During the past 18 years of my life, since becoming a parent, I have become very reflective on the joyous task of raising children. I, like most people I’ve met, find it a blessed responsibility, one that speaks to the miraculous and mysterious events that simply sweep us along, like a raging river of toil, triumph and, at times, terror.
What shall I do to care for the chicken pox? How do I get my son to go along with potty training? How do I describe the ecstacy of watching my daughter ride a bike with no training wheels for the first time? How do I express the heart-stopping dread of hearing of my son’s first in-school “girlfriend,” or the pride of watching my daughter graduate? It’s simply something that needs to be experienced to fully appreciate.
Too often, I find that my fellow parents have not found the time to fully wrap themselves up in that wonderful duty of being fully engaged at being a mom or dad. Time seems to be so limited, the years fleeting; the moments to be fully engaged with your children flit away before we know it.
Unfortunately, this also puts many of our children at risk of learning about the world from sources other than us parents. Video games, television, the Internet and social groups like gangs are often fraught with violent and criminal messages, and encourage behavior that is self destructive and harmful to the community.
We, as parents, need to step in from day one and establish our routine to raise our children, and reaffirm daily that our child is OUR responsibility, and what our child learns and experiences should be under our supervision and guidance.
I would like to challenge parents to evaluate what time they spend being parents, and how they measure themselves as successful mothers and fathers. How much time have we invested in our youth? How much do we abdicate our responsibilities to the schools or to television or toys, computers and electronics? How much does society lose from not having children who are engaged in solid family time, learning from their moms and dads right from wrong, but instead learn how to engage in hand-to-hand combat from their game console or how to cook methamphetamines from a cable show, without a guiding word to help reinforce the horror that such activites visit upon individuals and society as a whole?
What does your child know that you would be horrified to learn of? Let’s take the time to find out, and to take time to buffer the barrage of messages our kids are facing with some good, old-fashioned parenting and love.
Christopher M. Chevalier, Sanford
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
