How the archetype of a naughty, playful, yet divine child can turn parental stress into joy
Every year around Janmashtami, something quietly wonderful happens in millions of Hindu homes. Amidst the ceremonies and devotional chanting and singing, parents also dress up their toddlers — sons and daughters alike — as Krishna. Peacock feather in the hair, a tiny golden-yellow dhoti, a little flute in hand. These are the same toddlers who threw a tantrum over eating vegetables an hour earlier, who scribbled on the wall, who refused to nap. And the naughtiest child is now, quite literally, the deity parents adorn the most.
It’s easy to see this as a sweet ritual and nothing more. But look closer, and we may find something much deeper and wiser: a sophisticated psychological system, one that helps parents not just survive the exhausting, chaotic work of raising children, but find joy in it.
Adoring the Makhan Chor
As a child, Krishna is not depicted as obedient or easy. He is Makhan Chor — the butter thief. He breaks pots, steals curd, leads the other children into mischief, and generally makes his mother Yashoda’s life difficult. And yet, in the Hindu Bhakti tradition, this is precisely what one is invited to adore. There’s even a name for this particular flavor of devotion — Vatsalya Bhava — the tender, fierce love a parent feels for a child who cannot be controlled, only cherished.
In this mode of Bhakti, God doesn’t protect the devotee. The devotee protects God. Krishna, as an infant, willingly surrenders his own omnipotence to become helpless, hungry, cold, and in need of someone’s care — and this isn’t just a poetic idea. Vallabhacharya’s Pushtimarg tradition is built almost entirely around Srinathji, a form of child Krishna worshipped with the same tenderness as a real toddler. Poet-saints like Surdas and Periyalvar spent their lives capturing exactly what it felt like to be Yashoda raising him — his tantrums, his wobbly first steps, his butter theft.
To someone raised on the father, king, judge image of God common to Abrahamic traditions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this may seem like a mistake. But not in the Bhakti tradition, where Bhakti is a yoga — a tool for inner transformation.
Bhakti itself is easy to misread as blind religious devotion. But look closer, and it turns out to be something far more psychologically astute. It builds on our innate capacity to feel the emotions particular to different relationships — the love, the tenderness, the longing, the loyalty we already know how to feel. As yoga, it deliberately harnesses that same capacity as fuel for our own spiritual transformation. In that sense, the intense love and tenderness we can feel for children can become the very vehicle for that transformation. That is why a baby Krishna or a child Rama has long been one of the most beloved deities in Hindu culture.
However, the tradition doesn’t stop at harnessing that capacity; it strengthens and elevates the ordinary, exhausting love of a parent into something far more beautiful. The same broken pot, the same chaos, the same “bad behavior” that a modern parent might read as a problem to manage, the Krishna stories reframe as Leela — divine, joyous play. Nothing about the child’s actual behavior changes. What changes is the lens the parent is handed to look through. Frustration softens into awe. Control gives way to delight. The mischief stops being a failure of parenting and becomes, instead, the very sign of a child bursting with life.
When Parenting has Become Clinical
Modern parenting, grounded in insights from developmental science, helps us see far more clearly what’s actually happening inside a child’s mind. We understand child development far better now. We’ve moved away from harsh discipline. We talk about co-regulation, boundary-setting, sensory needs. All of this is genuinely useful.
But something got lost along the way. When parenting turns into a set of strategies to execute — a mental checklist to run through mid-meltdown — it starts to feel less like a relationship and more like labor. We have the mechanics of coping. What’s often missing is the poetry that makes it joyful.
There’s a lovely story that captures this shift perfectly. When Krishna’s mischief finally exhausts Yashoda, she tries to tie him to a heavy wooden mortar with a rope — enough is enough, she decides. But no matter how much rope she adds, it is always just two finger-widths too short. She adds more. Still too short. She keeps trying anyway, rope after rope, worn out but refusing to give up. It’s only then, the story says, that Krishna himself — moved by watching her — finally lets the last length reach.
