Don’t Level All the Rough Edges!

Recently while finishing some play equipment for our toddlers’ room in our new church school building I was reminded: “Be sure to sand off all the rough edges. The kiddies might get hurt!”

Aside from the fact that a public institution should not knowingly have any dangerous toys for children, I wonder whether we parents aren’t going a bit too far in sanding the rough edges off life for our children?

We want to bring them up with no heartaches, no troubles, no wants, no delay in having the things we didn’t have as children, and when they get married—no delay in getting all the expensive gadgets we parents had to save and scrimp 20 years to acquire.

In our over-love we want to save them the bumps and falls which are, or should be, a part of growing up. Our hearts go out to them as they struggle. So we even want to save them the pain, and also the joy, of struggle.

One sad thing I witness every day of the school year is the line of heavily-loaded public busses which go from all parts of our small city to the two junior high schools and one senior high school in the city. Parents rake and scrape and do without in order to give their children a bus ride to and from school, which is not only unnecessary but actually harmful to their bodies. While they boast of how they, the parents, used to trudge three miles to the district school through snow drifts, they allow their own children to ride in an overheated bus just ten city blocks. And any person who tells them they’re pampering and really hurting their children’s health by this indulgence gets short shrift. One dollar a week it costs these parents of Watertown for Johnny or Mary to ride to school—one dollar often taken out of a meagre family budget, and all in the name of giving our children advantages. How quickly can parental love, misdirected, become a harmful thing!

By our insistence on automatic devices in our homes, we Americans have taken out not only inconveniences for ourselves but many of the household and backyard chores which once were automatic instruments of discipline and character training for our children, and we have done all this in the name of love.

In our church life also, we are taking out too many of the rough edges. In places of sharp demands that may prick the conscience, produce guilt feelings, and face children and youth up to conscious, radical decisions as to what they shall do with their lives, we have substituted a gradual, yet somewhat too comforting, process of Christian education which gives a vast amount of information, and even inspiration, yet leaves the child undisturbed and unchallenged, especially in the adolescent years when youth yearns to devote all to something or somebody. Many modern Christian educators would even go so far as to say of Jesus’ demands of the rich young ruler who chose his wealth against discipleship: “We cannot blame the young man. He was a product of his environment.” Jesus knew of his environment, yet he made the sharpest demand he could think of—give up your money and all that goes with it.

How long has it been since any clarion call was made in your church or Sunday School to the young people to commit themselves to Christ? This is a disturbing demand, it is upsetting. To be asked to give up your life, to put your self second, to yield your own interests to another’s—this is tough business.

In many churches and church schools this demanding quality of Christianity is either glossed over or omitted. We want our children to have happy years, playful years, years of smooth contentment and pleasure, for, as adults, we know these years never return.

So, while the Communists are demanding and getting supreme loyalty from millions of youth, we are content, in the name of love for our children, to leave them half-committed or uncommitted to Christ.

But, as Sigmund Freud once said, “Throw nature out with a pitchfork and she’ll come right back every time.” We cannot omit this sharp edge of Christian commitment without serious jeopardy and final judgment. To raise a generation without commitment is to raise a morally flabby and indecisive leadership for the future. No cross, no crown—this ancient Christian adage applies to our children as well as to adults.

It is a great tragedy to see millions of fine American youth grow up today in the hot house environment of city culture with no primary experiences of either joy or pain—to know so few of the elementary, first-hand feelings of having one’s skin cut by rough bark of trees and brier bushes and sharp stones, to know the fear of wild animals, snakes, and high places, to experience the fear of dark woods at night with no one near, to know intimately extreme exhaustion, hunger, privation, cold, exposure, wet feet, soaked clothing, and searing sun. We no longer want to expose our children to the elements which, harsh though they be to the body, are kind to the soul, for they come from God.

So we expose them to the apparent kindness but final cruelty of overstuffed reclining chairs to watch endless television programs which involve no effort but a fastened, hypnotized eye, no demands except physical presence. We give our children overstuffed furniture, even at the dining room table. We let or make them ride to school where they sit in overheated classrooms. At public expense, we pay professional recreation directors to teach them in small play areas instead of leaving vacant space where boys can play and quarrel by themselves, but develop on their own.

In all this process, we hurt them in the name of love. Leave some sharp edges, parents and teachers! And where they have all been taken out in the guise of affection, restore a few, so that when adulthood comes pain will not be something novel, but an old friend and dear teacher.

“It must needs be that the Son of Man be crucified.…” So spake the Master.

It must needs be that our children undergo experiences, thoughts, demands, and teachings which will jolt, hurt, or agonize at the moment of enduring but which will make them finer, stronger, and less selfish.

Let’s not level all the rough edges.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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