There are cases of entire families who adopted Krsna Consciousness. In most cases, everything starts with one becoming a devotee and then gradually presenting Krsna Consciousness to the others. If one becomes a serious and mature devotee, and at the same time maintains his ties with other family members, it’s natural that gradually, by association, the others also start to become favorable to Krsna Consciousness, and some will end up becoming devotees.
The critical point here is maturity. If one is not mature, he will act in fanatical ways and thus make his family members antagonistic to the whole thing. They will think he or she became a fanatic and blame Krsna Consciousness for that. Naturally, they will not want anything to do with it and will do everything possible to bring the devotee back to “normal”. The result is that the whole family will become antagonistic, and without the support of the family the devotee will face many difficulties in life, and as a result may also not remain in Krsna Consciousness. Even if he manages to stay on the spiritual path, this will not be an ideal situation.
We can practically see that we sometimes propagate this kind of fanatic behavior, telling people to abandon everything and just “surrender to Krsna”, without taking into account their inclination or current situation. Sometimes we do this out of immaturity, without really understanding what the Bhagavad-Gita teaches, but in other situations, the problem may be that we are just interested in recruiting members and we don’t really care much about people. This is of course a more serious problem and can create very negative repercussions.
When we speak about spreading Krsna Consciousness, it’s very important to keep in mind that our goal is to help people reconnect with Krsna, and not just try to increase the number of members of our group or project. The worst mistakes we commit happen exactly when we put the needs of our project above the needs of the people whom we are teaching. When we teach people to take into account their natural propensities, preferences, and needs, the result will be always positive. They may progress in spiritual life faster or slower, but whatever growth they achieve will be sustainable, and they will have a good chance of continuing practicing for their whole lives. We try to press and indoctrinate people, however, we just create some kind of cult, where people appear to quickly adopt the process we are teaching, just to later abandon it. We may think we are doing good, but we may be actually just burning people and preventing them from getting in contact with a real spiritual teacher later on.
This is certainly something that happened in some communities in the past, and it caused harm to a number of devotees. Even in recent times, it’s not uncommon to see devotees telling newcomers to stop associating with their parents, leaving the university, and instead just start traveling with them. My observation is that in many cases, the devotees who teach like that often have themselves physiological traumas due to mistakes in the past, but without knowing anything better, continue to spread the same failed ideas to the new generations.
If on the other hand, if a new devotee is taught right from the beginning how to be serious in Krsna Consciousness, but at the same time be respectful to his parents and other family members and perform his material duties, he will have a much easier time following Krsna Consciousness, and will have the chance of bringing his family members to Krsna Consciousness. This is a path that may be a little slower in the beginning, but that will bring better fruits in the long term.
It may sound very difficult, but in reality, it isn’t. We just have to play the role of a son, husband, wife, father, or mother and at the same time wake up early to chant our rounds, read and execute the other aspects of our spiritual practice, being attentive to Krsna when we are with Him, and being attentive to our family when you are with them. If we can do that, we will see that they will gradually start becoming interested without separate effort. If one has the tendency to become a renunciant, there is also no harm. He can just practice for a few years at home, using his time to properly study the philosophy and, after maturing a little and understanding what his real inclinations are, he can put on saffron and remain a mature practitioner. Even in such cases, a good relationship with the family will not do any harm.