Question: Good article. Unfortunately, many parents begin raising their children having had no real nurturing in their own upbringing. It's a do the best you can with the information and experience that you have at the moment. How do you explain the parent who seems to have done all the right things only to have her child resist and rebel, arriving at a lifestyle totally foreign to which he was raised?
This is a response to an article I wrote about rearing children on Thursday, May 26.
Apples rarely fall far from the tree. Good people rear good people. And into every good person's life a little rebel and a little resistance must fall. It also works to the contrary. Sometimes it's just a matter of communication or a lack of it. Most parents believe with all their hearts that they have done the right thing, said the right things, and been the kind of parents they would like to have had, and somehow, sometimes, with some families it just doesn't work.
By any stretch of the imagination, my own parents were pillars of the community. They were loved by dozens of people, had a million friends and my father had an impressive Wall Street job. He came from wealth and name, and my mother came from education. But sadly, it didn't work. If I had followed my parents advice, my parents desires for me, I would have been a dependent - as in mental patient - unhappy to the point of suicide, and if nothing more a terribly lonely mess. So I took a powder early and did my own thing.
There has to be a philosophy about life that is in order, has real order, reason, and substance that works before children will buy it. A parent can go by the book, and copy other parents, and do what is popular, but that doesn't sell a child on his own parents. Just looking at my own parents' lives and thinking about who they were, I can honestly say that their main purpose in their lives was to sacrifice nothing for anyone and to enjoy at any cost their own good time.
Substance is the key here. To nearly any onlooker, my parents' lives, had all the requirements. We had everything money could buy. We went to church...but the belief was not in God but in money. Money was the master and the goal. They loved money best, and I knew it. I found them out, and I determined very early not to go their way.
My parents loved people who broke the rules. They found them daring, interesting, and noble.
Although my parents followed some of the rules, they didn't follow them if they could get away with cheating or lying or pretending. Their greatest heroes broke the important rules, broke the law and swindled loved ones around them. I knew this about them and developed a whole other set of rules for myself.
As I grew up, the things that my parents said they believed in and told me to believe in became suspect when the quality of these things and people couldn't be proved. When I asked serious questions about serious things, I was punished because they couldn't follow through with a believable "because."
When I took my own way, about age four, I quickly became the enemy and the scape goat for any and all household failures. As a young child, I reasoned that if you love God as my parents told me I should, then you behave well for the love of God. When I saw my parents behaving badly, unjustly, or without sense, I had the choice to either throw over loving God or throw over respecting them. Guess who won?
Children do not want to be like those people they don't respect. And one of the things that halts respect is weakness. When parents refuse to stand up for their own child, refuse to take their child's side, to understand a suffering child and what has made the child suffer, children will naturally deem their parent to be a weakling and a coward, and that's not respectable. Parents are parents in order to be the champions of and for their children.
Recently, my hyperactive but extremely well behaved grandson was viciously assaulted by his teacher who hated him. William is the kind of child who loves you best just because. He is constantly sharing his toys, his food, his life, his ideas, his everything with anyone who wants some. If you brought him a shiny penny, he would be delighted all day. Big smiles hail this wonderful little boy.
His teacher hated him because he MUST be moving all the time, and she has no interest or tolerance for high energy people. If he's not moving, he's chewing, tapping, wondering, humming; he's busy with something all the time. Once he made his teacher a string of paperclips as a necklace, and she called him a thief.
Now look at this boy and look at this adult. Will William ever want to be a teacher... like she is a teacher? Has this woman earned his respect? How about his affection? His kindergarten teacher loved him for his efforts on her behalf, for his bright interests, for his stick to it-ness, for his loving kindness to every student in the classroom, but this first grade teacher did not have the substance to see his bright face and figure him out. Now what would happen if his mother listened to the teacher and did not take his part?
When families seem to be intact, and children don't thrive, there is something lacking or missing in the formula that makes up a home. The question is what? It could be that parents are just hanging on, and children see this and can't stand it. It could be that parents make too many demands without making any significant effort of their own. It could be that parents are too likely to cave into anything that seems popular at the time:
"We'll go to this church and believe this because my friend Mary does."
"We will eat this brand because Sally said it was better than my own brand."
"The Gills have this kind of dog, so that is the one we will have."
"My sister only lets children have one overnight a month, so that is what we will do."
Or in William's case, "We will drug you to the point of stupid because that's what your teacher wants us to do."
None of these scenarios will work in the mind of a straight shooting child, because children expect their parents to have their own commanding and very strong ideas and even stronger reasons for those ideas that they freely speak of and freely pass on to children without the influence of those around the block, down the street or even at the relatives home.
The duty of rearing children is not something that we can ever take lightly, copy, or do momentarily or without thought. Rearing children is the most important job parents will ever do in their whole lives. Theodore Roosevelt, a president, world diplomat, Nobel Peace winner, hunter, historian, naturalist, said that his six children were is greatest effort. Going lightly, going without a strong intent or by the moment is not only unfair but wrong - and it won't work.
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