So, here's a quick thought for you, culled from an unremembered website (I can remember what it said, but not where it was!) and an Agatha Christie political suspense novel.
I get a lot of email from conservative interest political groups. One of them contained a link to an article that they had posted on their website. This article was written by a homosexual activist. This writer claimed that the homosexual movement had converted the majority of youth between the ages of 18-24 and therefore the war was won. They were now concerned with the little skirmishes that would take place as the views of the youth grew to take place over the more conservative views of their elders. Ultimately the youth would be adults and their views would define the political and social climate. The war--won in one generation.
I didn't find this difficult to believe at all. Talk to any bishop of any California LDS single adult ward and he will tell you that his ward members are struggling with the idea of taking a firm stand against homosexual marriage. And these are our kids! It is a walk in the park to convert to homosexual rights any non-religious kid. After all, who would teach him/her any reason to object?
This shouldn't shock us. For many years our kids' most go-to sources for information: school and the media, have been preaching the doctrine of sexual tolerance. No, more than tolerance--they teach the full acceptance of the current "in vogue" sexual deviances i.e. homosexuality, transsexuality, and the like.
Anyway, that little article has been swimming around in the back of my brain and then I read this by Agatha Christie:
"They--whoever they are--work through youth. Youth in every country. Youth urged on. Youth chanting slogans--slogans that sound exciting, though they don't always know what they mean. So easy to start a revolution. That's natural to youth. All youth has always rebelled. You rebel, you pull down, you want the world to be different from what it is. But you're blind, too. There are bandages over the eyes of youth. They can't see where things are taking them. What's going to come next? What's in front of them? And who it is behind them, urging them on? That's what's frightening about it. You know, someone holding out the carrot to get the donkey to come along and at the same time there is someone behind the donkey urging it on with a stick."
She goes on to remind her readers of Hitler's Youth and how they were used so effectively in WWII.
She adds, "What is being promoted, you must understand, is the growing organization of youth everywhere against their mode of government; against their parental customs, against very often the religions in which they have been brought up. There is the insidious cult of permissiveness, there is the increasing cult of violence. Violence not as a means of gaining money, but violence for the love of violence."
Christie's book was a political thriller (and a rather boring one at that) written in 1970. But what it said about youth really struck me. I felt a strong sense of their power and their vulnerability. Am I giving less credit to their individual strength of mind and their openness to the Spirit of God? Probably so. Every generation of youth is bombarded with the most liberal of social ideals and some choose to adopt them and some choose to stand fast with higher morals. Hm. I'll be thinking more about this. What do you think?
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Can a parent be a friend?
Okay.... I had this vision of parenthood the other day when I was thinking so much about family as the best friends.
I've heard often from parenting "experts" that a parent should not be a friend--he/she must parent. And I've always felt vaguely guilty about that because I WANT to be friends with my children. Now that I've been thinking about it all, I've come up with an idea that supports my desires (those are the best kind of ideas. In fact, pretty much all my ideas support what I already think. Why else would I claim them as mine?) :) So, you can see what you think.
I think that there are 2 main phases of parenting, one phase much longer than the other.
The first phase is the real PARENTING part. This is when your kids are young and you must instruct, guide, reprove, protect, set boundaries (and defend them), etc. This is what we do from almost the beginning of parenthood.
The second phase is the FRIEND part. This is when your kids have grown out of the lectures, the rules, the punishments. They no longer want/need the protection and they have already set their own boundaries (which will inevitably vary from some degree from those which were set by their parents). IF a parent attempts to parent during this second phase, they will push their children away. Adult children do not want lectures from their parents. If a parent persists with lectures, boundaries, rules, etc, a child will avoid encounters with parents. These are the situations so often parodied in our sitcoms. The kids belittle the parents behind their backs (sometimes in front of them). The parents look ridiculous because they are providing parenting rather than friendship.
Once you've identified this situation and the cause behind it (i.e. the parent fails to move from parenting into friendship), it seems obvious, right? When does your mom bug you? When she's giving you advice you didn't ask for. It seems like she's not allowing you to be the adult, that she's pushing you back into childhood, maybe? She's not being a random pain, though, she's just being the parent--the same parent that you really needed when you were little. The same parent that you practically worshiped then. She's doing what she's always done only now it doesn't work the same way it did and she wishes she knew what she was doing wrong. And you, the poor child, are so busy pushing her away and defending your own adulthood, that maybe you don't realize what is going on. Plus, as a child, it's easy to stay in childhood roles too and it's hard to make the effort to actually contribute in friendly way to your relationship with your mom. It's just habit to make her to all the work in the relationship and something you may not think about changing. One way or another, the transition to friendship is never made and the relationship can never reach its true potential.
