The role of a parent

What are my responsibilities to my children? What am I being asked to do as a parent? For my daughter, at five months old, the answer is fairly simple. Babies need food, love and warmth and Effie gets ample amounts of each. With Rocky, who is inching towards three years, it gets more complicated. The source of many a parent's anxiety is the knowledge that it will get even more complicated yet.

There is a powerful desire for a parent to instill your likes and dislikes onto your children. I want Rocky to root for the Cardinals and to look forward to going to the opera with me. I dream of discussing Schopenhauer and Aquinas with Effie before heading to the couch to watch Columbo or a Truffaut movie. All this is unlikely and even a little unfair. I didn't love the opera myself until I was an adult, wouldn't have known Arthur Schopenhauer from Marty Schottenheimer until well after college and I can't even get my wife to watch Truffaut movies. My children will have their own interests regardless of what I put in front of them (and in some cases will choose the opposite path precisely because of what I've put in front of them) and they will pick those interests up on their own time. The heartbreaking truth about children is that from day one they get a little further away from you. "We cannot give the young our experience, they will not take it," George Eliot said. "There must be the actual friction of life." The mature parent accepts this, embraces it and does what she can to make sure the kids have the tools to brave the friction. I am more complete now (though still far from it) than I ever have been and my parents, whose fierce promotion of my curiosity and self-reliance is a large reason I am as dedicated to self-improvement as I am, have not seen me on a daily basis for 20 years. Parenting is an investment you make in which you know you're going to reap the rewards, if any, from afar.

Besides, I'm not responsible for Rocky's interests right now. Yes, I'm prouder than I should be that I've taught him to sing Purple Rain but this is an act of mimicry, not a self-selected preference. Right now, I am focused on instilling a few basic things in my son. He needs to know that he is not fragile. He is made of bones designed to get stronger when they break. The world is no where near as scary as his ability to navigate it, which is infinite. He must respect adults. This may sound paternalistic until you realize he is doomed to become one. I need to give him the ability to make his own rules for himself once he's on his own which starts with understanding and respecting somebody else's rules right now.

Currently it's easy. As parents, we have authority over what he sees, what he does and, to a degree, what he thinks. He is small enough that when he behaves in ways that make him unlikable he can be removed from the situation. Making him wear certain clothes when he resists or give greetings when he doesn't want to is a reminder that he isn't the only person in the world, a lesson that is valuable for people of any age. However, that authority is going to go away (it already is) as he becomes more autonomous and our responsibilities as parents will change in ways that it's foolish to try and anticipate.

It's a parents right to rub our hands about the world our children will inherit. Like many, I have concerns about the hyper-sexuality of our culture and the easy access to pornography. I fear that technology will make it impossible for young people to connect with each other, isolating them in a depressing facade of empty likes, shallow engagement or radical ideologies. I justify these concerns with data. Extensive pornography use has a relationship with sexual dissatisfaction, loneliness and divorce. Suicide rates among both young boys and girls have skyrocketed in the iPhone age, linked to highs and lows associated with the need for online approval. If these things are true now, when Rocky is sheltered from them, how bad must they be in 10 years when he must face them more or less alone?

The problem with that thinking is that it is counter to the course of human history. It's possible, likely even, that the above paragraph will look as ridiculous to the next generation as a similar one written in 1967 about the dangers of the Beatles and television viewing or one from 1987 warning against video games and the prevalence of satanic daycare centers and hair metal. Only one of those things, hair metal, remains a damnable idea. Fear of the new has always attracted worriers foresee the death of culture. Plato was terrified of the new art of writing which he was adamant would kill storytelling. The Church resisted printing for a number of reasons including that it would it would destroy memorized knowledge. Major League Baseball fought hard against radio because it was clearly a threat to live attendance and on and on it goes. I may not recognize the world my kids inherit but I'm not the one inheriting it and people, self-destructive as we are, have a knack of improving their lot with each subsequent generation. Sleepless parents are the cost of progress.

What alternative is there? In The Benedict Option, Christian author Rod Dreher advocates for social isolation. So corrupt and immoral has the public square become that the only sensible thing to do is vacate it, like the monks from which the book takes its title, ripping kids from public schools and shared spaces. The book does contain a few nuggets of wisdom in terms of instilling values in your own home but its main message is intolerant, regressive and an unrealistic call to abandon the arena lest your children find themselves next to homosexuals and reprobates. As concerning as that prospect may seem, I refuse to condemn my children to a life without brunch. I find it mystifying the amount of Christians that use their religion as an excuse to abandon the modern world, as if their religion wasn't invented as a way to navigate it. Didn't Aquinas practically invent modernity? Wasn't it St. Paul who said "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone?” The words "live" and "with" seem to be too easily forgotten. So I can't stop myself from worrying about my kids but I won't remove them from the universe either. Hand-wringing is a parent's right, pushing them into the sun, even if its a sun I don't fully recognize, is a parent's duty.

I don't know what kind of adults my children will be but I know that, with deep respect to my parents who were wonderful, that the type of adult they are is ultimately up to them, all I can do is present them with the tools to make an intelligent choice in that matter and hope they use them. One of the most heartbreaking anecdotes about the pathology of the president comes from his first wife's memoir, in which, after suggesting that their first child be named Donald Jr., Donald Sr. responded "What if he is a loser?" My kids don't reflect on me as much as I think and the times I do think that are usually fueled by vanity or self-consciousness. They are their own people and I need to be prepared to make themselves obsolete in their own development. I have been asked why I maintain an interest in the classics, surely the tales of gods and monsters are pointless in today's technological age, but the old stories are more instructive than people realize. Zeus watched over the creation of humans but denied them intelligence enough to rise against him. Having destroyed his own father he had good reason to be wary. It was Prometheus, Zeus's Titan uncle, who gave man fire, leveling the playing field. Surely, humanity has a decision to make as far as artificial intelligence goes to either be Zeus or Prometheus but every parent faces that choice every day. Currently, I have a duty to be more like Zeus but Rocky and Effie are going to discover fire one day inevitably and I can't control what they do with it but I'd like to make sure it is me and their mother who gives it to them.