Choices

...learning to parent wisely...

Jean-Paul Sartre told us that we are our choices. And in deed we are. The choices we make says more about our inner souls than any proformative outward appearance. Who you choose as friends, who you choose as a partner, the profession you go into, and how you approach the world in general, will dictate who and what you will become. To that end priorities matter.

We try to teach theses truths to our children. Of course, we do not want them to make the same mistakes we made. Hence, modern parenting attempts to shield them from their choices. But does that really, truly help them learn to navigate life successfully?

Choices in childhood do teach you right from wrong.

When you look at the animal kingdom, mammalian parents do not shield their children. They correct their children. They teach their children. They punish/redirect their children. But if the young in the wild don't learn to navigate the natural world while they are young, they will never survive once they reach maturity.

We humans used to let our children make choices. We messed around. We erred. We learned, sometimes the hard way, that its not ok to disregard societal rules. This is not to say that there isn’t a need for “Good Trouble” in some circumstances. This can lead to society changing and morphing, hopefully into something better.

But not everything done in the name of societal growth is actual growth, its instead reactionary. Witness societies’ present choice to provide a safe space for the the ill thought out, hateful, illiberal, machinations of spoiled entitled shrieking children going on across the country, and ask yourself is this how you want your society to function?

While we do point fingers at the university administrations and their hypocritical call for free speech after all the years of noplatforming speakers who don’t fit the DEI and progressive mode, ultimately we need to ask where are the parents?

Parenting is also a choice. The parents of these children have abrogated their responsibilities. Witness the family that greeted their child who had just been released from jail after being arrested for illegal activity at NYU. They attacked the police and the school rather than reprimand their child and her actions. ( The interesting question now is how is she is going to explain to any potential employer about her arrest. When you chant “from the river to the sea” everyone knows you are calling for Jewish genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews from their ancestral homeland. I guess she could get a job at the UN.)

I remember back in the day of the 1960s antiwar protests which, counter to flower-power and love-in reminiscences, were violent, interfered with other students education and basically brought colleges to a standstill. My parents actually turned to me after one such violent campus contretemps and told me that when I go to college if I ever take part in anything close to what they were witnessing, they would revoke my tuition and shlep me home. School is for education. I can be an anarchist on my own dime. (By the way, my parents were not against civil protest. I had taken part in many a protest on behalf of Soviet Jewry.)

It’s a lesson that stuck with me.

Someone should have explained to these young people that when a terrorist organization (Hamas) that committed mass murder, rapes and barbarisms applauds what you are doing, when a regime (Iranian Mullahs) known to hang gays, murder women who dont cover their hair, deny all forms of civil liberties, traffics in some of the most egregious forms of antisemitism since Nazi Germany, and is committing genocide against the Bahai, applauds what you are doing, your choices are repugnant. You are on the wrong side of history. There is no joy and harmony when those who would burn the world says “good job.”

A personal anecdote: Those who know me, or have read some of my other writings, know that my sons are on the autism spectrum. And with everyone on the spectrum, each autistic person has individual needs. One of my sons’ needs is that they required an aide to attend college and graduate school. We provided that. As my husband said, our sons have a right to an education, but they do not have a right to interfere with someone else’s education.

So we worked out an agreement with the school to do what was best for everyone.

In truth, one of the things I have learned over more than 6 decades of life is that the choices we make in raising our children have a profound effect on our children. We are supposed to guide them, support them, and teach them right from wrong.

But when parents don’t take the responsibility to teach their children how to make good choices, we fail abysmally as parents, and we set up our children to fail as adults.

We are supposed to teach our children to be discerning and to understand right from wrong. We are supposed to teach them honesty and compassion. We are supposed to teach them to be good people. We are supposed to teach them to choose like minded friends and eschew philosophies that call for murder, mayhem, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, genocide, and anarchy.

When we teach our children that they are their choices, we also need to remember that the choices we make in raising them have quite a profound effect on the rest of their lives. And how their lives turn out, says alot about us.