
Parenting is supposed to be about raising good, intelligent, well-adjusted human beings. This book actually helps to do that. Not by giving another rulebook filled with “best practices” but by exposing how most of what we do as parents is pure conditioning. We have the best intentions, and yet we raise anxious, fearful, guilt-ridden adults. Not because we’re bad parents, but because we don’t even realize what we’re passing down.
This is a compilation of Osho’s works on child-rearing, and some of his ideas were radical in 1987 and remain radical today. He was already talking about genetic modifications for health and talent enhancement, rejecting the nuclear family model, and arguing that raising children should be a communal effort. Families, in his view, are breeding grounds for fear, insecurity, and limitation. Even when parents mean well, they unconsciously shape their children into miniature versions of themselves, ignoring the child’s natural disposition and failing to account for the changing world they’ll live in.
A friend’s child once had a meltdown, accusing her parents of “conditioning her to love reading.” She couldn’t fit in with her American peers, whose entire cultural programming was different. The culture itself might be shallow, banal, or idiotic, but to a child, loneliness is worse than silliness. Osho makes a brutal but accurate point—parents don’t raise children for the world they’re in. They raise them for the world they themselves were raised in, which no longer exists.
“You have to learn non-doing; you have to learn to keep away, out of the way of the child. You have to be very courageous because it is risky to leave the child to himself.”
Last summer, I left my 16-year-old home alone for two months while we traveled. She didn’t want to come. She had summer classes, friends, a life. At 16, parental presence feels suffocating, so I exhaled and let her stay. It was terrifying. Every night, my brain ran a horror reel of worst-case scenarios. Rationally, the statistics made no sense. Emotionally, it felt like I had just released a defenseless baby into a world full of wolves.
She didn’t throw parties. Didn’t burn the house down. Didn’t even kill the cat, though I’m still not sure that was a good thing. And she became more independent, more trusting. Responsibility follows freedom.
The Family, the Church, and the System
Osho doesn’t just stop at parenting. He draws a direct line between the family and the survival of religion.
“The moment you abolish the family, the church will die off.”
The church destroyed tribal and communal life, forcing people into isolated nuclear families, where the first lessons learned are obedience, guilt, and control. In most families, children see manipulation, resentment, passive aggression. They see their mothers controlling their fathers, fathers resenting their mothers, fights that go on for decades with no resolution. They see power struggles, but not love. Love happens behind closed doors. Violence happens out in the open.
Education: The Factory of Fear
Osho rips modern education apart.
“Education up to now has been goal-oriented: what you are learning is not important; what’s important is the examination that will come later. It makes the future more important than the present.”
School trains children to sacrifice the present for some imaginary future. Learn for the test. Work for the degree. Chase the job. This system creates a lifetime of emptiness, where people are constantly chasing the next achievement, never fully living.
Osho predicted, long before screens took over our lives, that education should ditch outdated methods and adapt to how children actually absorb information.
“Teaching should not be done in the old way. The teacher has to appeal to your eyes. Television appeals directly to your eyes, and the impact is far greater.”
Teachers shouldn’t dump knowledge onto students. Their job is to guide them through contemporary knowledge, not force them to regurgitate outdated facts.
This book doesn’t tweak the system. It blows it up.
Osho isn’t here for small improvements. He wants a full-scale jailbreak for children—out of mindless obedience, out of fear-based conditioning, out of an education system that kills creativity before kids even have a chance to discover it.
“Real education should not teach competition, but cooperation. It should teach how to be creative, how to be loving, how to be blissful.”
“I’m not in favor of organized revolution because all organizations basically destroy the individual.”
This book stabs at the heart of everything we take for granted—not just about raising children, but about how we live as human beings. Some of Osho’s ideas are impractical, anarchic, extreme. But at the very least, they force you to think.
And if nothing else, maybe you’ll stop molding children into smaller versions of yourself and actually let them figure out who the hell they are.
Final Thoughts: Career Coaching, Osho, and Why No One Wants to Hire Your Kid
Most of my clients eventually bring their kids in for career coaching, confused about why their bright, well-educated, diploma-holding children can’t get jobs. The reality is harsh: 90% of employers don’t want fresh graduates. They don’t know how to think, solve problems, or adapt—because they’ve spent their entire lives chasing grades, meeting expectations, and memorizing answers instead of developing actual skills.
Here’s what fresh graduates actually need to do if they want to be employable:
1. Stop waiting for permission. No one cares about your degree. Show what you can do. Build something, start a project, freelance—anything to prove you can function outside a classroom.
2. Learn how to think, not just follow instructions. Employers hire problem-solvers, not people who need to be spoon-fed. Question everything, challenge assumptions, and figure out how to add value.
3. Get comfortable with failure. The most successful people in any field got there by messing up, adapting, and trying again. The ones who sit around waiting for the perfect opportunity never get anywhere.
Degrees don’t make you employable. Skills, adaptability, and independent thinking do. The sooner fresh graduates figure that out, the better their chances in a new world that rewards action, not obedience.