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The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 19: Family Responsibility:
September 2, 2002:
In a previous philosophy essay I suggested that we need to reestablish
our ideals of personal ethics, integrity, and responsibility.
Now I want to look more closely at responsibility. What are we
responsibility for and to whom? As far as what we are responsible
for, I suggest that it can only be ourselves. More specifically,
we are responsible for our behavior and how that impacts and effects
others and ourselves. We have personal commitments to many other
people and groups.
These commitments will be to our family and friends, our local community, our country, and finally to all of humanity. These are what I call our implicit commitments. They come out of the conditions of our birth and cannot be forfeited or transferred. We own them. We escape them only at the sacrifice of our own integrity and sanity. Of course, we are also responsible for any explicit commitments which we make.
With our implicit commitments I also include the environment and the rest of nature's creatures? In a very real way these are crucial responsibilities. For example, if we damage the environment, it will have a negative impact on other people. This means we must be environmentally proactive. The environment is really under our protection. It is not just our local garden and yard, but the whole world.
One of the things which causes me great distress is to see the great lack of respect many have for our environment. I visit a local Michigan State park on a regular basis. Every time I go, I spend some time picking up after people who are unable to see the connection between their irresponsible behavior and the quality of their life. Even rats don't crap in their own nest. Only humans do that. Yet, many of us deliberately blind ourselves to the fact that the entire earth is a single nest. This means we cannot look the other way. We cannot pretend it did not happen when someone damages our nest. Like it or not, we are the caretakers.
As another example of this, because of something which happened 200 years ago, some American Indians have decided that they have a right to violate the law and gill net fish in the great lakes. Do they have any responsibility to the culture? Do they have any responsibility to the environment? How are they different that the people who dump garbage in our parks? They were supposedly the noble caretakers of the Great Spirit's earth. Is that to laugh?
I don't think anyone has a right to negatively impact the environment, regardless of history. We all have an obligation to act responsibly. Everyone babbles about rights, but no one has talked about responsibility since John F. Kennedy. In fact, we sometimes get the opposite. Following the crisis of the attack of September 11, Americans needed leadership. We were ready to sacrifice and do whatever was necessary. So we got a president who told us to go out and spend money. Instead of responsibility and sacrifice he was advising hedonism. If it were not so tragic, it would be laughable.
I firmly believe that rights must come out of responsibility. I mean personal responsibility. Without that, there can be no coherent society to secure our rights. That should be self evident to even a fool. Yet, as a people, we continue to move away from the acceptance of responsibility toward a hedonistic life style where we apparently have a right to total self indulgence. Does anyone except me see the parallel to the decline of the Roman Empire.
We are responsible for the earth. That is just one area. In the area of family and home, we are responsible to and for each other. That means the parents must be responsible for and to the children. The children must be responsible to the parents. This responsibility includes the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual nurturing of the children. That implies the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual grounding of the parents. If the parents come out of that space, the children will respond. They will meet adult responsible behavior with responsible behavior of their own. No one will need to tell them how to behave. They will heed to the example.
Parents have to be role models. You cannot just tell your kids what to do or teach them what to do. You must be what you want them to be. If you are honest, your kid will most likely be honest. If you lie and cheat, expect your kid to do the same. If you are a bully, so too will your kid be a bully. The kids will learn from what you are, not from what you say.
Unfortunately, many of the crucial decisions about our children's nurturing are too often evaded. We tend to avoid the discipline of making and holding to healthy decisions, for ourselves or our children. This weakness is not lost on the children. They are much more likely to emulate what we do than to do what we say. This laziness of spirit is too easily transferred. It has a spiritual and an emotional impact. Our children's emotional nurturing requires us to do better than that.
I view the emotional nurturing of children as the most important of the aspects of the home. It is also the easiest to fulfill. One could probably write several volumes concerning the how to of this and the psychology of it. It comes down to this. Children are vulnerable and defenseless. They are very aware of that. To thrive they need the safety and reassurance of a stable, dependable, nurturing environment.
The way we give that to them is simple. We listen to them. We give them positive reenforcement and praise. We give them love; not just the words of love. Words are birds. They fly out and fly away. Hugs are forever. Never mind the sugar and toys. We cannot buy love at Toys 'R' US, or at the candy store. It must come out of our hearts. It must be real. This is one thing that children have always been better at than adults. They can easily spot a con which would fool a tax examiner.
Physical nurturing is a lot about making reasonable dietary decisions. I regret to report that it does not happen in most homes that I am familiar with. We tend to take the easy way so kids end up with too much sugar, too much fat, and too little real food. We all know what is best. Too often, we just don't do it and our children develop poor dietary habits. These, of course, are precursors to adult poor health.
The other part of physical nurturing is about exercise. Again, we too often take the easy way out. We ignore the fact that the TV and the computer have switches to turn them off. As parents, we may complain that it is not as easy as it was before television. It is true that I got exercise because it was a natural part of my entertainment. There was not much else. Sandlot baseball was fun. So what? Sandlot baseball would still be fun if adults could refrain from interfering. I'll have more to say on adult interference later. For now, good health in children requires vigorous exercise.
Our children's intellectual development is crucial if we are to have a viable democracy. Democracy requires an informed electorate to function. I think too many of us assume that sending the kids to school will do the trick. I am here to say that formal education by itself is necessary, but not sufficient. The truth is, the public schools do as well as they can given their situation, but it is not enough. This efforts must be supplemented in the home.
It is essential for us as parents to support and supplement our children's education. We can only do that if we pay attention to what they are doing in school. We must not only encourage them, we must understand the processes involved. To be sure, that requires that we ourselves understand the subject matter. If we do not know it, we must do whatever is necessary to learn it. Our children have a right to expect that of us.
There is another school of though about public education which has been lurking on the fringes of our culture for some time. That is the concept of in home education wherein one or both of the parents usurp the functions of the public system. They attempt to single handedly supplant public education. I will address this later as a separate issue. For now I will insist that nothing good lurks on that road, only disaster.
The final aspect of our responsibility to family is the spiritual nurturing of the children. This is not a responsibility that we can pawn off as many parents attempt to do. Some of us send our kids to a religious institution of some kind for this. Others will even insist that religious concepts be taught in public school. This is all nonsense. As a parent, the spiritual nurturing of the child is our responsibility, no one else's. If our kids don't find it in us, nothing the professional holy-man says will matter.
Nothing that happens in school or in religious indoctrination can possibly offset that moral void. If spirituality is not in the home, it does not exist for the child. The only real goal of education is to create a more skilled and more conscious population. Support for spiritual and religions activities is not the proper function of education. Those are proper functions of the home.
Many of us are too insecure to deal with our children's spiritual grounding and we farm it out to a professional church group where it gets poorly done. Look at your Priest or your Rabi or whatever. Would you loan him your life savings and trust him to return it in good time? If not, why are you trusting him with your children's souls. In another essay I will treat further with organized religion as an aspect of our culture.
For now, I will insist that morality and spiritual nurturing
are functions of the home.
Morality is simple. It's about honesty and integrity. That's all.
The home is responsible for teaching children these basic disciplines
along with respect for law. I don't mean subservience, I mean
respect for the rule of law. That concept is a cornerstone of
democracy. Respect for the rule of law is part of our personal
responsibility.
Now personal responsibility merges into family and then into
community where law first comes into play. Very strong personal
responsibility will produce very viable local communities. Then
dominating and oppressive federal and state governments will become
untenable. The local communities will simply not allow it. Viable
communities can only exist where the citizens hold to a personal
ethic and take responsibility for themselves.
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