Dr. Dobson reminds us that parenting is not for cowards. I can still remember the emotions of seeing Mary Alice hold our firstborn and knowing that our lives had changed. The level of responsibility had increased, as had the potential for reward. We have raised three fine children who are a major part of our legacy. In thinking about parenting I believe that there are two parts: 1) what we owe them and 2) what they owe us. Let me start with what is our responsibility as parents.
(1) Love that exceeds our ego, I should never choose an ego expression over a love expression. Our children may embarrass us but never more than our love for them. (2) The lesson of cause and effect.
There's nothing more crucial, I feel, to the development of a person than to become a firm believer in cause and effect. An early example occurred as we were raising our children.. We lived in Indian Hill, one of the affluent communities of Cincinnati. After some of our children started going in a direction that didn't look to good we called a group of eight or ten fathers together in my office to talk over the situation. One of the fathers said, with great assurance, "there is no judge in Cincinnati that would touch one of my children." He knew that I was in total disagreement with his position so he turned to me, almost in scorn, and said, "Smith, you came from the poor. You don't understand the privileges of the rich." I could have spit on him, I was so mad. I didn't know being rich gave you privileges; I thought it gave you responsibilities. It is interesting, but sad, to trace the progress of those children who were not taught the clear lesson of cause and effect. Without a moral compass, they tried to unhook action and reaction, but were unable to escape the natural law of consequences.
(3) Unconditional love
I've been very much interested recently in a survey of successful career women and their fathers. One of the commonalities among executive women is a positive relationship with their fathers. Other times it's not good. We know that there's considerable conflict between fathers and sons. Bill Glass, who has interviewed thousands of prisoners, says, "I have never met a prisoner who loved his father." That doesn't mean that a great relationship isn't possible, particularly when it can be built on unconditional love. Performance based relationship result in tension, hostility and at worst, total alienation. Unconditional love isn't easy, but it also isn't optional.
We've been talking about what parents owe children, but children also owe
parents some things.
1) Respect
I have seen some children who were so rough on their parents that they literally became bullies. I felt there should be a law against parent abuse. One of my " Most Unforgettable Character" friends is a large, wild Italian who came out of a criminal background into Christian work. One day he walked in the kitchen where his two sons, age 10 and 12, were batting his wife around psychologically like a shuttlecock. They had her going in total frustration. He surveyed the scene for a second, then walked up behind the two boys, grabbed them each by the neck, bashed their heads together. They fell on the floor with big knots. He stood over them and said, "Now, boys, fortunately for you, your mother and I were married before you came here, and fortunately for us, we're going to be married after you leave. Now you quit hassling my woman." He looked over and big tears were running down his wife's face.
Our children told me, after they were grown, that one of my mistakes was that I didn't back up Mary Alice's decisions as uniformly as I should have, I was used to operating a non-union plant where you decided what was right and not who was right. At home, I should have stood with Mary Alice in whatever decision she made.
2) Personal accountability
Our children sometimes justify their own actions by blaming us. They evidently have studied Freud. Sometimes it's humorous, however, like the boy who brought this rather ugly girl home. When his father said, "Son, I'm sure she's a sweet girl, but couldn't you find one that looks just a little bit better?" the son said, "No, not with the car you provide me."
I have said to our children repeatedly that they were not going to blame me for their poor achievements, because I could name people who had become famous who had worse starts than they did, and so until they become more famous I didn't want them blaming their poor start in life on me.
Once a young college student was complaining to the college chaplain that his poor showing in school was because of his parents. The chaplain wisely asked, "How far back?" Of course if you go far enough back you end up with Adam and Eve!
3) Acceptance
Not only do our children bluff and blame their parents and cause strife, they also can develop tension by comparing them unfavorably with other parents. How many times have you heard, "you're the only parents in school that don't ..." So forth and so forth and so forth. Once Brenda was telling me how much more liberal our neighbors were with their daughter than we were, on everything from curfew to allowance. After she got through, I said, "what do you make of it?" She said, "Oh, they don't love her or they wouldn't give her all that." I have always admired that scriptural stand "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
4) Obedience
Sometimes negotiations are the way children bring stress. There is a time for obedience, not negotiation. One of the problems I see with making education an entertainment is that we lose the submission to authority, plus the good lesson of learning to do what is needed, not just what is enjoyed.
Genuine love reduces tension and stress. This is our aim. The mutual responsibilities that we share as a family keep us in relationship and in balance. I like to think of a healthy family as being a collection of steel balls magnetized and held together by love. If one of them is removed, the others are not destroyed. I like this metaphor much better than I do the chain, which means that if the chain is broken it is destroyed.
