A few generations ago parenting manuals were unheard of. Today, walk into any bookstore or scan any magazine stand and you will see it decked with materials on how to raise one’s kids.
With global and national shifts in cultural and social behaviors, common parenting tasks –usually handed down within extended families by grandparents to their children and the children to the grandchildren–, are becoming a rare family legacy especially in cities.
Traditions and customs that previously focused on building the moral character of children for life, are now being overlooked by the more pragmatic approach of parents geared more towards rearing their children for professional success. At first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong about this. Given the high material costs of raising children, sending them to school and probably still continuing to support them after college is a basic priority for most parents today.
Moreover, this material support of their children, united with the parents’ openness to the number of children God may want them to have, is part of the secondary purpose of marriage: the education and formation of the children. But greater emphasis is now placed on ‘skills’ for rearing successful children, and parents are paying less attention their moral identity as parents which is indispensable for forging and polishing their children’s personality.
David Brooks, in his enlightening book Road to Character, explains how parenthood is being threatened by parenting or rudimentary ‘child care-giving skills’. He traces this from the rise of a ‘meritocratic outlook’ in society. This in turn leads to a ‘conditional love’ in parents for their children which “unconsciously shapes their expressions of love to steer their children towards a behavior they think will lead to achievement and happiness.”
He recognizes that a meritocratic vision “encourages people to make the most of their capacities, but it leads to the shriveling of the moral faculties that are necessary if you are going to figure out how to point your life in a meaningful direction.”
How does this affect their children?
Brooks describes that children today, are “praised and honed to an unprecedented degree” and they “are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. (…) Enormous internal pressure is generated by the growing assumption that it is necessary to behave in a certain way to be worthy of another’s love. (…) children are terrified that the deepest relationship they know will be lost.”
If this is how children grow up from a meritocratic love, then how are parents also affected by this materialistic approach? In my view, parents who are overly focused in developing their children to be materially successful are in danger of not grasping the full identity of their calling to be parents. Their children become ‘material projects’ to engage and to measure their personal success with. In the process, they reduce ‘parental identity’ into a set of intellectual and social skills concentrated uniquely towards their children’s material excellence.
Parenthood, however, is a richer and more meaningful reality. It is a vocation for both the father and mother. It goes beyond the usual material, intellectual and psycho-emotional care –that is, parenting skills– that one ought to give to children. Parenthood is a defining feature that constantly invites husband and wife to engage in a divine mission from God, for their family and society.
Only from this perspective will parenting skills authentically properly align itself as one more component within parenthood. Parenting skills can therefore be enriched more by opening them towards other ‘goals’ besides the children’s material and emotional success.
The mission of parenthood, St. Josemaría says, “transforms their whole married life into an occasion for God’s presence on earth. (…) They are called to sanctify their married life and to sanctity themselves in it (Christ is passing by, no. 23).”
In a homily, he synthesizes what parenthood wonderfully achieves and what sheer parenting cannot.
“What a son or daughter looks for in a father or mother is not only a certain amount of knowledge or some more or less effective advice, but primarily something more important: a proof of the value and meaning of life, shown through the life of a specific person, and confirmed in the different situations and circumstances that occur over a period of time.”
“This is how you will best contribute to making your children become true Christians, men and women of integrity, capable of facing all life’s situations with an open spirit, of serving their fellowmen and helping to solve the problems of mankind, of carrying the testimony of Christ to the society of which they will be a part (Ibid).”