The parent can actually be the best friend: the SUPERFRIEND. A loving parent-child relationship has already all the right ingredients for a great friendship: true caring, unconditional love, shared history, common interests (to name a few). And, this phase is the LONGEST phase of parenting. The rule-setting phase only lasts for a few years, but the friendship phase lasts for the rest of life and on into forever. Therefore, making this phase work is essential to eternal family relationships.
The tricky part is where the two phases collide. When does the first end and the second take over? This is where the mess-ups happen. I'm thinking this transition would be smoother if the parent has been a friend all along. You can add friend characteristics to parent characteristics as you go along from the very beginning, can't you? While still being a parent? I'm thinking YES. But I'm still pretty foggy about details. I have some more thinking to do about this. What do you think?
I've heard often from parenting "experts" that a parent should not be a friend--he/she must parent. And I've always felt vaguely guilty about that because I WANT to be friends with my children. Now that I've been thinking about it all, I've come up with an idea that supports my desires (those are the best kind of ideas. In fact, pretty much all my ideas support what I already think. Why else would I claim them as mine?) :) So, you can see what you think.
I think that there are 2 main phases of parenting, one phase much longer than the other.
The first phase is the real PARENTING part. This is when your kids are young and you must instruct, guide, reprove, protect, set boundaries (and defend them), etc. This is what we do from almost the beginning of parenthood.
The second phase is the FRIEND part. This is when your kids have grown out of the lectures, the rules, the punishments. They no longer want/need the protection and they have already set their own boundaries (which will inevitably vary from some degree from those which were set by their parents). IF a parent attempts to parent during this second phase, they will push their children away. Adult children do not want lectures from their parents. If a parent persists with lectures, boundaries, rules, etc, a child will avoid encounters with parents. These are the situations so often parodied in our sitcoms. The kids belittle the parents behind their backs (sometimes in front of them). The parents look ridiculous because they are providing parenting rather than friendship.
Once you've identified this situation and the cause behind it (i.e. the parent fails to move from parenting into friendship), it seems obvious, right? When does your mom bug you? When she's giving you advice you didn't ask for. It seems like she's not allowing you to be the adult, that she's pushing you back into childhood, maybe? She's not being a random pain, though, she's just being the parent--the same parent that you really needed when you were little. The same parent that you practically worshiped then. She's doing what she's always done only now it doesn't work the same way it did and she wishes she knew what she was doing wrong. And you, the poor child, are so busy pushing her away and defending your own adulthood, that maybe you don't realize what is going on. Plus, as a child, it's easy to stay in childhood roles too and it's hard to make the effort to actually contribute in friendly way to your relationship with your mom. It's just habit to make her to all the work in the relationship and something you may not think about changing. One way or another, the transition to friendship is never made and the relationship can never reach its true potential.
The parent can actually be the best friend: the SUPERFRIEND. A loving parent-child relationship has already all the right ingredients for a great friendship: true caring, unconditional love, shared history, common interests (to name a few). And, this phase is the LONGEST phase of parenting. The rule-setting phase only lasts for a few years, but the friendship phase lasts for the rest of life and on into forever. Therefore, making this phase work is essential to eternal family relationships.
The tricky part is where the two phases collide. When does the first end and the second take over? This is where the mess-ups happen. I'm thinking this transition would be smoother if the parent has been a friend all along. You can add friend characteristics to parent characteristics as you go along from the very beginning, can't you? While still being a parent? I'm thinking YES. But I'm still pretty foggy about details. I have some more thinking to do about this. What do you think?
What is friendship?
My close girlfriend is in the middle of getting a masters degree. She's reading and writing a ton, but she still manages to email me now and again. Since she's knee deep in ideas, she can't help but pass some of them along and this latest one really made me think. Here's how it started out, from her:
"I read something in the Gatto book that I have been pondering a lot, and I wonder what your thoughts are. He writes about the fact that we don't really have friendships as adults, only networks. He says we don't even know the difference between communities and networks, communities being a collection of real families who participate in life--argue and help and make things together. Networks don't require the whole person. You suppress all the parts of you but the ones that are necessary to your job (calling, board, club). He says that networks seem to address human and social needs, but they don't really encourage the friendship that we constantly seek. [He says:]
'With a network, what you get at the beginning is all you ever get. Networks don't get better or worse; their limited purpose keeps them pretty much the same all the time, as there just isn't much development possible. The pathological state which eventually develops out of these constant repetitions of thin human contact is a feeling that your "friends" and "colleagues" don't really care about you beyond what you can do for them, that they have no curiosity about the way you manage your life, no curiosity about your hopes, fears, victories, defeats. The real truth is that the "friends" falsely mourned for their indifference were never friends, just fellow networkers from whom in fairness little should be expected beyond attention to the common interest.'
