Everything
changed for me in a moment. It was in the kitchen. My son was there; he
was the catalyst for my transformation. Up to that moment I had believed that we
acquired our personalities through experience. We were born as lumps of soft
clay, and the obstetrician’s fingers made great and permanent impressions. Our
parents continued to mold us as our clay-stuff hardened, until sometime late in
childhood we became unmalleable. But now, standing in our kitchen, trying
desperately to get through to my sixteen year old, I watched as he argued back, setting up distracting roadblocks exactly as his mother often had—and yet I had been his single parent since he
was small, raising him since the divorce!
Maybe children of
child-beaters become child-beaters not because of their experience but because
they inherit the child-beating gene. Children of alcoholics are predisposed to
alcoholism because they inherit that predisposition. It has long been
understood that we inherit our dispositions, but we inherit so much more
specific tendencies than those.
Why is it so
mysterious and surprising that identical twins raised separately buy similar
cars, work similar jobs, even marry women with the same names? If you are
convinced that we are what we are because of our experiences, of course those
coincidences are unexplainable. But when we understand that we were born as
very specific individuals, then we can easily see why identical twins would live
parallel lives.
And speaking
of direction, have you watched a flock of birds swoop around the sky like a
great living cloud, or a school of fish turn abruptly in the same direction?
It’s because they were born that way, and they are all the same bird, all the
same fish. (Those birds that were different and those fish that were different went
their own way and were picked off by predators.)
So what can
we do as parents? Many of us have experienced frustration with our children,
because they are who they are and will not bend to our corrections. But maybe
we have neither the ability nor the divine right to impose corrections. Maybe
it is best to allow our children to develop into the people they were destined
from birth to be—within reason.
There are
two qualities that I believe are
necessary for a young person to cultivate: kindness and consciousness. The term
kindness, I believe, is unambiguous, perhaps because it is visible to others.
Not
so easy to discern in others is consciousness, by which I mean mindfulness,
self-monitoring awareness, remembering oneself, being here now. I find it quite difficult to
make the concept clear, as apparently also do many authors. It may be too simple to be believed.
There is being
conscious in the sense of being awake as opposed to being in a coma, and there
is consciousness of self in the sense of being self-conscious, or preoccupied
with one’s image. I mean neither of these, nor any of several other possible
misconceptions. The subject is worthy of a book-long discussion, and such books
do exist. I’ll not attempt to write one here.
Anyway,
kindness and consciousness don’t violate any decent character, and they are
teachable.
Of all the
things my father tried to impress upon me, three versions of the same admonition
survive in me today as eminently worthwhile:
Pay
attention
Think about
what you are doing
Try to put
yourself into the other person’s shoes
Other
lessons were intended to socialize me and inculcate common courtesy into my
behavior, and most of those took, over time. And many lessons were useless to
me, even destructive, such as “do not be an engineer,” because he didn’t enjoy
his profession, or stay away from Black people (he said colored), or do not
aspire to be an artist, or don’t tell anyone your mother is dead. Those
instructions went against my nature and were ugly.
But those first,
big three—Pay attention; Think about what you are doing; Try to put yourself
into the other person’s shoes—I remember those often, and thank my father keenly
for them.
Every one of
us has the capacity for kindness and consciousness—I see evidence of it
everywhere—but we do need teaching and reminding. That, I believe, is the
proper work of a parent.
