Tag: parenting

So I'm wondering where the spirit of the American pioneer, where the culture of the can-do man has gone?

Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.

So whatever value motherhood gets assigned on earth, it’s pretty clear what position it holds on high. You may feel invisible here, but you certainly aren’t in Heaven.

A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.

What this means is death. When our kids were little, parenting meant death to my independence: my time, my space, my very body, were no longer my own. Parenting meant death to sleeping in and going out on a whim. It meant death to plans carefully wrought and carelessly wrecked by fever and blowouts and ear infections.

Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm and safe, I imagine, and so he is not as afraid of making mistakes. Alternative educators recognized this in the classroom decades ago: that children read better with an adult’s arm around them, or while piled onto soft pillows with a couple of friends.

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived just around the corner in our quiet, speeding-car-free neighborhood, and spend a couple of hours engaged in free creative play, or a massive self-directed building project, or an epic game of Scrabble. How I sometimes wish we lived in that world!

All of parenting is risky because nothing is more important to us than our children. And the decisions we make do matter, sometimes greatly. But if we allow risk to dominate our thinking and practices, we will become unmoored from reality and pass down this paralyzing anxiety to our children.

I didn’t intend to welcome two children into an era marked by so much bleakness and turmoil. With James’s help, I’ve remembered that there is no project more local, no gift more world-changing, than the calling of parenthood.

At age 12, our daughter discovered that our front yard could be more than a place to turn cartwheels. It was also an evergreen...