It’s all finger-pointing and blame-shifting.
The teachers complain that parents don’t know how to raise well-behaved children. Parents say the teachers spend more time with their kids than they do at home, which makes the teachers the dominant influence in behavior. Cops say both are to blame for letting kids run wild to become criminals, and wonder why churches aren’t more involved, as if churches are accountable to their secular wishes. Church leaders insist the problem is folks have forgotten God, which is code language for demanding society give the preachers more civil authority.
Fact: Children are not naturally bratty little shitbags. It requires an ambient cultural failure to promote moral images for child behavioral modeling. There’s money to be made in dysfunctional families and our culture opens the door wide to such corruption. Our social mythology has created an impossible situation and everyone insists it has to be that way. We just need to [insert politicized social agenda demands here].
I don’t have any quick and simple remedies. All I can do is offer my best understanding of God’s moral character woven into reality.
Do your best to detach your children from this damned world. Withdrawing from society need not be an absolute. If you can think and operate in terms of heart-led awareness, you can easily pass that on to your kids, or anyone else’s kids that come under your influence. No other single factor will make nearly as much difference. But expand on it; get used to dealing with Creation as alive. Teach them to interact with nature on that basis and they’ll be less inclined to surrender to the empty thrill of damned media influences.
Live your faith vividly.
The kids in this village are great. Polite, nice open smiles, engaged and engaging. One quirky little habit that they all have, from little ones to teens, and I wonder where they get it from – they caw at the crows, and the crows caw back. That right there is an indication that someone, somewhere is teaching them that a crow is a ‘who’, not a ‘what’. It’s a small thing, but it matters, because how they see crows will spread to how they see the rest of Creation (at least for some). Who is teaching them to do this? Are they teaching each other? Is it the crows who start the conversation? I don’t know, but it sure warms my heart to witness it.
I taught my kids to do the same thing in the city, much to the consternation of those around us. But to this day, as grown men, they have a feeling for nature that their peers don’t quite get.
Amen, Christine. It can be done.