So... I've been thinking a lot about this. Here are some of my thoughts. What do you think?
Firstly, I agree with the network/community idea. Our mobile society has not been kind to communities. Nor is it kind to friendships. We move a lot. It's hard to build true communities (as Gatto describes them) in this kind of atmosphere. We try, though. We all want those kinds of connections. Perhaps networks are the best substitute that we manage to generate in our efforts to build communities. Networks are a series of positions that can be filled by whomever is present, so I guess it's kind of a framework for a kind of friendship. Some enduring friendships are made from those network beginnings. Communities seem to require a pre-supposed kind of committment e.g. when generations of families lived and died in the same place together, they knew they'd always be around each other and therefore there was a committment to living among each other. We just don't ever get to that place now. What social folks do instead is join multiple networks. They have many different groups of peers. In my area it's: book clubs, bunco groups, church groups, teams, school groups, etc. Pile up a lot of limited networks and maybe the community spirit comes close to being reached?
Secondly (and this is just a vague idea): I wonder sometimes if our general inability to form and maintain intimate friendships might be designed to bring us to God, or at least to leave a craving in us for that perfect relationship that only He can offer. After all, no human can be the perfect friend. Every friend has a flaw. Even our most intimate friend (hopefully), our husband, can never offer us the perfect love that can only be offered by God. Can anyone know every part of us and love us still? Are we even capable of showing anyone every part of ourselves? I'm not sure that we are. I think that we are flawed in what we can offer as a friend just by virtue of our humanity. We are incapable of complete unconditional love because we can't do anything perfectly. But God is God and he offers that love unceasingly, if only we can find our way to it. And there's the rub, eh? Hm.
Or here's another angle that makes even more sense to me: Our unsatisfying temporary friendships with others should encourage us to seek those more permanent friendships with the people who are truly permanent in our lives--our family. As I make and lose friends over years and years, I realize more and more that the most stable, lasting relationships that I have are family relationships. These are the relationships that are divinely designed to last forever and they have the most capacity for unconditional love and acceptance. However, these are also the relationships that can become most deeply flawed and therefore most deeply painful (which things are a good indication of how powerful these relationships are). And it's not always the fault of parents who are trying their best and children who are attempting to do what's expected of them. I believe that society has poisoned our notions about what family is.
One of the falsities of this "dynamic" sociality that is sold to us by our world is that our families are the enemy and our social peers are our friends, that family is to be outgrown, while friends are kept forever. This leads us to mock and abandon the "difficult" family relationships while we seek depth in the "easy" relationships with our friends. So we can never be satisfied. We invest in shallow relationships and feel the lack of them at the same time we are critical of the relationships that could really satisfy us.
I really think, though, that this campaign to destroy the family relationships has been going on for a long time, and that family dynamics today have fallen into patterns that create these disconnects. It starts in grade school when our teacher becomes our exemplar and we begin to see the inadequacies of our parents. As we get older, we become convinced that our parents (and most other adults) cannot understand us and that our peers can best provide that understanding and counsel that our parents seem incapable of offering. No sibling can be as close to us as a friend. Parents often become merely wardens and bankers. There are families that overcome these typical patterns, of course. Thank goodness for that! I'm suggesting only that these are common patterns that we have somehow been fooled into accepting as "normal". Some strong families see beyond "normal", but many people just follow conventions and, if they're lucky, they may manage to overcome the societal norms, and parents and children can build things in common and be friends. But, as the children grow to adulthood, too often parents and children follow their parallel paths to occasional visits, vastly different interests, regular back-biting and complaining, and general dissatisfaction.
So perhaps the loose networks that exist and that can provide foundations for deeper friendships are acceptable as long as we as a society remember to care for our family relationships. But that's the rub, isn't it? Family can be so much harder than casual friends. Have we discarded family members as our intimates in favor of our comfortable friends within our loose networks? And what does this say about our capacities for forming lasting relationships of value and depth? Are we, as individuals within a loosely knit society becoming too isolated? If so, will this isolation incubate selfishness, pride, enmity, and all those other destroying characteristics? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, I'm sure thinking a lot about my friendships and family relationships and what I am (or am not) contributing to them. It's something to think about....
