Should We Encourage Children to Hate Their Parents?
Simple enforcement of basic norms can help repel the orcish hordes.
The register at Costco rang up to over $150, lower than our average monthly foray. The employee behind the counter was an older gentleman, all gray hair, slightly stooped.
He looked at my 12-year-old son and held out his hand. “Are you paying?”
My son shook his head in confusion.
“You don’t have a job?” The old man put on an incredulous expression.
“No,” my son said. I smiled and handed the man my credit card.
He took it, still looking at my son. “You do have a job. You have the easiest job in the world. Know what it is?”
My son furrowed his brow a bit, not knowing what to think.
The man waved a finger at me. “It’s to obey your parents. Do whatever they tell you, because they love you and want the best for you. One day you’ll wake up and wish you had a job as easy as obeying your parents.”
I often think about this encounter. What compelled him to say something at that moment? Many children and parents passed through his line that day. Did he have similar conversations, like a roadside monk bestowing common blessings on passing pilgrims? It didn’t feel like it. It didn’t sound rehearsed. It sounded authentic and real, with the air of spontaneity.
Either way, it was refreshing. A simple reinforcement of meaning and purpose from a complete stranger. An island of sanity in a mad, mad world.
Parents, especially fathers, don’t get much bolstering from the surrounding world. At every turn, the authority of parents is called into question. Teenagers in particular are encouraged to look at them as hopeless rubes, out of touch, backwards, and that on the other side of rebellion is limitless freedom. Basic discipline is lambasted as abuse. Saying “no” is seen as cruel. It’s common to scoff at a parent’s role in education. Any sort of hierarchy is looked on with suspicion, even though hierarchy is unavoidable.
The world is ready to turn your kids against you, to shift their natural loyalties, to turn them into automatons powered by propaganda. The shelter of a household has been replaced by the fig leaves of “expertise,” backed by nothing but a paper trail of lies, damned lies, and misdemeanors. The intent is to make children unsteady, questioning everything, always shifting, always malleable. Modern universities aren’t places where truth is explored, but only where old orthodoxies are torn down, while students become enslaved to debt while abusing their bodies. As Anthony Esloen has stated, whorehouses and mental wards would be cheaper.
“Don’t listen to your parents. They didn’t learn the real truth that we just discovered 5 minutes ago. Oh, and they’re probably racist. Be enlightened with us, while we nibble on nonsensical riddles in the dark.”
Entertainment preaches this message nonstop. Parents are usually an obstacle to overcome rather than part of the solution to the problem. While I can sympathize, because most middle-grade novels could be resolved in about five minutes if the protagonist had a half-way competant father, there are ways to achieve good storytelling without treating the parents as absent, as oafs, or as abusive ogres. See the wonderful Have Space Suit – Will Travel by Robert Heinlein for an example of how to do it correctly.
A healthy culture needs shared values and common bonds. It needs to reinforce what it finds valuable and worthy. Peer pressure matters. It’s rare that a single household can thrive alone, because either the wilderness swallows it or the orcs overwhelm it. Households need a healthy culture like they need a nearby source of clean water.
Churches can provide some of this need, in part. Families doing hard work together. Parents backing each other up. An atmosphere and aroma of shared values. But they have to be real churches, not afraid to confront both the ugliness of the surrounding world and the ugliness at the center of their members’ hearts. Nor can it be a country club, like so many megachurches devolve into, where families skim the pew on Sunday morning, shake a few hands, and then leave to live the rest of their lives.
The influence should never be limited to the church, however. Churches are supposed to be yeast that gradually spreads, and their members salt that adds a certain flavor to the world around them.
And so I appreciate what the older man did. He was doing a small part in keeping the flame alive. His words, though few, helped hold the line against chaos. We need more like him. We need more people lighting small torches so that eventually the smothering darkness is banished to the shadowed corners of the culture. It doesn’t take much to light a torch. Sometimes only a simple, cheap, short-lived match will do.
For more examples of this in action, see how to lift up other fathers.