The Triumphs and Trials of Rearing Children

Family as a means of God’s grace giving

“What is the effect of being with children? By the pity, by the tenderness, by the peculiar modes of admiration which connect themselves with the helplessness, the innocence, the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven—the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is so alien from the worldly—are kept in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed” (John Milton).

You’ve seen them on Saturday morning at the Pancake House. Here, where you have gone for a quiet breakfast—coffee, eggs, and sausage—they have come, too, with their three children. The mother still looks surprisingly young and pretty considering, and the husband shows remarkably little gray hair for being in his late thirties.

The eldest child, a 10-year-old fan of the Dallas Cowboys, takes up his seat at the table’s end with no intention of sitting for more than three minutes in a row. The four-year-old in pigtails lifts the menu from the hands of her two-year-old sister, who continues to shout that she wants “hammerburg and frinch fries.” During the next hectic half hour, the father cuts the food on three plates, cleans up one spilt milk, and reminds his son to sit down twice, while the mother argues the merits of milk over Coca-Cola, takes the four-year-old to the bathroom twice, and arbitrates three disagreements over matters of ineffable triviality. You sit vicariously exhausted, amazed, and admiring. Why would somebody want all that work? How can they do it? These are the wrong questions.

When a man works late at the office, goes in on Saturdays, pours his profits back into the business for still more development, we admire his tenacity and ambition. Rarely do we seriously ask why he does it. Nothing could be more obvious than that this kind of effort, mental and physical, is absolutely necessary to succeed. Maturity informs us of the inevitable maxim and we sagely pass it on to youth: “Anything worth having requires hard work, risk, great expense.” And we feel that this is the way it should be. We know that what we have worked hardest for is what we value most.

Why then are we surprised when we learn how difficult it is to create a family? Why do we back away from taking on such a seemingly impossible task? Why are we amazed that two people in love would seek the fruit of that love, wish to develop it, and be willing to sacrifice tremendously for it? Most often we will find that they are simply doing what seems natural in God’s plan for his creation.

Almost immediately after he created Adam, God saw that it was not good for man to be alone. Basically a social being, man needed a companion; almost as quickly as woman came to him, they made a family.

The most obvious realities have a way of escaping us these days. We all have come from families, and our instruction and impulses tell us that families are basic building blocks of all social order, yet we seem increasingly reluctant to reach out for the life we see in the family. We say, “It’s too much work.” “It’s too expensive.” “The times are too depressing.” “We just aren’t sure if we’ll make good parents.” “What if our marriage doesn’t last?” and so on, interminably. Have the times ever really been different?

As children in large families begun and increased throughout the years of World War II, we have often wondered what parents must have thought about bringing children into the uncertain days of the late thirties and early forties. Yet we are here, and in our lives life has been reaffirmed and replenished. The command to replenish the earth continues to be spoken by the Almighty, and there are no signs that our current narcissism offers any more of an antidote to the world’s problems. Perhaps we need to explore the obvious.

Part of being a responsible adult is caring for others; no one disputes this. In the family or those structures that simulate it, we find our opportunities to be real adults. Whether one chooses to be Mother Teresa of the destitute of Calcutta, houseparents in an orphanage, or the provider for a family of five, he or she will discover vitality in living in a family. What better can provide the opportunity for creativity, education, and delight than this sanctified unit?

The environment for a family is the home, not only the physical surroundings that in themselves call for tremendous effort to develop, but in the culture that enlivens it. What books, what music, what rituals, what beliefs, what activities, what relationships, what arts are to be developed to suit this ever-changing group of lives? To suggest that the task is any less than demanding, yet richly rewarding, is to tell a lie; it requires all we’ve got. And to direct all of these efforts toward establishing an independent person able to give to still others—this is what all parents labor for. It is a labor beside which the efforts to teach a novel, coach a victory, write a book, build a business, or win a case may somehow seem less demanding, and maybe, to some, ultimately less satisfying.

What we can learn as parents is surely worth any effort we make to teach. Wordsworth wrote about birth: “Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

How else can one explain the mystery unfolded by the three-year-old who prayed: “Dear God, help us to remember what we forgot when we were born.” Living with children, we learn the beauty and intricacy of language development as no book could relate it. We are reminded of the fundamental facets of human nature, shiny and dark, within all of us. We are taught humility when two children respond in exactly opposite ways to our learned efforts to raise them according to the latest foolproof theory. A dozen moments each day we are forced to reappraise the meaning of our own childhoods as we see them more clearly in the light of our children’s struggles, defeats, and victories.

Children have a grace that brings delight in a way unmatched. Many times a weary, even angry, shopper has been drawn out of his despondency after a few moments with a two-year-old who simply smiles at him. What father has not found that all-soothing balm in the words of his little boy’s welcome at the end of a long, exhausting, unappreciated day of work? What mother is not enchanted by the tiny girl playing peek-a-boo through her miniature fingers? In a day’s passage, there follow literally dozens of such moments when simply to watch a child at play is to be touched with the joy inherent in the simplest act or discovery. Things are no less wonderful for their being common; this is the text preached by the child adventuring through his days.

Why would any couple want all that work? Simply because he and she sense that this is one of God’s basic modes of supplying grace.

MARK AND ANNE HANCHETT

Reprinted from the Stony Brook School Bulletin, Winter 1981. Used by permission.

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