Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Things More Grim? January 19, 2012

 

I was homeschooled. Yes, and please understand that this is nothing of which I boast. In fact, I seldom admit to it at all. Until I was nine years old, I lived in a home far removed from any metropolitan influence. I had no cable, of course no internet access, very few friends, no modern reading material… perhaps you get the idea.

What I did have were my books and a television plugged into a VCR. With that VCR, I was allowed to watch movies that were dated pre-1970. While other children my age were going to the movies to see Back to the Future 2, Die Hard, and Indiana Jones, I was home watching Arsenic and Old Lace, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and To Kill a Mockingbird, with the likes of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Gregory Peck along with their beautiful and always submissive love interests.

My book collection consisted of age-old children’s literature which some may have called archaic; although, I’ll admit to having enjoyed them. Now when I say age-old literature, I’m including everything from Kenneth Graham’s,  The Wind in the Willows, Arnold Lobel’s, Frog and Toad and  Grimm’s Fairy Tales (illustrated by Arthur Rackham, who is my favorite illustrator to this day. I have, in fact, used two of his illustrations in this very post) to Christian family books from the nineteen-thirties through the fifties. In these books, men were chivalrous. They wore suits and combed their hair impeccably. Their wives respected them, and their children revered them. They didn’t neglect their family for the game, piss on the toilette seat, or retire early in the evenings to indulge in online porn. They were never effeminate, nor were they ever “stay at home dads”.

My dad had a good job, and one that required him to wear a suit and tie. He always opened and closed doors for my mom, and ultimately had the final say in most of the big decisions for the household. He was kind and we felt his love, but when he said jump, we jumped till he said stop (figurative).

I remember riding horses with ease by the age of six; being completely familiar with how to operate my Grandfather’s tractors and other equipment at the age of nine; and being proficient enough with any hunting rifle or shotgun at the age of eight to rival many adults.

The first time I ever touched a girl, I was seventeen. She had taken her shirt off. My god, I remember it so well. I suppose it was nothing really. I bumped into her recently; she was my age, but she looked old. I suspected she had “touched” a few other boys.

 

In short, I was raised in another world. I supposed that the odd choice of style by everyone around me, who never wore suits and seldom bathed, were simply a byproduct of where we lived. Perhaps they were inbred. Surely when my Dad left for work every day, he needed to wear his business suits because… well, out there, everybody wore them. Didn’t they? The world had changed dramatically from the only age to which I was ever exposed, and I was certain that the conflicting view that I saw around me was only a local element.  It must just be here; it must just be the people around Spring Hill, Arkansas.

 

When I made it to college, I befriended Sean. He was worldly and experienced in everything from drugs and women, to serious felonies and jail. He decided that I needed a dose of life; a good dunking in the real world. He was good at that. I learned quickly, and although there were certain lines of misbehavior I simply would not cross, those lines were far over the horizon.

I stood recently at the conference center of that school thinking to myself, if only we had known then. If only Joel would have known then that his future wife would leave him, and he would call me periodically with a gun to his head. If only Sean had known that he would be arrested for operating a drug enterprise and prison would be in his near future. I wish I could tell Amanda that she would drop out after her first semester, and ten years later she would be a single mother waiting tables back in her home town of Berryville. I looked at those old seats where we had all once sat, and I thought those things.

 

I now have a son whose name is Alek. Alek is four. How shall I raise him? Might I expose him to the world as it is, or place a facade over all that is bad? A world of make-believe that hasn’t existed for half a century, or the world as it truly is today?

Alek, wanted to stay up on New Years with me to watch the ball drop in New York from our living room in Berryville. I couldn’t see why not.

“Daddy, why is that boy dressed like a girl?” he’d ask. “Daddy, I think that guy’s a monster?” he’d say.

And when Lady Gaga appeared on the screen, “sang” her “song”, and she had finished, “You know Daddy, I think that lady is sad.”

“How do you think son?”

“I saw it on her face”

 

 

I want to close the curtains, and make everything beyond them disappear – All of the scary things – The monsters and such. I want for my little boy to dream, like his daddy once did, that the world is at peace; that monsters aren’t real; and that men are still chivalrous.

 

Do I dare?

