I am reading a book on the plane. The man whose arm threatens to touch mine is reading a book as well. I sneak sideways glances at his title page and realize we are both reading books about children. I am reading my book because I’m a parent of six children and I’ll take any wisdom and succor I can find, though I’m not sure I have the appetite for yet another treatise on parenting. The man next to me, I discover mid-flight, is a doctor, his wife is a critical care nurse, and they are reading theirs because they’re about to become foster parents. She leans over and tells me why: “I’ve seen too many beaten and dying children in the emergency room. We have to do something. I’m tired of seeing dead kids.”
I had no words to say after this exchange. But my initial hesitation about the book evaporated. I returned to its pages, which then burned in my hands with the fire of her words and her face, a book that suddenly became more than diversion, more than entertainment, more than information.
Despite my heightened attention, there is no desperate, pleading tone in these pages. The 13 essays from various contributors, all scholars in their respective fields, are calm, reasoned, thoroughly researched and quietly enlightening. But The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right is groundbreaking all the same, responding to the most essential questions for all of us concerned about the well-being of children—our own, and all others. It asks not what is in the “best interests” of the child, the phrase and the sensibility that have directed much of the children’s rights movement of the last few decades, most notably the UN Conventions on the Rights of Children (1989), and a phrase that has guided the legal system in its attempts to administer justice for children. Instead, it asks how can we best love the child? This simple substitution of “love” for “interest” moves the discussion about children’s well-being two giant steps forward. The legal language provides for a “negative justice” that is essential—but is not enough. The first step forward affirms the legal protection of children’s rights to food, clothing, education, and health care, the right to be free from abuse, and other necessities for survival and sustenance, but then moves beyond the legal framework to point us toward a higher and an even more fundamental need of all children: love. Receiving love is the first human right for all children, the contributors assert. In the fields of traditional law, history, sociology, psychology—the purview of this book—”love” is a famously many-splintered word, yet the writers here are undaunted, and offer a blend of research and argument advocating specific means of better loving children in specific ways: with the love of God, in the love of God, within familial and even institutional settings. If we fail at loving our children, the consequences can be grave, as both the book and my seatmates so powerfully reminded me. In Stephen Post’s words, “loved people love people; hurt people hurt people.”
The writers dare, as well, to outline the end of this love, which is the giant second step forward, asking not simply how we can best love children, but how they can best love others. Timothy P. Jackson, the editor of the anthology, who is a professor of Christian ethics at Candler School of Theology at Emery University, describes the second step this way:
[W]e also examine the duties of and love from the child. What is to be expected from children as bearers of sanctity, and what do and should they cherish? How can we create familial and institutional contexts that nurture love for and from our children so that they (and we) might thrive? How do we cultivate a next generation that will appreciate our common humanity, the kind of children who will live lives of generosity and compassion for all people?
How indeed. By now I know I am not reading a parenting book. It is a book for parents, but it offers something few parenting books provide: it moves us beyond our own obvious self-interest as parents into a sense of a communal responsibility for all children, not simply the ones who inhabit our own houses. As such, this is also a book for educators, social workers, church workers, psychologists, anyone who has anything to do with children—which, I hope, is all of us. While staking a tent over the entire world and its children may seem like another foolproof means of inducing paralyzing guilt (which parenting books are famous for), this perspective echoes Jesus’ own words, urging us toward a larger definition and practice of family beyond our own genetic code and household walls.
What are we given, then, to help us love children and equip them to love others? It must be said here that these are not essays dashed off in response to a call for a new anthology. This compilation is the fruit of a major project conducted by Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. The project, led by the esteemed Martin Marty, gathered twenty scholars from multiple fields to address “The Child in Law, Religion and Society.”
While I can’t include them all, here are a few essays that resonated with me personally. Robyn Fivush reports on the importance of family narratives and detailed storytelling with children, even simply over a day’s events, providing children with a sense of identity and place in the world. (She even includes transcripts of actual parent-child story interactions.) In “When ‘Good-Enough’ Isn’t Really Good Enough: Aiming for the ‘Best’ for All Young People,” the authors argue that child-rearing has become too negatively focused, aimed at keeping kids out of trouble instead of helping them to thrive. (Do I hear an amen?) Cynthia Willett, in her essay “Collective Responsibility for Children in an Age of Orphans,” suggests that our individualistic culture, stressing self-actualization and autonomy, can make orphans of us all, causing us to neglect the common good and to miss the marvelous paradox of freedom—which is best achieved through interdependence. Two essays give us a rare historical perspective, summarizing four centuries of household and childrearing manuals, the Dr. Spocks of their day, concluding that our “enlightened” age of parenting (with its horrific rates of child abuse) does indeed have something to learn from our predecessors. Michael Broyde clarifies the Old Testament concept of love as action rather than emotion, and the care of children, particularly in divorce and death, as a mandate and a duty, as against our contemporary emotional notions of love. Most provocatively, and yet hardly surprisingly, two essays offer the thesis that “unconditional love” is best given and inspired in the context of a stable marriage rather than in other family structures that are becoming increasingly common.
As I moved through the book, I could not shake the words of the woman on the plane, nor could I suppress the image of a little girl I had met at an orphanage in Guatemala a few years ago. She had a cleft palate so severe her face was hardly recognizable as a face. Her arms were shrunken and barely usable. I did not pick her up and play with her as I did with the other children; I could hardly even look at her. Yet this little girl, barely two, was cared for in an orphanage with 28 others, many of them considered unadoptable. I watched the house mothers brush her sleek black hair and put a purple bow in it. They dressed her in cute clothes. I found out later that a team of doctors volunteered their time to perform corrective surgery, and that she had died on the operating table. Her name was Michelle.
I think of the children in emergency rooms being hurt and even dying at the hands of people who have themselves been hurt; and I think of this little girl, who was the subject of so much tangible love from so many. Sometimes even the best love cannot keep death at bay, but I am thankful for those who loved and supported Michelle through her short life. And I am profoundly thankful for the couple beside me on the plane, who will invite hurt children into their home as sons and daughters to provide for more than their “best interest”: to provide a love that may enable them to love others as well.
“We simply cannot live well in the absence of love, and it is the most important gift we can give to our children,” Stephen Post writes in his foreword. While this collection—reader alert—is far from narrative and personal, and at times suffers from an overly academic tone, I am certain the content will not only provoke us to think more deeply about what it means to love children but also inspire us to widen our circle of concern and to look for ways to love all children better in word and deed. Which reminds me: I have overdue letters to write to my sponsored children in Central America. Maybe you have something to do right now as well.
Leslie Leyland Fields is a writer, speaker and professional editor who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska in the winter and Harvester Island in the summer, where she works in commercial salmon fishing with her family.
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
