Question: Beloved ascended masters, I ask you to break the vicious cycle in my mind. If I understand free will correctly, parenthood seems to violate it. This happens both in everyday situations and in psychological dynamics, especially with young children when they want something and I forbid them from experiencing it, acting for my own beliefs and level of consciousness. Or does free will function differently with small children? As I understand it, this violation creates karma. At the same time, I see parenthood as the balancing of past life karma, a process of loving a child and accelerating those energies that are previously misused in my relationships with these very beings. Please clarify my understanding.
Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2026 Kazakhstan Conference.
Imagine that you create a wonderful playroom or nursery for a young child. You take all of the toys you can think of and put them into the room. Then you put the child in there and leave it alone in the room with no human interaction. Now there is no human being, meaning you as a parent, to violate the child’s free will and tell it it cannot play with this toy or that toy. Would you be doing a service to your child by doing this? You can see that you obviously would not because the child would not have any human interaction. It would feel lonely, but first of all, it would not develop its sense of self.
What is it that enables a young child to develop its sense of self? It is that it interacts with other people, first of all the parents, but also siblings. You have to shift your focus and realize that as the parent, you have a right, you even have an obligation, a job, to present the child with a situation that gives the child something to react to, but also sets boundaries for the child. Because you are teaching the child how to basically function in life, which really means functioning with other people. Your child has to somehow learn that its own will must be balanced with the will of other people.
And it learns that by experiencing you and how you are and how you set boundaries for the child.
To break this vicious cycle, as you say, you need to rethink your view of free will. Of course you can violate a child, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about you having a right to be yourself in your own home. And you do not have to be perfect to be a parent. You just have to look at the parent-child relationship as an opportunity for you to see subconscious selves in your mind, to work on these. And that is essentially also how you balance karma. You are not making karma by setting boundaries for a young child. You would be making karma if you did not do so. And there are many parents, especially in the more developed countries, who have gotten into this state of mind where they think they should not set boundaries for the children, they should be allowed to do whatever they want. And they are actually making karma for doing this, or rather not doing this.
It is true, of course, that you can have karma with children from past lives. But the way to overcome that karma is simply to look at your own psychology, your reactionary patterns, and work on those subconscious selves with the tools we have given you.
You can even look at the dynamic you describe here. You are afraid of violating the free will of a young child. Why? What is it in your mind, what is the belief you have that you should not do this, or that this would create karma? Does it relate to something in a past life? Perhaps that you were too controlling towards someone else, or that you were being controlled, so you made a decision that is a typical dualistic decision where you say: “Well, that was too much control, so to correct that I have to go to the opposite extreme and have no control.” That is how many people swing back and forth. But that is, of course, still on the dualistic scale. You need to step back from that and find the middle way, the balanced approach. What you are basically also teaching your child is a balanced approach to life, to dealing with other people, to balancing its own will and the will of others. The child needs to learn to balance its will with yours, and it can only do that if you assert your will.
Copyright © 2026 Kim Michaels