"I read something in the Gatto book that I have been pondering a lot, and I wonder what your thoughts are. He writes about the fact that we don't really have friendships as adults, only networks. He says we don't even know the difference between communities and networks, communities being a collection of real families who participate in life--argue and help and make things together. Networks don't require the whole person. You suppress all the parts of you but the ones that are necessary to your job (calling, board, club). He says that networks seem to address human and social needs, but they don't really encourage the friendship that we constantly seek. [He says:]
'With a network, what you get at the beginning is all you ever get. Networks don't get better or worse; their limited purpose keeps them pretty much the same all the time, as there just isn't much development possible. The pathological state which eventually develops out of these constant repetitions of thin human contact is a feeling that your "friends" and "colleagues" don't really care about you beyond what you can do for them, that they have no curiosity about the way you manage your life, no curiosity about your hopes, fears, victories, defeats. The real truth is that the "friends" falsely mourned for their indifference were never friends, just fellow networkers from whom in fairness little should be expected beyond attention to the common interest.'
So... I've been thinking a lot about this. Here are some of my thoughts. What do you think?
Firstly, I agree with the network/community idea. Our mobile society has not been kind to communities. Nor is it kind to friendships. We move a lot. It's hard to build true communities (as Gatto describes them) in this kind of atmosphere. We try, though. We all want those kinds of connections. Perhaps networks are the best substitute that we manage to generate in our efforts to build communities. Networks are a series of positions that can be filled by whomever is present, so I guess it's kind of a framework for a kind of friendship. Some enduring friendships are made from those network beginnings. Communities seem to require a pre-supposed kind of committment e.g. when generations of families lived and died in the same place together, they knew they'd always be around each other and therefore there was a committment to living among each other. We just don't ever get to that place now. What social folks do instead is join multiple networks. They have many different groups of peers. In my area it's: book clubs, bunco groups, church groups, teams, school groups, etc. Pile up a lot of limited networks and maybe the community spirit comes close to being reached?
Secondly (and this is just a vague idea): I wonder sometimes if our general inability to form and maintain intimate friendships might be designed to bring us to God, or at least to leave a craving in us for that perfect relationship that only He can offer. After all, no human can be the perfect friend. Every friend has a flaw. Even our most intimate friend (hopefully), our husband, can never offer us the perfect love that can only be offered by God. Can anyone know every part of us and love us still? Are we even capable of showing anyone every part of ourselves? I'm not sure that we are. I think that we are flawed in what we can offer as a friend just by virtue of our humanity. We are incapable of complete unconditional love because we can't do anything perfectly. But God is God and he offers that love unceasingly, if only we can find our way to it. And there's the rub, eh? Hm.
Or here's another angle that makes even more sense to me: Our unsatisfying temporary friendships with others should encourage us to seek those more permanent friendships with the people who are truly permanent in our lives--our family. As I make and lose friends over years and years, I realize more and more that the most stable, lasting relationships that I have are family relationships. These are the relationships that are divinely designed to last forever and they have the most capacity for unconditional love and acceptance. However, these are also the relationships that can become most deeply flawed and therefore most deeply painful (which things are a good indication of how powerful these relationships are). And it's not always the fault of parents who are trying their best and children who are attempting to do what's expected of them. I believe that society has poisoned our notions about what family is.
One of the falsities of this "dynamic" sociality that is sold to us by our world is that our families are the enemy and our social peers are our friends, that family is to be outgrown, while friends are kept forever. This leads us to mock and abandon the "difficult" family relationships while we seek depth in the "easy" relationships with our friends. So we can never be satisfied. We invest in shallow relationships and feel the lack of them at the same time we are critical of the relationships that could really satisfy us.
I really think, though, that this campaign to destroy the family relationships has been going on for a long time, and that family dynamics today have fallen into patterns that create these disconnects. It starts in grade school when our teacher becomes our exemplar and we begin to see the inadequacies of our parents. As we get older, we become convinced that our parents (and most other adults) cannot understand us and that our peers can best provide that understanding and counsel that our parents seem incapable of offering. No sibling can be as close to us as a friend. Parents often become merely wardens and bankers. There are families that overcome these typical patterns, of course. Thank goodness for that! I'm suggesting only that these are common patterns that we have somehow been fooled into accepting as "normal". Some strong families see beyond "normal", but many people just follow conventions and, if they're lucky, they may manage to overcome the societal norms, and parents and children can build things in common and be friends. But, as the children grow to adulthood, too often parents and children follow their parallel paths to occasional visits, vastly different interests, regular back-biting and complaining, and general dissatisfaction.
So perhaps the loose networks that exist and that can provide foundations for deeper friendships are acceptable as long as we as a society remember to care for our family relationships. But that's the rub, isn't it? Family can be so much harder than casual friends. Have we discarded family members as our intimates in favor of our comfortable friends within our loose networks? And what does this say about our capacities for forming lasting relationships of value and depth? Are we, as individuals within a loosely knit society becoming too isolated? If so, will this isolation incubate selfishness, pride, enmity, and all those other destroying characteristics? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, I'm sure thinking a lot about my friendships and family relationships and what I am (or am not) contributing to them. It's something to think about....
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