What is the right thing to say to your children, and when?

My fingers clacked at the keyboard of my laptop as the kids went about their daily business of destroying the living room. Noah was busily pounding on his sister's toys as Alysha sat near the tv, watching the Princess Diaries. Zora was over on my desktop computer playing games at some television channel dot com, like she usually does.

I was half-watching the movie as well. For some inexplicable reason I liked it, and always ended up watching it whenever it came on the Disney channel, or wherever. The story is relatively straightforward. It is about a girl who is raised not knowing that her father was the prince of a small European kingdom and the resulting upheaval when she finds out. Perhaps it is the fact that the grandmother in the movie - Julie Andrews as Queen Clarisse Renaldi - used to play Peter Pan, which is one of my all time favorite tales, that makes the movie so engaging to me, and that pulls me into its rather simplistic storyline time and time again.

And so at one point in the movie, the princess, Mia Thermopolis, played by Anne Hathaway, is speaking to her mother about her father's death. I'm barely paying attention, but then I hear my youngest daughter, Alysha, sighing.

She walks over to me, her face scrunched up, and says, "Daddy, I don't want you to die."

Before I can respond, she sits beside me and lays her head on my shoulder and hugs me, continuing, "When I grow up you're going to be dead, and I don't want you to die, Daddy."

I wonder for only a moment what the correct response to such a comment made by a 5 year old is, and then answer her anyway. "Everybody dies, baby girl. But don't worry, I'll always be with you no matter what. Hopefully, Daddy will be able to be here with you for a long, long time."

Sometimes, at night, before we say the Lord's Prayer, we speak to the Ancestors. I tell the girls about their great grandparents, their Big Momma and Big Daddy, their grandma Grace, their aunts and uncles – Aunt Frances, Uncle Bubba, Uncle Oscar, Aunt Lotrice's husband and cousin Oscar's Jr.'s daddy –who have passed away, and, by now, they know the names and the stories, even though they've never met the people, being long passed from this plane of reality. They can repeat the litany and the excited glow of their faces in the dark as they speak into seemingly empty space, their eyes wide as they tell their Ancestors how much they love them, creates a space of reverence and timelessness as the dim emanations from the nightlight, and the sound of the television downstairs, are blunted by the potentiality of our shared evocation.

Even Noah, at 2 years old, can repeat the syntax of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom Come. Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in Heaven", even if he can't say all of the words, yet. But he can end the prayer with us loudly and with a big smile on his face, "Amen!" and also mumble the additions that Zora tagged on to the end of every nighttime prayer some years ago, "For the Lord of Justice, and God of the Glory."

Death, reverence. Spirituality and faith, in the face of the ever-increasing materiality of our lived existence. Should children be coddled, told fairytales about the grim realities of life? The pain of childbirth? The ugliness of the world, of people's interactions one with another, or of the things that they even witness themselves, in the daily interactions of family and friends? Should the trappings of imagination be shuttled to the side in favor of a stark realism that banishes the magic from the world and presents life as a cold, sterile journey from birth to death, with a little happiness and a lot of pain characterizing the seeming instant in between?

Contrary to popular belief, it does not seem that children are innocent in many ways. The movie Lord of the Flies presents the example of a group of boys stranded on a desert isle, creating a society of might and the possible consequences of such pristine barbarism upon the veneer of civilization. Each of our lived experiences holds memories of our own childhoods and examples of the viciousness of children toward each other, sometimes mirroring the things they've learned at home, but most often being comprised of egoic battles of size and strength, perhaps evolutionary preparation for the aging process, and a symbolic rite of ritualistic culling, maturing into the stratified society that is best exemplified by the High School Cliques whose names change as the generations pass, but whose power relationships remain the same.

Walking down the street with the kids, watching the ground and talking to them about stepping on insects, carefully observing the natural world by interactive play, climbing trees, laying down in the grass and exploring the tangled web of life and industriousness of all creation are mandatory methods of learning and teaching. Funky expeditions into the wilds of our small part of the Central Texas Hill Country, admiring the blooming bluebonnets and rose bushes, warily side-stepping the Cactus Forests and exploring the magic of pretend and reality simultaneously with the realization that perception is paramount and there is no true , qualitative difference between a fantastic and rational division of experiential Being in any way, shape or form when it comes to a parent's life, let alone a child's.

The darkness of life is necessary in order to appreciate the light. Sheltering my children from life's harsher elements is a natural reaction, that of a father protecting his young, shared by all creatures no matter their genus and species. The will to change your children's life so that it is better than your own is something that must be genetic, passed down from generation to generation. My own father's continuing presence and stubborn desire to teach me what I need to know to pass through this life continues apace, even though I a man now, with my own family and experiences that he, my mother and my sisters never went through when we were growing up. His studied insistence upon the time he and my mother spend with the children, a time spent talking about things that I know they want to impart while they still can. The longing, yearning, and quick pang of recognition, of remembrance is bittersweet, the peace of the moment rent by the relentlessness of oncoming death.

Incorporating generational karmic lessons into daily life requires the ability to separate one's experiences and examine them subjectively at one level, then, objectively and in a comparative manner, at the next. Conclusions regarding specific incidents results in an experiential matrix of probability by which repeat lessons, at the next level of intergenerational interaction, should be approached, experienced, and transcended. That is the hope, at least, although often not the result, since the emotional complex of past reactions acts, in so many cases, to obscure what should be in favor of what we feel in the moment to be right. This results, in too many cases ,in continued enslavement to the senses and further karmic debt accruing between souls in search of enlightenment, in search of the resolution of issues that may extend beyond current incarnations into an eternal space of presence, the present moment, where all that Was, Is and Will Be coexists concurrently, occurring, Now.

So I hold my children tightly and pray fervently that I am able to impart to them the importance of their own self-salvation, their connection to Divinity and that nothing is possible in and of ourselves. Of course the deeper lessons of the spirit and the transcention of the material realm are not communicable in any way other than parables and stories when they are very young, but children do indeed remember everything. Especially the things you wish they'd forget, their parents' failures being among the most vivid of these often orphaned impressions. Providing them with the philosophical and spiritual matrix to recognize the possibility of self-transformation when they are of an age to engage in such is a mandatory lesson to impart, from parent to child. Since we're all works in progress- none of us in the least bit perfect – providing our children with the tools to continue their own, personal work, therefore, is the most precious gift that we will ever be able to give our children, living by example being the goal, if not always the practice.