words for it because the people teaching them words do not remember their own divinity.  One of the primary challenges faced by children today is that they come into the world with a distinct sense of themselves as spiritual beings, as divine beings, and a deep and abiding perspective of every other human as being divine and full of love.

It is more disorienting for children than it ever has been before on Planet Earth to encounter the idea that you are not divine or to encounter the illusion of anything other than goodness.  You will find that children today often struggle more than children did in the past.  When they are placed in situations where their divinity is not supported, in situations where they are not given an enormous amount of love or the ability to love, they become disoriented.  The opportunity children need most is the ability to love.  Children can get by much easier being deprived of love and affection than they can survive being deprived of someone to love.  If a child has someone to love, they can hold onto that and it can help them through a great deal of suffering or struggle.

The nature of the children being born at this time is that they are lighter and that their experience is heavier or more of a struggle.  This is one of the reasons that you see more physical syndromes being diagnosed in children.  A higher percentage of children in the world have asthma, allergies, diabetes, behavioral disorders or autism.  All these diagnoses and more are on the rise for various reasons.  There is a physical reason based on the pollution of your planet and the toxins in your air and water.  In conjunction with that, children’s bodies are inherently more sensitive to their environments.  They are born with a higher vibration.  Their bodies cannot as easily absorb and manage toxins because their bodies are not as energetically dense as the bodies of children in the past.  You will actually find that children will be more prone to eating healthy foods when they are offered than they may have been twenty or thirty years ago.  Children are more likely to sleep at odd hours but sleep more than children would have in the past.  If someone who raised children many years ago tells you that your child is sleeping too much, it may not matter.  It may not matter that your child is sleeping more often or less regularly than a child would have thirty years ago.  Do not worry yourself too much as long as your child is sleeping at least 10 hours of every 24 hour period.  You will find that the nature of children being born at this time will be more erratic if you try to compare it to an externally-defined system.  If you allow your children to develop their own rhythms for sleep or eating, you will actually find that they do have patterns that are quite unique to each of them and can evolve into a very healthy pattern.  Support them as they listen and respond to their individual needs and patterns. 

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