 

 Certain names have been changed to protect the identity of certain people mentioned

Raising Children From a Beginner’s Perspective August 9, 2011

Stephanie and I have chosen to raise our children with high, but not unattainably high standards. Some of these standards might seem somewhat parochial, according to modern logic; nevertheless, we actually expect our children to adhere to them. Don’t misunderstand, when I say we expect them to adhere to our standards, I certainly don’t expect this to be accomplished without the occasional hiccup. Instead, our intention is to not lower the standards that we’ve set for our children simply because they fall short of achieving them a time or two. To lower the standards to something more achievable would not give our kids an accurate perspective of the “real world”. Lowering standards or changing rules to suit the needs of the rule breakers is not a common practice in the everyday life of a grown up, yet parents so often seem dead set on providing such conveniences for their children. Notice that no matter how many times we are caught speeding through a particular area, it seems the powers that be never even consider raising the speed limits to help compensate for our inability to adhere to the existing ones. If we arrive late for work a few days back to back, the boss never calls us into their office to discuss changing the time to something that would be better suited to our needs. Instead we are expected, even after failing once or twice, to eventually conform and live up to whatever standards are put before us. In this same way, should Stephanie and I some day catch our son Alek stealing, rest assured that our response will not be to lower our standards because, through his falling short of our standards, Alek has proven his inability to achieve them. Nor will our response be to keep our high standards, but determine that Alek is simply not capable of living up to our expectation of moral behavior. The appropriate response, should we find that Alek has been stealing or falling short of any standard that we might place for him, will be to sit him down and explain to him that he has done wrong, but that his wrongdoing does not make him a bad person; instead, his behavior has created a condition by which he must make right his wrong and leave it at that. He mustn’t dwell on his wrong doing and consider ways to steal the next time and not get caught, or consider ways to excuse it and perceive it as right. Instead he must own his wrong, believe that it was wrong, and turn his focus from the atrocity and back to the standard, which is still exactly where it was, unmoved. It seems that a Rousseauian influence has crept into many homes around the globe. When I say Rousseauian, I’m speaking of a modern philosophy edicting new standards of sexual liberty, neglect of discipline, compassion for rebellion, and a general acceptance that a fourteen year old is growing and maturing and therefore should be regarded as a fellow adult by her parents. All of these are considered by modernists to be important freedoms for an evolving generation of species, but really they are nothing more than examples of poor parental leadership. Leadership is one thing that is no longer held to a high standard because in a world where modernism rules, there is no existing standard to which one may hold leadership accountable. An obvious and surely overused example would be Bill Clinton. Upon hearing the news of his promiscuities, most of the world recoiled a bit and maybe even threw up a bit in our mouths. Then someone blurted the question, “What did he do that was so different from what any of us has done or at least been tempted to do at some point?” This question would only be valid if it held true that, when we are tempted to engage in an activity that was previously perceived as immoral, the activity suddenly becomes permissible, or justified once we grow comfortable enough with it. The president committed adultery while inhabiting the respected position of our nation’s leader, and then lied to us about his affair. It’s time we stop making excuses for our leadership and ourselves, and realize that the fact that a particular sin may have at some time been on our own plate doesn’t excuse or justify the sin or the sinner. Immorality does not find salvation in numbers or with familiarity. Now, remember that the president’s actions are still forgivable, only not justifiable. (More on the subject of forgiveness vs. justification in a  following paragraph)

