Tag: children

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

Whether the experience goes beautifully or our best-laid plans go awry, hand cranking ice cream with a few dozen kids is a whole lot more powerful than dithering in paralyzing despair. As always, and as we so often forget, the light wins out.

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human relationships too.

children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject tragedies that are too small to really qualify as tragedies, and thus by the paradoxes of the spiritual world become the deepest and most incandescent tragedies of all.

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived just around the corner in our quiet, speeding-car-free neighborhood, and spend a couple of hours engaged in free creative play, or a massive self-directed building project, or an epic game of Scrabble. How I sometimes wish we lived in that world!

However, my role that day was not to frighten but inspire, as all the other mentors would do. My message was simple: I wanted these energetic students to know that they were created to be great and to do great things.

Fertility rates are low. After going through the pregnancy of our first child, I’m surprised they aren’t lower. Many young people lack the “why” to endure the cultural pessimism around childrearing.

We should not reject the good fruits of our modern era, but let us also not neglect the good it does young bodies and minds to run up and down the cliffs, to have a mountain to rest the eyes against, and to sometimes simply be outside without parental interference.

Being a teacher is a demanding job, whether in a college, school, or home setting. It requires tremendous energy, responsiveness, and mental flexibility. It requires that you, the teacher, also be willing to let yourself be taught.

It is a terrifying responsibility every single day, for a preschooler’s capacity to find ever creative ways to put herself in danger does not always match up with the parent’s ability to foresee said dangers. And yet, without the wonder of exploration, how could anyone ever truly learn about the world?