Among other things, parents wish they could teach their children the wisdom they’ve acquired over the years. Some say parents do, but I say fundamentally not so. Indeed, the world would be much different by now if wisdom was teachable. The wisdom we gain in life comes from learning from our mistakes. In other words, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, if you would have a thing laid aside, you must first set it up.

Alas, one ‘teaching’ we can’t help but pass on to our children are the ghosts of our fear and insecurity. Naturally, this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. Animals that raise their young pass on some sense of what is fearful in their environment. The major difference between us and other animals is that we also pass on our ‘ghosts’. The ghosts are those uniquely human fears and insecurity rooted in our psychology.

Thus, at best I would say that the only wisdom we can hope to pass on to our children is the absence of past ghosts – any of those psychological fears we set up and laid aside over time. In so doing, we avoid passing on what might psychologically cripple our offspring. There in we see the advantage of either (1) being raised by older parents or (2) having many emotionally mature (wiser) elders intimately involved in a child’s life. The latter was a de facto reality of ancestral tribal life. The former may become a de facto reality in the future. Perhaps we’ve been in a transition between the two for the past 10,000 years or so.