By Keith Frome
Buffalo, NY – I have noticed that when schools and advice books talk about parenting, they tend to ignore its spiritual dimensions. They describe raising children using the same vernacular as auto-repair manuals or investment brochures or cookbooks. Notice how many parenting advice books organize their ideas into "bullet points": the formatting tool writers use to boil down complex subjects to digestible bites. How many children do you know who can be reduced to a set of bullet points? Whose relationship with their child can be organized into the frames of a PowerPoint presentation? My concern is not that the children themselves will be harmed by the simplistic language and methodologies of the parenting advice industry. Children are resilient and free and wonderfully individualistic. The danger is that the language of such advice is rarely rich enough to give parents a vocabulary to behold and appreciate their children in all of their miraculous and sacred ambiguity.
I believe that all parents, no matter their religious background or lack thereof, feel a spiritual impulse. I know of no parent, no matter how logical or scientific, who is not struck dumb with awe at the birth of his or her child. What animates this baby? What makes her go? How can she be so much a part of me and so separate at the same time? Atheists, agnostics and believers alike see a baby as more than just a union of cells. They cannot reconstruct a direct and complete causal path from the biological mechanism of conception to the just-born breathing infant pulsating in their arms. Creating a life is not the same as making one domino knock down the next, and the next, and the next, in one mapped succession. Something else intervenes something free and wild and mysterious and brings this person into existence in the most unlikely way.
I would submit that every parent experiences at the moment of birth a mystical insight. It is in this rapture of beholding, without knowing exactly how or why, that the seeds of humility and spirituality the twin foundations of every religion are sown.
As we do at the beginning of life, can we not also locate the same revelatory moments in our everyday encounters with our children? Can we see the soul of our child in the way he picks at his peas during dinner? Can we recognize the divine moments in each frustrating, taxing day of begging our children to eat just a little more, to use an inside voice, to take a nap, to clean up after themselves, to let mommy and daddy talk a little bit, to take a bath, to not draw on the walls?
At Elmwood Franklin, we believe the task of parenting is to continue to explore the mysterious power of the parent-child connection that is so palpable at birth. The paradoxical message of each of the world's religions is that though the nature of reality is beyond your personal control, you are still responsible for your world and for your soul. This is the line of tension for every parent. If we set before us, as we rear our children, the task of beholding one divine moment a day, what might we find? And how might that change our perspective and behavior as parents?
Listener-Commentator Keith Frome is Headmaster of Elmwood Franklin School in Buffalo.