In the beauty shop this afternoon, my hairdresser and I got into a discussion about raising children. She was telling me about one of her daughter’s friends who habitually spoke to her mother in a very disrespectful way. “My daughters,” she said quite emphatically, “know better than to speak to me that way.”
The more we talked, the more we agreed that children need their moms and dads to be parents first; to set the standards of behavior and beliefs. Children make friends who are the same age they are. As parents, we need to be the grownups in the relationship and set firm moral foundations.
We have an intrinsic desire for our lives to have meaning; the two gnawing questions we ask throughout life are “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” says psychiatrist and pediatrician Robert Coles in his book, The Moral Intelligence of Children: How to Raise a Moral Child. This search for meaning transcends all cultural boundaries, customs, and mores. It is through reaching beyond socially and culturally imposed limitations that we discover our goodness within, our shared purpose in life and, attain true happiness.
After years spent working with children and teachers, Coles argues that firm moral foundations are necessary in the development of the individual, stating that “Unfortunately, all too many of us in contemporary America feel troubled by the matter of religion as it connects with our children’s life, in school and at home and in the neighborhood, as if the subject in some ways is puzzling, confusing, even a threat to this nation’s secular society.”
While adults may be muddled, Coles goes on to point to what children in fact strive for, explaining, “Yet children constantly ask their whys, seek the moral reasons upon which to gird their present and future life – the heart of spirituality: to look inward in search of meaning and purpose; to seek an understanding of what truly matters and for which reasons.”
In the third century, the great thinker, Aristotle defined good as "what everything seeks" and that a human’s good/end is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” Aristotle argues that individuals struggle between their desires and what is best or rational. He draws a distinction between an individual who may know what the virtuous thing to do is yet is somehow incapacitated or ignorant to the appropriate response and, a weak-willed individual who knows what is best or virtuous and is overcome with some opportunity of great pleasure which blurs his perceptions so he chooses pleasure over virtue.
Coles comments on goodness by noting that “the issue of goodness is not an abstract one, but rather a concrete, expressive one: how to turn the rhetoric of goodness into action, moments that affirm the presence of goodness in a particular lived life.” He describes goodness as tied to the Golden Rule, which takes us beyond the self to other.
Even Abraham Maslow, the well-respected psychologist of the late 20th century, grew beyond the apex of his earlier humanistic model of the Hierarchy of Needs where he had placed “self-actualization” as the pinnacle of individual growth. Moving up from the fulfillment of physiological needs, to safety, love/belonging, esteem to self-actualization, he tops his pyramid with “self-transcendence.” He wrote, “I affirm … that at the highest levels of development of humanness, knowledge is positively, rather than negatively, correlated with a sense of mystery, awe, humility, ultimate ignorance, reverence, and a sense of oblation” [surrender to the Divine].
While the rhetoric of Coles, Aristotle and Maslow may sound heavy, as parents it simply boils down to taking on the responsibility of giving our children a moral code by which to live. The bond of friendship we want with them will be forged as they grow into moral, happy and good adults.
And so I pray: Dear Lord, help our children seek your ways and surrender to your love so that their lives may be filled with joy.
In the beauty shop this afternoon, my hairdresser and I got into a discussion about raising children. She was telling me about one of her daughter’s friends who habitually spoke to her mother in a very disrespectful way. “My daughters,” she said quite emphatically, “know better than to speak to me that way.”