Different Paths

I read an article in which a mother talked about raising her children to hold the same values that she possessed.  To this end, they volunteered together, recycled and gardened together, and she limited (if not altogether banned) things like tv, video games, and outright banned gun play.  Not REAL guns, of course, but water guns, toy guns, fingers in the shape of guns, etc.  But her kids, the author recounted, weren't excited about volunteering, wanted to eat the kinds of things their friends ate, and eventually wanted to play shooter video games.  When her teenage son broached the subject of the gun games, he told her (and I'm totally using my own words here), "You brought us up to recognize the dangers of real guns and I know the difference between real violence and video game violence."  This was a paradigm breakthrough for her, she reported, because she realized that there really were different paths to the same places.

If you looked through my Easter photos that I posted on my wall on Facebook, you've seen the picture of my 12 year-old son, Noah, jumping into the pool with his grandma and cousin.  His pose as he's jumping into the air is not very masculine.  My son is being funny.  He is trying to make people laugh.  Some might look at the picture (and the repeated silly behavior) to be indicative of aberrant boy behavior-- like he's some kind of sissy.  But what I love about my family and friends is that this silly kind of behavior is not only NOT seen in that light, no one thinks less of him for it.  No one's telling Noah he has to stop acting like that-- making girly poses and ugly faces when a camera is pointed at him.  Friends and family know that Noah likes to make weird noises and poses and faces, he likes to make strange, disjointed comments, and he likes to gross people out with jokes about poop and farts.

And yet it's only occurred to me recently that in this way, we're all teaching him tolerance and acceptance.  All these people that surround my son are teaching him without actually coming right out and saying it that it's okay to be who you are.  It's okay to be weird and silly and sometimes scream like a girl or make ugly faces into the camera.  They're telling him without saying a word that you don't have to take yourself so seriously, you don't have to Look Good in pictures, and you can laugh at yourself.  No one's giving him long speeches about the virtues of humility or tolerance (although it does come up every so often), and it isn't something any of us are really even conscious of, I think.  Creating this environment where my kids can be who they want to be and feel safe to try new things has just HAPPENED.

So while I know that this is also true for bad habits (what bad things are we inadvertently encouraging?),  I'm going to keep this positive.  I mean, our broadest goals as parents is to raise happy, compassionate, and productive adults, right?  And we do things to nurture our values in our offspring in hopes that they will be those adults we're hoping for.  We teach them manners, we take them to church, we enroll them in group sports.  We teach them to share, have good hygiene, and eat good foods.  We DO in hopes that they'll be the kind of adults that we like.  It's easy to forget that many of the lessons we teach are tacit... implied... taught in our actions, smiles, and responses to danger or conflict or good fortune.  And it's good to remind ourselves to trust in our kids as they grow-- and to remember that there are different paths to the same place.  I like to think that I'm a good person, that Charlie's a good person, that my parents are good people... but we didn't all make the same choices along the way to being good people, you know?  And we still wouldn't.  It doesn't diminish our goodness that we took differing paths to get there, and I have to believe that it won't diminish who my children grow up to be, either.