I recently watched the Ron Howard film “Parenthood”. There are lots of great things I could say about the film, but in an effort to stay on course, I’ll only describe one scenario that pertains to the heart of this essay. In a compelling scene set in the nineties, an aged Woodstock flower child is depicted trying to figure out how to be a single mom of two rebellious teenagers. At one point in the film she manages to break into her thirteen year old son’s padlocked bedroom where she discovers the boy’s stash of violent, sadomasochistic porn. She becomes concerned for her son’s well being, and thus turns to her daughter’s nymphomaniac teen husband, Todd Higgins, for advice. Todd decides that it would be best to discuss the issue directly with the boy, and in the next scene we see Todd emerging from the boy’s bedroom to rest the worried mother assured that the boy is in no immediate psychiatric danger. He informs her that he put the boy at ease by letting him know that masturbating to porn is, “Just what little dudes do”. It comes as no surprise that we see the same thing happening in Hollywood that we see from our leadership in the White House. That is, condoning misbehavior rather than correcting it; “Hey, I did it when I was young so it can’t be that bad”. I have been tempted to use that same mentality with my own children. I have even been heard saying, “Alek will probably get into a lot of fights growing up. That is, after all, just what little dudes do.” When I said those words, I was really just attempting to trivialize my own shortcomings. By saying that fighting is just what boys do, I was excusing myself from any guilt of my immorality. Rather than dealing with the reality that I should have avoided fighting while growing up and accepting the fact that my sin has brought on many consequences and much heartache, I chose to excuse it by saying that not only did I fight, but so will Alek. Had I kept up that attitude, I would have been predisposing my child to a particular immoral behavior from my past that I was unwilling to deal with and seek forgiveness for. Here’s a challenge for all of us, no more making excuses for our shortcomings. Whether our sins involve lust, pornography, stealing, overeating, overspending, violence, dishonesty or any one of millions of other examples, let’s view them for what they are, own them, repent of them and continue striving for the standard, that of biblical morality. If we as parents are willing to do that, then will be assisting ourselves in coaching our children around the land mines that we trotted through at their age rather than sitting by and watching them make the same mistakes that we did, all the while excusing their immoral behavior as something that is “just what kids do.”

 

Christians have a slightly different way of wording their condonance of other’s sins. Often times Christians, in their theological ineptitude, will refer to justification as “forgiveness”, and they explain it away by saying that we should not judge (C. S. Lewis effectively communicates the distinction between justification and forgiveness in his short essay titled “Forgiveness”). This new doctrine of not making an animadversion on immorality, even if it kills us, is only an attempt to excuse our own equally unjustifiable behavior. Funny, I don’t remember Samuel in the Bible ever saying to Saul, when Saul disobeyed the Lord’s command and spared the king, “Who am I to judge you Saul? Heck, I might of done the same thing if I were you”. Instead, Samuel chopped the king’s head off and told Saul that his sin would have consequences that would affect entire generations. Then there was Nathan who told David that Bathsheba was just hot, and it would be difficult for any man not to commit adultery with her, and the murder that ensued was simply a byproduct of man’s gradual evolution and praescindere from his animalistic, territorial instincts. Obviously that was not how the story went. Christians, let’s read the Old Testament, and learn how God expects his people to function in society. Now that we have grown quite adept at justifying the misbehavior of our nation’s leaders and Hollywood’s finest, why stop there? This is where we come back to the subject of our children, yours and mine. Modernists claim that we are evolving. They also claim that the evolutionary process consistently yields improvements to the evolving species. Yet these same modernists allege that with each new and improved generation, our children become increasingly less likely to make good, sound, moral choices. Should our response to this obvious paradox be to lower the standards for our children in hopes that their more evolved generation could more easily achieve a standard that is less rigid? This seems an absurd notion, but I can’t tell you how many of my students have told me that their parents have informed them that they are incapable of making good choices when it comes to sex, given them condoms and told them to hope for the best. These students wonder aloud why their parents have so little faith in them. Of course, I’ve never told them that this may be their parents’ way of excusing their own shortcomings. There is a tendency to reason that if we as parents were unable to make good choices in the area of our sexuality, whether in thought or in action, then certainly our children will be as hopeless as we were. Only, we were not hopeless. The Lord promises to provide a way out of every misguiding temptation. That we may have failed to notice the exit door doesn’t doom our children, thank God, to being so blind as we were.

How might things change for our children if we were willing to own up to the fact that our breaking the law was inexcusable, our adultery was immoral, and our overindulgence was damaging? What would happen if we stopped making excuses for our misbehavior and began discouraging our children from making the same mistakes we made. Think about it, do you really expect your children to not smoke? Probably so if you don’t smoke: probably not if you do. Consider this, your willingness to observe your own trespasses against moral standards could be the very thing needed to break the generational pattern of a particular behavior. Our view of our own moral behavior affects our expectations of our children’s moral behavior, and our expectation of their moral behavior is the influence that molds that behavior either closer to, or further from the biblical standard of morality.

Nathan Gray