According to Osho, the new generation troubles parents because evolution and modern education make children more intelligent and up‑to‑date than their elders. Formerly, parents were the sole teachers and thus revered; today knowledge explodes beyond them, wounding their all‑knowing self‑image. The remedy is to drop outdated expectations, respect the new, and be willing to learn from your children instead of demanding automatic awe.
Kids now learn faster and know more, so parents feel less in charge and should start listening and learning from their kids too.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, why is the new generation such a problem to the parents?
WHY IS THE NEW GENERATION SUCH A PROBLEM TO THE PARENTS? They are not really a problem: your expectation that they should respect you, that they should respect you as children have always respected their parents -- it is impossible. You start respecting them. You start respecting the new. Age in itself cannot now be any reason for respect. Intelligence, consciousness, they should be respected. And if you respect your children, they will respect you. But only if you respect your children will they respect you. The old way was that you go on humiliating the children, you go on insulting them in every possible way, and they have to respect you -- now this cannot be so any more. The preacher's wife, while shopping, noticed a sign in the butcher's shop: "Dam Ham on Sale." Slightly taken aback by such a name, she confronted the butcher about the use…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS THE GENERATION GAP? If a student is intelligent enough, he can know more than the professors. He just has to spend more time in the library and be acquainted with the latest developments. The professor is already twenty years behind. All the professors, all the teachers, all the parents, all together are complaining of one thing, that the newer generation is not respectful towards them. But they can't see one simple thing, that the whole reason for respectability has disappeared. You have to accept it, there is no other way. The person who knows more cannot respect the persons who don't know that much. And this gap is widening. It has stopped the communication between the older generation and the newer generation, because conversation is so difficult.
Beloved Osho, what is this generation gap? I hear so much about it these days.
I was very much puzzled when I was in the university: my professor of psychology was quoting names and books which had been out of date for almost three decades. And because I was so interested to know everything -- before I entered into myself, I had to know everything that was happening around -- I was continuously in the library. And it is impossible to respect a professor who knows less than you know, who is outmoded. He should be ashamed to remain in the seat of the professor. That's what I told my professor of psychology: "It is simply undignified for you to remain in that seat, because you don't know what is happening in the field of psychology today. You know what was happening thirty years before. Since the day you left your university you have not touched a single book." He was very angry. He said,…
Everywhere now there is a vast generation gap. The parents are responsible for it, because they have been trying to impose their ideologies, political, social, religious, philosophical -- all kinds of things they are trying to impose* on their children. And this is for the first time something strange has happened in the world of which they are not aware. In the past, just five hundred years before, the generation gap did not exist for the simple reason.... It does not exist even now in very primitive societies. The child starts working with his father when he is seven years old, eight years old. If the father is a woodcutter, he becomes a woodcutter. Naturally the father knows more about woodcutting, and the child never becomes young the way today children become young. You send them to the schools, to the university.
Beloved Osho, what I find really amazing about your childhood is that, unlike most of us as children, you seem to have an intrinsic and undeniable understanding that your parents' interpretation of reality and your experience of reality were often two different things. You insist that you are no different from us, yet this facet of your childhood alone is more than enough evidence that you house the most unique sort of intelligence. I would be grateful for your comment.
I said, "Don't be worried, I am not going to be a Mohammedan. You just remember, if my father asks you, you say to him, `Yes, he has come, and if he wants to become a Mohammedan we cannot refuse.' I am not going to come, but this much you have to tell him." And my father asked him, "Has he come to you?" He said, "He has come, and he is very insistent." My father said, "It is better to leave him alone! They had a meeting of the whole family, "Leave him alone; he is really dangerous. If he becomes a Mohammedan we will be condemned by the whole city. And he really has gone, and he is insisting, `If anything happens again to force me, then I am going to change my religion.'" That was the last...! They remained silent; they never told me to come to…