12 Parenting Essentials
1. Love. Love is many a thing, from a feeling that might be selfish, to a service done in secret. Love can be the crest of an emotion, or it can be the toil of assistance.
Love can be forgiveness, or it can be judgment, a balm to soothe, or a surgical knife. Love can be decidedly blind or painfully seeing—praise or rebuke.
If love wore one expression, if its hands were always open, if it gave and never retained, then it could exist as a sentiment without thought. But true love places a supreme demand on the resources of wisdom, for manifestations of love are as varied as human need.
If the end of love were passivity, the absence of conflict; if it laid aside principles for peace, laid aside conflict for cordiality, it would not be a virtue. It would be vice.
That love sometimes leads one into desperate sacrifice, with no certain promise of return, that it requires trading one goodness—your own—for another, makes it as rare as manifestations of deity.
Love must be ready to embrace or to refrain from embracing, to give or to deny. It requires expenditure and vigilance. Love must be ever alert—a delicate, shifting balance of law and grace. The final measure of love is not the cloak of emotion it wears, but the service it renders. Certain love is not found in the good feelings but in the high cost to the one loving.
Rather than say, “Children need love,” we must define the acts of love by which children will realize their full potential. For the sentiment of love can be as harmful as that of hate. As all the Law is contained in this one commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” so parenting is nothing more than the activity of love. But as the law meticulously defines the expressions of love, so the works of love must be defined.
2. Security
Not just physical security—sometimes parents cannot control the circumstances—but security of soul. It is not only that parents provide food, shelter, and clothes, but that children feel their commitment to do so. This is not about what you do; it is about atmosphere, the very breath of home-life. The soul of a parent is the source of this security. Outward circumstances cannot touch that secret place where children feel their parents’ love and good will. Morale is of utmost significance in business, war, and sports; how much more in a child attempting to win against the world? The child must be able to assuredly say to himself, “I am worth having people care about me.”
This inner security is absolutely essential to healthy development. Without that peace of soul that comes with knowing that you are supremely valued and that there are people in the world who have an unswerving commitment to your happiness, then a child has no ground on which to stand while growing up.
A well ordered and disciplined environment can be helpful, but it is not essential. Children living in poverty, occasionally evicted from tenement houses, cast upon the street with all their belongings, and ridiculed by their peers can still be rich in emotional security. Children of single parents can also be secure and stable. “Disadvantaged minorities” need not be disadvantaged in providing emotional security for their children. Providing for a child’s physical needs is insufficient in and of itself. It takes a giving soul, not just a giving hand.
