Why is it important for my child to create merits?  

Just like how you want peerless happiness and awakening for yourself, your children are also precious sentient beings capable of being enlightened one day. It is important to wish for your child to become a kind-hearted human being who can benefit even just one other sentient being and to become a Buddha for all. To awaken these innate wisdom qualities within your child, it is important for them to gain merits, so that they may realise these qualities.  

What can my child do to gain merits?  

Your child can do something as simple as making daily prostrations before school to accumulate merit. Even a single prostration to the Buddha plants the seed for enlightenment and lasting happiness. Moreover, the merit increases based on the number of statues present—prostrating once to a thousand statues generates a thousand causes for enlightenment. If your children do this regularly, it will give them tremendous inspiration, as they’ll be creating the causes for happiness and success both in this life and in future lives, along with the causes for liberation and enlightenment. So, by teaching your children to make prostrations to sacred objects, you’re offering them a truly meaningful gift. 

There are many other valuable practices you can share with your children. For instance, it’s beneficial to have an altar at home with many images, thangkas, and statues of buddhas and deities. Each child could also have a personal statue, such as one of Tara or Chenrezig. Every day—ideally in the morning and maybe also in the evening, but at least once daily—they can offer a sweet or a biscuit on a clean plate to their personal statue as well as to the other holy images. If nothing else, they should recite OM AH HUM to bless the offering and transform it into vast nectar before making the offering. 

 You can also make prayers together such as: 

By this merit, may I never cause harm to any sentient being and may I cause all sentient beings to have every happiness up to enlightenment as quickly as possible. 

Or:

By this merit, may I, like the Buddha, be able to liberate numberless sentient beings from suffering and bring them to enlightenment as quickly as possible. 

By dedicating in this way, your children will not only collect the extensive merit of making offerings to holy objects, but also the merit that they create will become extremely powerful. 

No matter how many university degrees someone has these days, there is no guarantee that they will find a job and be happy. On the other hand, there are many people who live a happy and satisfied life, who experience inner peace, even though they don’t have a university degree. For these reasons, you must focus on using skillful means to help your children create merit. You must put effort into this so that, sooner or later, they will come to have an easy life, free from problems. By creating merit, they will have every success in life, including finding a job. 

Thinking beyond exam success 

Exam success is only a small part of happiness and does not bring happiness for future lives, nor does it create the cause for their liberation and enlightenment. Of course, you can pray for their long lives, for them to be healthy, for all their wishes that accord with the Dharma to succeed, for their actions not to become negative karma and for them to not cause harm to themselves and others, but in particular, you can also pray: 

May my children develop the same qualities as Tara (or Chenrezig, Manjushri, Medicine Buddha or Lama Tsongkhapa) in this very lifetime and be able to do perfect work for sentient beings, freeing them from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and bringing them to full enlightenment as quickly as possible. 

This prayer is short but it includes all the realisations. 

You can pray to Tara together with your children in the same way that you normally pray to her. I am just giving you some ideas and then you can elaborate on them. There are many things that you can do to educate your children and give meaning to them having been born into a Buddhist family. 

Conclusion  

While your children are young, it would be most fortunate to plant good seeds in them. By saying this, it is not implying that you should force your children to adopt your lifestyle. Rather, it is to emphasise that it is important to help them abandon the causes of suffering and create the causes of happiness—not only this life’s happiness but also the happiness of future lives, liberation from samsara and full enlightenment. If they learn some Dharma practices, recite some mantras and so on when they are young, even if they don’t continue with these when they get older, all the merit they collected earlier on will still cause them to meet and practise the Dharma in future lives and will bring them happiness for many lifetimes. Because it is not easy to help your children when they become teenagers and don’t want to listen to you anymore, you should try to benefit them as much as possible while they are young.  

If you are interested in planting the seeds of Dharma in your children, consider signing them up for our Dharma Junior programme which happens yearly! Click here to find out more.