"Child-rearing is not pottery or sculpture; the materials in our hands turn out to have ideas of their own. Most of what we know about the task we learn only too late, after our mistakes have been made. Rather than a mission of rearing countercultural children, we have the task of doing the best we can, in love, to set our children on the way in life. We teach them how to behave, we try to set them on the right path and shape their character properly, but we don't own their souls. They must for a time obey us, but they don't have to share all our likes and dislikes."
"...[G]enuine nurture recognizes that we must, in various ways, hand our children over to others as well. We do not possess them. Indeed, at moments I found myself wondering whether crunchy cons, in their zeal to turn against an obsession with “things,” were not in danger of filling that need for things with children. And I shudder to learn of the children reared by crunchy cons that 'these kids are going to be rebels with a cause' when they grow up. We may all hope to bring up children with character sufficient to resist whatever is genuinely evil (and character wise enough not to brand as evil what is simply not to their liking), but to delight in rearing little rebels, who will likely think they know far more than they do, does not strike me as a helpful way to face the future."
"....To bring that child to baptism is to hand him over to God, who must be the guarantor of his existence, and to the church, which must accept responsibility for him. There is something stiflingly possessive in this account of the parent-child bond. It is, no doubt, understandable — even admirable — in a world where so many children are left simply to fend for themselves, but it sometimes strikes a disturbing note."
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