Everyone’s responsible for the community’s children
Some friends were talking about the challenges of raising children today, and a youngish man (he looked about thirty) said that he thought ours a bad time to have children.
He liked children. He wanted children. He believed couples should have children. But he fretted about bringing children into this world. He explained why. The public schools, he said, “are overflowing with anti-Americanism and revisionist history.”
I thought: So he won’t have children because ... they might become liberals?
The village it takes
This seems to me an odd way of thinking about being a father, though I suppose I might feel a bit of what he felt if I’d lived in Texas and faced the possibility of our next child becoming a Dallas Cowboys fan. No one wants that for their child.
I think about this kind of thing reading articles on families in the elite media, like the New York Times and The Atlantic. What we do with our children is a subject that can set off angry steam-coming-off-the-screen arguments. Many people are heavily invested in how not only their but other people’s children turn out.
And rightly. Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village” should have been titled “It Takes a Government,” but the idea is sound. Everyone has, as a member of the community, some responsibility, even if very little, for the community’s children.
Everyone can vote for the school board, for example. You’re not responsible for teaching your neighbor’s children manners, but you are responsible for helping (mostly through voting) to ensure they’re housed, fed, and educated — that our society is a good society for children.
Many recognize the responsibility, but exercise it the wrong way, by trying to take control of children’s lives, including other
people’s children. “A child isn’t a religious or ideological project,” wrote my friend Mindy Robinson, in a Facebook discussion about raising children.
“They are a person. You have children and give them love and freedom, just like God gives us love and freedom. You don’t produce units for your team. Nor is the value of a human life contingent on them believing a certain way.”
Square pegs
She pointed out that people who try to raise children for a cause with a very specific idea of what kind of person their children must turn out to be will probably be surprised. The square peg being forced into the round hole may well make itself even squarer.
Mindy, speaking of conservative Catholics, said: “A really good way to raise future angry atheists is to treat your kids as future ‘good Catholics’ that you are making for the Church, rather than as individuals who you are welcoming because they are intrinsically valuable regardless of what they eventually choose to think.”
You treat things according to
what they are. You don’t buy a willow tree and plant it in a desert or plant a cactus in a swamp. You have to see where the plant grows best and nurture it as you can, which may mean intense attention and care or leaving it mostly alone.
The same applies to children. They come to you not just with bodies determined by genetics but with minds wired in a certain way, with strengths and weaknesses, inclinations and disinclinations, loves and hates, that are not yours and may not be the qualities you wanted.
You work with them to make them the best version of what they were made to be. That means accepting that the square peg is a square peg, but also that the square peg may need its corners sanded off a bit. I admit to having been too eager to push my square pegs into my chosen round holes, being swept up in the culturally dominant idea that you had to form your children and that disaster would come if you didn’t.
Forming children best
The young man felt anxious about the way the culture would
form his children, whatever he thought best for them. Other people feel that way about children in general. He and they aren’t unreasonable in that.
We can do much in a kind of counter-formation. And we have a personal influence Hollywood and Wall Street don’t have. We form our own children and the children around us mostly by being the kind of person we want them to be. Systems like schools and social benefits matter, but they only do so much. Parenting will involve politics and culture, but it mostly involves being there.
The English writer G. K. Chesterton got at this. “Education,” he said, “is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume that really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.” We want good children, we must be better adults.