Raising the Child Right.

It occurs to me that if I were bringing up a child now, the lessons I would impart with regard to living a life would be very different than they would have been even ten years ago, and increasingly so beyond that. I’ve spent my own life exploring angles on the matter from the middle of the tram lines to their edges of acceptability, and I’ve spent many an hour peering beyond those edges into the misty lands beyond. In consequence, my handling of life has always been in a state of flux.

I think that’s true of everybody. However imperceptible the change might be, I do suggest that each of us is slightly different today than we were yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow.

And then there’s the question of just how much we should teach children anyway. I dislike the didactic approach so favoured in our culture from the cradle to the end of formal education. I remember a disturbing blog I once read in which a woman said that one of her main priorities was to give her children to God. Which God might that be, I was tempted to ask, and by what right do you presume to give your children to anything or anybody? I favour the line in Khalil Gibran’s homily on raising children:

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

If we are to be realistic at this basic level, it needs to be accepted that each of us lives in our own world. We seek common consensus, of course, and to some extent we achieve it. And yet it still seems to me that everyone’s world is slightly different to everyone else’s, so what right do we have to coerce someone else into it?

Guidance is a separate issue. Guidance is good as long as it’s accepted that guidance guides, it doesn’t push. Guidance needs to be tailored to the kind of world in which the child lives, and the road on which the child is walking. And that requires a level of perceptive acumen that few people possess to any great degree. That’s the tragedy.

Do you know, I spent much of my childhood struggling with the version of me which my stepfather considered the ‘right’ one, even though it ran counter to my nature and instincts. I was in my teens before I was able to face him down and say ‘no.’