A little fellow who was fishing off the end of the pier lost his balance while trying to land a fish and fell in the lake. Several men who were also fishing nearby rushed to his aid and pulled him out.

“How did you come to fall in?” one of the men asked him.

“I didn’t come to fall in,” the kid said. “I came to fish!”

A large family was finally able to move into a more spacious home. Some time later an uncle asked his nephew, “How do you like your new house?”

“Just fine,” replied the lad. “My brother and I have our own rooms and so do my sisters. But poor Mom, she’s still stuck in the same room with Dad!”

A woman was almost panic-stricken as she called her long-time friend on the telephone, but the friend was in the bathroom and her young daughter took up the phone.

“Oh dear,” she said, “I just have to talk to someone! I just found this note on my kitchen table. My husband has run off with another woman. Gone, gone, gone forever! I am so full of pent-up emotion I don’t know what to do. I am sure that any minute I’ll just let go.”

“That’s the thing to do,” the daughter said. “Just give in to your emotions. Let yourself go. Nothing will do you any more good right now than a good laugh!”

Every child is born intelligent, clear, clean, but we start heaping rubbish on him.

You ask me: “Does a child not have as much right to privacy and freedom from parental conditioning as the parents themselves expect?” He has much more right than the parents, because he is beginning his life. The parents are already burdened, they are already crippled, they are already depending on crutches. He has more right to be his own self. He needs privacy, but parents don’t allow him any; they are very afraid of the child’s privacy. They are continuously poking their noses into the child’s affairs, they want to have their say about everything.

The child needs privacy because all that is beautiful grows in privacy. Remember it, it is one of the most fundamental laws of life. Roots grow underground, if you take them out of the ground they start dying. They need privacy, absolute privacy. The child grows in the mother’s womb in darkness, in privacy. If you bring the child into the light, out in public, he will die. He needs nine months of absolute privacy. Everything that needs growth needs privacy. A grown-up person does not need as much privacy because he is already grown-up. A child needs much more privacy, but he is not left alone at all.