What do you want your children to know? What skills or attributes do you feel it most important to nurture?
Like many parents, I want to know how other moms and dads answer these questions. “I want to raise white children who are agents of justice,” says one very progressive friend. “I want to raise feminist boys,” says another. “The most important thing is that I raise my kids to have a relationship with the Lord,” says an old pal.
“I just hope I don’t fuck them up too much,” remarks another to me, and that gets a laugh and a vigorous nod in return.
I was a church youth leader for a long time. I taught high school before I taught college. I briefly coached cross country. Long before I became a dad, I’d seen what often happens when parents try too hard to push a kid in a particular direction. Our children, to state what really should be screamingly obvious, are not extensions of ourselves. They are not mini-me’s. Kids confound and surprise, delight and terrify. They will tell you who they are. (Note that this is not the same thing as saying that we should believe every one of their declarations at any given moment about who they say they are.)
When I was 13, I became a dues-paying member of the Socialist Workers Party. At 19, I was baptized and confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church. Leaving aside the five divorces, I have amused and exasperated my parents with my spiritual, political, and intellectual peregrinations. “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties,” said Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the avant-garde artist). I had too many certainties in my youth, and I am paying for it now, I suppose. There are worse consequences of a misspent youth.
My parents did not push me into the arms of the Socialists, or the Catholics, or various and sundry wives. They also did not denounce these varied and fleeting passions. They gave me the freedom to be wrong, and they gave me the very great gift of not mocking or decrying the misplaced certainties of my younger years. “Whatever’s right,” my Aunt Marianna (mama’s older sister) would say with an indulgent grin when I shared a new dossier of deeply held but transitory convictions.
I do not want my children to fight the battles I fought. I do not want them to make my mistakes. I live in fear that I have already inflicted a whole collection of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Heloise and David. A disgraced, brain-injured, compulsive oversharer is not an easy man to have as a father. On the other hand, I am very gentle, and I am very kind, and I always, always show up when I say I will.
So, what do I want for them? I tell them that four things matter:
Manners and social skills. Curiosity. Empathy. A work ethic.
The first, once inculcated, never leave you. Charm and grace will serve you wherever you go. If you can marry your manners to a deep curiosity about other people, and a concern for their well-being, you will always be welcome somewhere. If you have a reputation as someone who opens the door when others knock, the doors will open for you when you need them most. That is my lived experience.
You also need to work. Work on your soccer drills. Work on your math. Work on your 400 time. Work on your sentence structure. Work on the things that don’t come easy but work especially hard on the things that do. I am so grateful that in high school, when I was earning As in English and History and low Cs in math, my parents had the good sense to tell me to keep focusing on the English and the History. They wanted me to pass math, and I did (barely), but they knew better than to encourage me to spend most of my time on a subject I loathed. Work is important, but we learn to delight in work when we are allowed to push ourselves hardest in the areas where we already have some promise (or at least interest.)
I don’t judge those who see their most important task as raising kids to love and fear God, or who want to raise up warriors for social justice. If your religious and political convictions go to your very marrow, you should share your faith, your hope, and your certainty with your little ones. It would be strange if you didn’t. And yet, even the most devout of believers deep down knows it possible that their children will astonish and bewilder them.
Perhaps manners, curiosity, empathy, and a work ethic are themselves just tenets of my own religion. Perhaps my children will calibrate their ethical and spiritual compasses differently. I do not think, though, that I will regret teaching them to be charming, to be open to the new, and to suit up and show up even when it is very, very hard.
"Work on the things that don’t come easy but work especially hard on the things that do."
Sounds counterintuitive at first, but it's totally not. I appreciate this bit of wisdom!