An Epidemic of Malparenting
Don't have children if you do not have time to instruct them in moral and intellectual excellence
The United States has an epidemic far worse than COVID.
It is an epidemic of malparenting.
It is a self-evident truth that parents are saddled with a duty to emancipate their children from enslavement to their congenital hormonal passions and gratifications. The bright lamp of experience shows the way forward: daily instruction in moral and intellectual excellence.
This duty cannot be subcontracted out to babysitters, teachers, clergy, rabbis, imams, or otherwise. The parents are responsible because they chose to have children knowing that at birth they are slaves to their hormonal needs: nourishment, sleep, shelter, and TLC.
We are all born 100 percent hormonal. To the extent we are taught to subordinate our hormonal instincts to the higher rewards of wisdom, benevolence, learning, and justice, to that extent we have become free humans unfettered by hormonal chains.
The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery. Parents are guilty of violating the Amendment to the extent they default on their duty of imparting moral and intellectual excellence to their children.
Parents do not own their children like chattels. Children do not choose their parents. Parents choose to have children. Their duties are thus a one-way street. Children owe no duties to parents. But if they are properly instructed in moral and intellectual excellence reinforced by parental example, children will exhibit every benevolent instinct of the human heart in loving and exalting their parents.
Archeology is not required for parents to discharge their child-rearing duties. The knowledge has been lying around for millennia in plain view.
Read to your children every day for at least one hour and discuss the readings as long as necessary. The stories should brim with moral wisdom or questions, like Aesop’s Fables, Greek Mythology, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Huckleberry Finn. Let us pause on the latter.
Huck is tasked to return slave Jim to his owner Miss Watson. Huck has been instructed to believe that if he emancipates Jim he will be consigned to hell according to the Bible which sermonizes: “Slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear.” Ephesians 6: 5. Huck then reflects on the command of justice—the summum bonum of the planet. He decides to risk life and limb to secure Jim’s freedom, and exclaims figuratively to his erstwhile preachers, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
Other questions that should feature in parental discussions with children: Would you take the hemlock like Socrates to defend intellectual freedom and the quest for moral truths? Would you have substituted yourself like Sydney Carton for Charles Darnay at the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities? Would you have sacrificed a daughter like King Agamemnon to appease the gods to go to war? Would you have stolen a loaf of bread like Jean Valjean for himself, his sister, and seven children in Les Miserables?
Parents must also spend at least on hour daily teaching their children how to write—the most intellectually demanding of all disciplines. As Sir Francis Bacon taught, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Parents should instruct that brevity is the soul of wit; that economy of expression is the earmark of a master; that persuasive writing employs words that evoke images and verbs that carry action forward like race horses rather than plough horses. The statement, “Nothing dries faster than a politician’s tear,” speakers volumes. Nothing is more memorable than Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Make your children rewrite sentences 20 times, experimenting with different verbs, adjectives, metaphors, and similes. Remember Michelangelo, “If people know how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”
Parenting is the hardest job in the world by orders of magnitude. But the greater the challenge, the more glorious the fulfillment.
Better not to have children then to give birth to a slave with little or no hope of emancipation.
What a superbly written parenting advice! Emancipating children by teaching them morals and virtues. Probably add critical thinking to that as well. My hat is off for Bruce Fein!