海角大神

Parents are essential in a child鈥檚 life. But you knew that. Parents devote themselves to feeding, teaching, supplying, cleaning, correcting, comforting, and driving (in the sense of encouraging and also in the sense of dropping off and picking up) the kids.

Parents know they are indispensable, which is why they spend so much money and time trying to give their children the best possible upbringing. They can鈥檛 help it. Children are living arrows shot into the future, as the poet Kahlil Gibran memorably put it. The children of 2010 will be midcentury parents, teachers, politicians, and business leaders. They will be feeding, teaching, supplying, and driving the adults of the 22nd.

Important and influential as parents are, a child is at the center of his/her own powerful social network, which was launched at birth and expands at warp speed. No matter how caring and worthy of a child鈥檚 attention a parent is, children absorb information from all directions. Gravity is learned from the hard surface of the floor, the uncertainties of the natural world in the growl of a dog, lessons in commerce from lunchtime cupcake swaps. Along the way, of course, kids also pick up bad rhymes and ancient annoyances like the 鈥渘ah nah, NAH nah nah鈥� taunt.

We were all children once, so we know how this works. It isn鈥檛 fair to our elders. Parents (and their surrogates, teachers) have deep and credible knowledge and have sacrificed time and treasure for us. They deserve respect. But comic books and TV cartoons, urban legends that kids tell each other, and the innocent fumbling through young friendships aren鈥檛 exactly nothing.

I learned, for instance, how to use randomized numerical selection in choosing sides for a team sport by employing the 鈥淥ne potato, two potato, three potato, four鈥� formula (also the 鈥淓ngine engine number 9鈥� method and several more that have since been rightly banned as inappropriate). I learned about common interests when I made fast friends with a kid who had the same Zorro lunchbox. I learned about judgmentalism from the 鈥渟itting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g鈥� razz. Parents set the scene but weren鈥檛 directly involved, except to buy the lunchbox and to intervene when disputes escalated.

Rushworth Kidder, a former Monitor editor and columnist who founded the Maine-based Institute for Global Ethics, recently wrote a book called 鈥淕ood Kids, Tough Choices: How Parents Can Help Their Children Do The Right Thing.鈥� He believes parents are misleading themselves if they think they can control every variable in their children鈥檚 lives. The best path, he says, is not to teach kids what to think but how to think.

That can be difficult for supercaring 鈥渉elicopter parents鈥� (a colleague of his recently heard an executive talk of her three kids as her 鈥渓ittle cost centers鈥�). The good news, Rushworth says, is that studies show kids don鈥檛 come into the world as blank slates. They are making moral choices as early as 3 months old. Not everything, in other words, is on the backs of the parents.

Every enduring children鈥檚 classic 鈥� 鈥�Tom Sawyer,鈥� 鈥�Nancy Drew,鈥� 鈥淭he Famous Five,鈥� 鈥�The Chronicles of Narnia鈥� 鈥� is about brave and innocent children making moral choices. This can go wrong. Children can behave badly (see 鈥�Lord of the Flies鈥�). It can go right. The 50-year run of the Peanuts comic strip showed both possibilities. Neighborhood children 鈥� and one self-assured beagle 鈥� negotiated a complex set of relationships with one another. Charlie Brown and Lucy, in particular, had what we鈥檇 call 鈥渋ssues.鈥� They worried and schemed, fought and fretted like adults. Sometimes, like both adults and children, they rose above it all. The saintly Linus was a particularly good example of that.

Children can鈥檛 work it out all on their own. They need parental guidance. Parents can鈥檛 fix every childhood hurt, cover every contingency, or fund every cost center. They can set the right conditions, though, so that kids鈥� innate values expand along with their social networks.

John Yemma is editor of 海角大神.