It’s a gentle dig at the expense of anyone — ancient disciplinarian or modern optimizer — who believes a child’s wild, vital energy can be fully engineered into place. Some of it can be guided. None of it can be completely bound. The old authoritarian model tried to do this with a firm hand; the modern management model tries to do it with the right technique. The Krishna story, in a sense, pokes fun at both.
But look at it through Yashoda’s own eyes, and it becomes something gentler than a joke. Her turmoil in that moment is real — the frustration, the exhaustion, the growing sense that nothing she does will ever quite be enough. She doesn’t give up; she keeps adding rope, length after length, and still it falls short. What finally closes the gap isn’t more effort at all. It’s something entirely out of her hands — Krishna’s own will, touched by watching her try.
Most parents — mothers and fathers alike — live some version of this every day, rope or no rope. You can do everything right — show up, try again, add one more length of rope. And still, whether any of it actually works often comes down to something you can’t touch: the child’s own mood, their own timing, their own particular whim that day. The story doesn’t promise that enough effort guarantees the outcome. What it offers instead is a way to hold that uncertainty without either controlling the outcome or giving up the effort: your effort still matters, even on the days the result was never fully yours to decide.
Why Parents Felt Less Alone Back Then
Here’s the part I find most moving. In a traditional community, when a parent watched their child being a little terror during Janmashtami, they weren’t processing that alone. The whole neighborhood was dressing up its own small Krishnas at the very same time, telling the very same stories, laughing at the very same chaos. The culture did the emotional heavy lifting collectively, so no individual parent had to conjure up all that patience from scratch, alone, at 6 p.m. on a hard day.
This wasn’t unique to parenting. Across most of human history, rituals gave structure to the psychological experience itself — grief had its mourning rites, joy had its festivals, fear had its protective ceremonies. Feelings were never something you were expected to sort out alone in your own head; they were named, held, and shared by everyone around you.
We live in a far more individualistic age now, one where emotions are treated as intensely private — something that belongs only to the person feeling it, that no one else has any business interpreting. That instinct comes, perhaps, from a good place: a wish to protect people from being told how to feel. But it also means parents today must navigate their most intense feelings largely alone, without the supportive psychological and communal structures that once carried some of that weight for them.
That’s a kind of support that’s genuinely difficult to manufacture today. Modern parents are remarkably well-informed — and often remarkably isolated. Reframing a meltdown now tends to be a private mental exercise: remember to stay calm, remember the science, remember this is normal. It’s effortful, solitary work. And doing that kind of emotional labor alone, over and over, is a quiet but real contributor to parental burnout. Not because parents are doing anything wrong, but because they’re missing a community that once shared this load with them.
This is really the heart of it: these old stories were never handed down as rules about how a parent should feel. They were something gentler — a kind of transgenerational reassurance. Almost as if every parent who came before was saying: we felt this exhaustion too, and here is proof that it’s not a flaw in you, it’s just what it looks like to love somebody this alive.
The Universe in His Mouth
One day, Krishna’s playmates ran to tell Yashoda he’d been eating mud. She caught him and told him to open his mouth so she could see for herself. He did — and there, inside her son’s mouth, she saw the entire universe: sky and stars, oceans and mountains, every living being, even a vision of herself looking at her child. And then, the story says, Krishna’s own grace made her forget. She blinked, and was simply a mother again.
It was a moment of transcendence for Yashoda: in an instant, the mud had transformed into the universe, and the mundane act of parenting had become darshana — the sacred glimpse of the divine.
The archetype of Krishna — a naughty, playful and yet divine child — is lodged deep within us. And it could resurface on some ordinary days, for a blink of a moment, as a glimpse of the divine within our own children. This darshana is what we’re really reaching for when we dress our children as Krishna every Janmashtami. It is what may help us cultivate patience and renew our playfulness worthy of the Leelas of our own Krishnas. And it is this darshana that we hope can carry us from enduring parenting to enjoying it — from managing life to living it.
Feature Image Credit: IStock
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