A few years ago, the father of one of my students sought an appointment and came to see me. He seemed visibly distraught. Even before I could ask him to sit down, he began to plead, “Sir, please help. My son is harassing me.”

I regarded him attentively, almost unable to believe that such a request could come regarding a student of St Stephen’s College from his own father. I tried to put him at ease, made him sit down and asked what the matter was.

The son was holding his father to ransom regarding his pleasure trip during the October holidays (1-10 October). He was adamant that he would have a holiday in the West Indies with a rich friend of his. He would not take ‘no’ for an answer. The father was a teacher in a school, who could not, by any stretch of imagination, afford the expenses, which included accommodation and local travel in the coveted destination. The student was blackmailing his father that unless he provided adequate funds, he would walk out of the house forever. It was at this point that he sought my intervention.

This is, by no means, an isolated instance. I have gone around the country addressing parents on the dos and don’ts of parenting. In the interactions that followed many a session, the stories I have heard, the tears I have witnessed, the mountainous pains I have encountered, defy description. Parenting is a humungous tragedy today, over which we maintain an awkward and nervous silence, driven largely by a sense of taboo about talking about one’s sorrows in public. This has not helped; it never will. The need of the hour is for everyone to speak up and learn from each other’s mistakes.

Jesus used a parable to draw our attention to an eternal reality, which is centrally relevant to this issue we are thing to understand. It is known as the parable of the prodigal son. It is so incisively relevant to the human predicament vis-à-vis parenting and the nurture of children that it has influenced popular imagination all over the world and the English language in particular. We denote those who are senselessly wasteful of their parents’ resources in the quest for maximizing the pleasure they think they need from day to day, as prodigal sons. A majority of the people who use this expression -and they belong to every religion and race in the world- do not know that this metaphor connects them to Jesus Christ.

Let us be clear: one of the major reasons for parenting to crash into heartbreaks is prodigality. The thing to note is that prodigality does not exist as a category by itself. Or, prodigality, per se, does not exist. It is a by-product of a fatally wrong attitude to wealth, which Aristotle defines in Ethics as, ‘whatever can be measured by money.’

To this day, in about half a century, I haven’t come across many parents who realize the extreme importance of training their children in the art of dealing with wealth. They strain the last nerve to earn, accumulate, provide or pass down maximum wealth to their children. But they don’t know that there is something far more important and precious than wealth, which is the ability to relate to, understand and manage wealth as rational human beings.

The problem with prodigality is that it enslaves its practitioners to the unending and limitless pursuit of pleasure. It makes them slaves to their own desires, and vulnerable to vices of every kind. It cripples their self-control, or mastery over the self. Prodigality is the inability to relate to, and use wealth as a rational and responsible human being.

Let us return to the St Stephen’s version of the prodigal son. It was not that the boy wanted to be cruel to his father; his cruelty was a by-product. What possessed him was the spirit of prodigality and enjoy-ment-seeking, resulting from a failure of nurture in respect of handling one’s wealth; in this case, one’s father’s non-existent wealth! For him his need for pleasure was all-important, and relationship with his father secondary and mercenary. Is it enough that we curse the perversity of the present age and the heartlessness of the present generation? Who made them what they are?

Let’s come to the heart of the matter. If children are raised with the idea, which they internalize over a period of time from the domestic ambience, that wealth is only an access to pleasure, it should be deemed a miracle if they don’t become prodigal and insensitive. Wherever the human is subordinated to wealth, the outcome can only be tragic.

Hundreds of times I have asked my audiences across the country, “How many of you have the courage to say “No” to your children when they ask for superfluous things?” I am sure, the reader will not be surprised when I say that I have not come across more than a handful in forty years. If we don’t check, as Immanuel Kant says we must, the will of our children, how are they to know that there should be limits to human desires and that surrendering to every desire is unhealthy and injurious to the formation of a healthy, rational personality?

A glutton once said that he would have been happier if he had the neck of a giraffe. Why? What we eat has no taste beyond our gullets. He thought that the length of the neck, such as the giraffe is equipped with, would prolong his enjoyment. His craving for pleasure is such that he despises even the human shape! This may be an exaggeration;but it is surely the exaggeration of a serious truth. Mindless indulgence in un-regulated pleasures turns pleasure-seeking a habit; and whatever is a habit seems uncontrollable. It even seems unhealthy and unreasonable to curb it.

Sigmund Freud is hailed as the father of modern psychology. I deem him the father of modern misery and disarray. By advocating indiscriminate impulse release, he invested the decline of man into an impulse-driven animal with cultural legitimacy.

The simmering tragedy of parenting being a heartlessly thankless job is eminently avoidable. But, remember; their key is wealth. Parents cut their throats gradually by giving to their children the impression that money-making is all that matters; and that they make money to grant them all that they wish. The truth, though, is that children are helped a great deal more by being denied ‘most of what they wish.’ Both parents and children will be truly helped, and joyously too, if the latter are trained in mastering their desires and impulses, especially out of a sense of regard for the needs and sentiments of others, which was what the young man in St Stephen’s utterly lacked.