Raising Doves and Snakes
by: James R. Lucas - Sep 1, 2006 - comment
The world can be a cold, cruel place.
Should we protect our children from it so they won’t be corrupted by it? Or should we expose them to it so they won’t be ambushed by it? The answer is “Absolutely!” We have to protect them like parents have never had to protect their children before. And we have to prepare them to enter a world in which young children are exposed to things that adults were sheltered from just a generation ago.
Rampant pornography is just the most perverse form of a sexual “revolution” that has turned into a moral bloodbath. What is presented as “normal” in television programs, PG-13 movies (I don’t go to them since I’m over 13), magazines, Web sites, music videos, and advertisements is designed to pervert. Kids are doing casually things that would have been done only rarely, and with great trepidation, just a moment ago. Language and dress are deteriorating to a point where we have to ask, “At what point does the word civilization no longer apply?”
Every day can bring assault on innocence. Flipping through television channels hoping to find something good has become the equivalent of going though a garbage can hoping to find a ham sandwich. We shouldn’t delve into the practices of cults and their strange beliefs, or welcome fanatics into our home with hopes of fixing them. We have to avoid discussing the details of evil, listening to what monsters do to women and children, and looking at the terrors that rock our world every day. We’ve got to protect our children’s innocence. To give up vigilance or abdicate responsibility for even a short time is to court disaster. Be prepared for the fight. It isn’t likely to go away.
Our charge as parents doesn’t include giving our children heavy sedation or a frontal lobotomy. Shielding them from reality is roughly equivalent to exposing them to disaster. They won’t know how to handle it, how to react to it, how to reject it or fight it. We have to send them out, because that’s where they’ll spend their lives, where they can make a difference. We want our children to have no illusions about the world. They need to know just how brutal and nasty and manipulative and destructive it can be.
The Bible gives us dual, paradoxical charges: “I want you to be … innocent about what is evil” and “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves” (Rom. 16:19; Matt. 10:16). In God’s world, there is no excuse for rubbing up against evil and no excuse for running away from it. We have to teach our children to do both–to maintain their innocence in the presence of a non-innocent army, and to face that army head-on.
How do we do this? We learn that it’s all about character. There isn’t an exact schedule for protecting or exposing, nor an exact ratio of shielding them from a world that doesn’t share our values and exposing them to the world so they can be a light in a dark place. If their character is ready for it, we expose them. If it isn’t, we protect them. But we’re always pushing them to grow stronger, like a plant that starts out in a greenhouse and is gradually exposed to the elements. We learn to define innocence as “careful exposure to reality.”
We have to prepare them to go out like sheep, but very well-armed sheep. We expose them to reality so that we can protect their innocence, because we know that awareness and alertness enable them to see danger coming and deal with it effectively. It’s not our responsibility to shield them from all that’s bad, but it is our responsibility to teach them how to fight it.
If we protect our children without exposing them to reality, we’re preparing them to be slaughtered by big monsters because they never learned how to battle little ones. And if we expose our children without protecting their innocence, we are sure to replace faith and hope and trust with twisted ideas and early-onset cynicism.
We can raise kids who are innocent and savvy, doves and snakes, little children and fearless warriors. God showed us a long time ago that the largest evil person on the planet was no match for an unsullied shepherd boy who knew how to kill lions.
Should we protect our kids’ innocence, or expose them to reality? Of course. Here are seven ways to do both:
- Eliminate interactions with rotten people. It doesn’t matter if he is a relative or if she goes to our church or if he is a friend of the family or that she volunteers to help me. If they’re rotten, whatever their position or age, they’ve got to go. We can’t protect innocence if we’re “authorizing” awful people to pollute our children a little bit at a time. Model how to say no gracefully and firmly: “No, he has chosen another activity” or “No, she would rather not, thank you.”
- Don’t let them “run the neighborhood.” The “neighborhood” could be the church youth group, an extracurricular activity, or our actual neighborhood. It doesn’t matter. Pollution can show up anywhere. Wolves go to sheep pens, and bad people go to church. We can’t assume that things are okay because of an illusion about safety.
- Remember that protecting innocence isn’t the same as shielding from reality. Master parents know that innocence and ignorance are not the same thing. Innocence is maintaining purity in the face of perversity. Ignorance is pretending that there is no perversity, or that it can be permanently avoided.
- Know the difference between “childlike” and “childish.” I’ve seen many children who were described as childlike who were actually very childish. Their immaturity, encouraged by their parents, is a big invitation to the world to trample on them at the earliest opportunity. “Childlike” means I’m mature and innocent. “Childish” means I’m immature and ignorant.
- Be your kids’ “reality check.” Resist easy answers. Listen to family and friends when they give us their observations about our children. Ask probing questions, and analyze the responses. Watch for sudden changes, and don’t explain them away. Allow healthy disagreement. And encourage them to speak freely.
- Make sure you have the ABCs of street smarts. Master parents Acknowledge the dangers, Bury the illusions, and Create effective strategies for dealing with the bad kids and bad ideas in the neighborhood or church or family. One teen called her mother when alcohol was introduced at a party and said, “Call me in three minutes and insist that I come home.” They had planned an escape route in advance.
- Move from discussing evil to attacking it. Discussing and complaining about evil doesn’t change the evil, but it does change us. It makes us part of itself. But attacking evil puts distance between it and us, makes it an ugly “other” to our children, and creates a warrior rather than victim response.
James R. Lucas is the veteran father of four grown children and the noted author of fourteen books, including four on parenting. To invite him to speak on “Apprenticing the Master Parent,” visit http://www.relationshiptruth.org or call 913-647-0441.
Further Learning
Learn more about: Family, Parenting