Forming the Affections of Our Children

When I was younger, I rolled my eyes at parents’ social media posts containing extravagant, heady quotes from their three- or four-year-olds. My experience at the time told me that children were dumb, clumsy, occasionally hilarious, and certainly not insightful. If they ever were insightful, it was an accident and not worth telling the world about. But then, three weeks after our first anniversary, my wife and I welcomed our son.

From the beginning, we have been as intentional as we can in pointing his mind toward the transcendent. Informed by our faith, we believe that beauty, truth, and goodness exist for their own sake, and the pursuit of these transcendentals is a gift. We rarely do this well in our own flawed and exhausted states, but it still serves as a beacon guiding our parenting. We have navigated difficult seasons in our young marriage and, as most parents know, sometimes parenting looks less like a carefully crafted plan for human formation and more like survival. Sometimes, child rearing looks like a 22-inch television screen showing Planes: Fire & Rescue for the umpteenth time.

Nevertheless, our efforts to introduce him to good children’s poetry and literature have not yet gotten lost in the chaos of life. I spent several years as an elementary school teacher in classical schools where good poetry and literature were the centerpieces of my classroom. It has been a great joy to pass this poetry on to my children, especially my oldest son, who can recite them with me. Some favorites are Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Moon” and “Where Go the Boats,” Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I am hard-pressed to experience more joy in my role as a father than when I tuck him into bed and he requests “Jabberwocky” while acting out certain elements of the poem. While he does recite with me, he remains an avid listener above all else at this point in his life. And I am more than pleased to be his bard—I know that this will not last forever. In the midst of Planes and Monster Jam diecast toys, poetry holds a firm place in my son’s life.

I had the privilege of seeing the fruits of this love on a recent trip to Wisconsin where we hiked Rib Mountain, a prominent landmark overlooking the city of Wausau. Rib Mountain is the highest point in Wisconsin relative to the surrounding landscape, and the view from the top is quite spectacular. One can see for miles, and for a Midwestern family that generally experiences flatness, it is absolutely beautiful.

As we peered over a lookout, taking in the scenery, my three-year-old son said to me, “Can you do statues touch the sky one?”

I was confused. “What?”

“Like statues touch the sky,” he said.

I finally realized that he was requesting a poem. Not just any poem, but one that directly pertained to what he was experiencing in that moment. He wanted me to recite “We Never Know How High We Are” by Emily Dickinson.

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—

The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—

My son does not experience all the meaning Dickinson’s poem conveys. He thinks “statures” is “statues.” But he knew that he was high, and he knew the poem discussed being high. He requested that I recite it a second time immediately after I had finished. I obliged, and the entire time, he leaned over the edge of the lookout, taking in the view while poetry rang in his ears. When I had finished the second time, again without taking his gaze off of the world below, he said, “That’s wonderful.”

To say that I was floored would not do justice to what I experienced mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in that moment. After years of raising an eyebrow to parents for supposedly fabricating profound insights from their children, here was my three-year-old son making one of his own. A fleeting moment from a small child carried enormous weight, at least for my soul.

Poetry had become part of his lived experience, and he reached for it when no other form of communication could do justice to what he was seeing. When his memory searched for words or images to describe the scene around him, it found poetry. Now I understand why these parents I had once dismissed on social media told stories about their children’s quotes. Their children were not small philosophers whose everyday musings were packed with deep insights into the human experience. Yet once in a while, children reveal the work that years of formation have been quietly striving to accomplish.

Children are capable of encountering beauty before they understand the concepts behind beauty. My son did not understand the Dickinson poem, but he did not need to understand it. It was still “wonderful.” The idea of wonder is a close companion to the concept of delight. My son delighted in the view and delighted in the poem, so much so that two recitations sufficed when one could not. Delight, for him, preceded meaning. Children laugh, after all, long before they understand or speak words. He encountered poetry and the mountain together as beautiful things that could inform each other, and then he expressed verbally that he was delighted in them.

When the stresses of life get in the way and I cave as a parent to lesser comforts that amuse my son, I can see these choices bear fruit, and often unpleasant ones. I knew that my son enjoyed listening to poems, simple as they are at this age, but I had not necessarily seen the fruits of this +particular exposure. Perhaps the point of memorizing poetry for young children is not so that they can recite it on command and impress their friends and relatives. Perhaps it is for poetry to arise unbidden when reality calls for it. I have taught many poems to many children, and rarely have I seen this result so clearly. For my son, if poetry was not part of his understanding of reality, then it never could have described his reality in a way that was satisfactory.

The youngest of us are malleable. What they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch forms their opinions and desires. Their taste is something that can be formed deliberately, and if we simply leave their taste up to the vagaries of life, plenty of clamoring voices will chime in to grab their attention and form their souls. My son is attracted to Disney movies and Monster Jam, and that is certainly my fault as a parent, whether or not they are inherently wrong for a three-year-old to know about. But he is also attracted to nature and poetry. Parents of young children, and especially of young men, have a duty to show them what is truly worth having in their repertoire of knowledge and experience. It is a noble privilege to introduce children to simple beauties that will enrich their souls. In my son’s memory, Rib Mountain and Emily Dickinson belong together, even if he does not know why. For now, that is enough.

Image Credit: Imogen Cunningham