A parent stands up at a microphone in front of a live audience and reads a question that has been run through Google Translator first, apologizing in advance for the awkward English. The problem is not complicated, and it is painfully familiar: they know what good parenting looks like, they have read the tips, and still they do not do the things they know they should. In this Dharma Q&A, published by Buddhistdoor Global, Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, the Korean Buddhist monk and Seon master who founded Jungto Society, answers with a reframing that is more demanding than any checklist. Children, he argues, are mirrors and imitators before they are anything else. A parent's disappointment is usually a measure of the parent's own contradictions. And a teenager's rebellion is not a defect to be crushed but a rational, if painful, attempt to rebalance a relationship in which the child has no other tools.
The questioner's diagnosis is precise. Their words and actions do not match, and they suspect that this gap is the root of their anxiety. "I know what I should do," they say, "but I don't do due to laziness." It is a confession many parents would recognize, and Sunim's first move is to lower the temperature. "Most parents are like that," he says, and then, more gently, "you don't have to feel so guilty about it." The audience laughs at his next line, a wry observation that children "never turn out the way you want them to."
The laughter matters because it signals what Sunim is doing. He is not excusing the laziness. He is refusing to let guilt become the engine of change. Guilt tends to produce either paralysis or a brittle, over-performed virtue that collapses under stress. What he proposes instead is an honest look at where the gap actually sits. The laziness is real, but the question the parent asked, "how do I stop being inconsistent," can only be answered by changing the parent's own behavior, not by collecting more advice about the child.
Sunim makes a move here that is easy to pass over. When a parent feels disappointed by a child, he says, "it's actually your own contradiction." The child has not failed a standard the parent set. The parent has set an expectation the child was never going to meet exactly, and then experienced the distance as a failure of the child.
His remedy is blunt. Accept that children will not turn out the way you want them to, and do not blame them when that happens. Then, he suggests, look at the outcome from a positive angle: your child, "at least, turned out better than you." It is a line that will make some readers wince and others laugh in recognition, but its logic is clear. Expectation is an inheritance and a projection. Letting go of it does not mean lowering the bar for the child. It means noticing that the bar was always partly about the parent's own unfinished business.
This is the center of the talk. "Children imitate like monkeys," Sunim says, and he means it as a description of how the child's mind works rather than an insult. "Children are beings that follow and imitate whatever you do." His examples are deliberately concrete. If you want children to live modestly, live modestly. If you want them to be humble, be humble. If you want them to be studious, "you have to constantly study."
"If you tell children to do something that you yourself don't do, you're not speaking or catering to the nature of children." — Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, Buddhistdoor Global Dharma Q&A (published October 2026)
The implication is that instruction without example is not really teaching. Sunim names the child's inner response directly: they will always think, "How come you don't do this, but you're telling me to do it?" Children are unusually sensitive to the gap between what adults say and what adults do, and they have no reason to trust the words over the behavior. The practical consequence is significant. If you want to change how your child behaves, the most effective method available to you is to change how you behave. Parenting, in this framing, is a form of practice that happens in full view of the people you are trying to influence.
Sunim's next claim draws on the same logic. A child who is told to do what the parent does not do, and who complies anyway, is "being forced to do it." Their emotions, he says, "become suppressed." The feelings are not gone. They wait. "All those emotions come out when they hit teenage years."
This is where the talk makes its most original turn. Most parenting advice treats adolescent rebellion as a problem to be managed, a phase to be survived or a behavior to be corrected. Sunim asks the parent to see it differently. When a child rebels in their teens, "do not see that as the problem of your children," he says, "but see that as a natural outburst of emotions that have been pent up." The rebellion is information about years of accumulated pressure, not evidence that the child is broken.
He is also explicit about the escalation loop. If a parent responds to that outburst with more control, the child resists harder. The resistance can take the form of running away, quitting school, or withdrawing into friendships the parent does not approve of. "They, in turn, hurt their parents," Sunim says, and the cycle tightens.
Sunim reads rebellion as a strategy, and an intelligent one. Children, he argues, "know you the best," because they came from the parent's womb and have spent their lives watching the parent. They understand what matters most to the parent: "the safety and well being of their child." A teenager who wants to push back has very little power to do it openly. So they go after the parent's known weak point. "They go up against the weaknesses of the parents," he says. The refusal to eat when angry, the decision to stop studying, the withdrawal, all of these are ways of making the parent's own fears do the work of protest.
That is why, in his account, the child is not a problem child. "They are taking the optimal strategy to show their displeasure through protests," Sunim says. "They don't have the power to do it any other way." The behavior is a form of negotiation, a "compromise to rebalance the power dynamics" inside a relationship where the adult holds nearly all the cards. Read this way, the teenager is not trying to ruin their future. They are trying to be heard by someone who has not been listening.
It is worth being clear about what Sunim is and is not claiming. He is not offering a clinical account of adolescent development, and he is not describing every family's situation. He is giving a Dharma teacher's view of how control and resistance feed each other, and he is grounding that view in the everyday observation that children watch and respond to power.
The practical instructions are short, and they follow from everything before them. The first is to watch for the ways you suppress your child's emotions without meaning to. Sunim's phrase is "inadvertently," which suggests that most of this happens by default, through tone, through pressure, through the habit of treating a feeling as a disruption. The second is to "show through actions." The parent's conduct is the teaching, and the parent who wants a calmer, more honest child has to become calmer and more honest in front of that child. The third is a kind of humility. Your child may not follow everything you do, he acknowledges, but "you have to understand them."
Taken together, the answer to the questioner's original problem is clear. The gap between words and actions cannot be closed by reading more tips. It closes when the parent begins with their own practice, accepts that disappointment is a signal about themselves, and reads a child's resistance as a message rather than an attack. It is an answer that asks more of the adult and less of the child, which may be exactly why it works.
The video runs under seven minutes, and its brevity is part of its force. Watch it once for the exchange itself, including the audience laughter and the questioner's careful translation, and then again with a notebook, listening for the moments where Sunim shifts the blame from the child to the parent. If you want to go further into his teaching, his own site is pomnyun.com. Jungto Society, the organization he founded to promote sharing and simple, sustainable living informed by Buddhist teaching, is at jungtosociety.org, and its international branch is at jungtointernational.org. The video itself was published with permission from Jungto Society and is hosted by Buddhistdoor Global.
A final caution, in the spirit of the talk: this is a short answer given in a live setting, not a complete parenting program. Use it as a mirror, not a rulebook. The most useful question it leaves you with is not what your child should do differently, but which of your own habits your child is already copying.
