I’ve noticed a peculiar twist in raising children: A natural tendency to encourage sin.
If your son tells you about a bully at school, it’s difficult to tell him to walk away. You want him to develop a backbone first, then choose to walk away. Just telling him to walk away could too easily translate into a license to be a coward in his young mind, so you encourage him to stand up against wrongful conduct, which could lead to the sin of violence.
A similar thing happens when a child starts playing sports. She needs to understand that the object is winning or else there’s no reason to keep score. But she needs to accept winning and losing with equanimity. If you tell her it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, she may think it doesn’t matter if she tries. That’s no good, so you tell her that she should try to win, which could lead to inordinate competitiveness (which easily slides into sinful pride — in C.S. Lewis’s words, “Pride is essentially competitive”).
My biggest problem is with money. I’m trying to instill in my oldest child (eight) a sense of the value of money. When he was five, he would want something ridiculously expensive, and I would tell him he would have to pay for it himself. He didn’t care. He’d empty his piggybank. If a neighbor boy asked for money, he’d give it to him. He had no sense of its value.
I have slowly begun to show him that he can’t just give his money away and that $20.00 is easily wasted. He’s learning the value of saving and the concept of interest.
I’m glad he’s learning these lessons, but they could lead to the sin of greed. I would like to teach him about greed, too, but I think the apparent inconsistency could overload his mind. On the one hand, I would be telling him that he can’t just give his money away, but on the other hand, telling him of the importance of donating money to charity. I’d be telling him to save his money so it grows, but then reprimanding him for acting like a miser. There are distinctions in these things, of course, but I can’t expect his eight-year-old mind to comprehend them.
The obvious answer to this dilemma is that children must be taught to walk before they can run and, once they can run, they can choose between walking and running. The child must understand the value of money before he can understand its secondary importance in life. Then he can choose between spending, saving, and donating.
The important thing is that I present him with a choice. I don’t do him any service by failing to teach him the value of money in hopes of getting him to be generous. If I succeeded, the generosity I engender would be no better than the “generosity” of a guy who gives away a moth-eaten painting to a charity fundraiser, not realizing that he’s giving away an original van Gogh. On the flip-side, I don’t help my child in the path of virtue by failing to teach him the importance of generosity.
In short, he must be taught the value of money, but the lessons of giving must be in the wings.
I try to do this through use of words and actions. I tell him he can’t just give his money away, but my actions place money in the offering plate on Sundays, give money to a beggar, or drop coins in the muscular dystrophy canister at the gas station. He sees my actions, but he doesn’t seem to contrast them with my words. He doesn’t seem to sense any inconsistency.
Now, as he gets older and his mind develops more, he will notice the inconsistency. But if his mind is that developed, he’ll be able to understand the inconsistency when it’s explained to him, and hopefully the explanation will help his mind develop even further. And hopefully the lessons of my actions will have taken root in his mind. Actions, after all, speak louder than words. In my effort to make my children responsible adults, I’ll take the risk of encouraging sin with my words, as long as I strive to inculcate virtue with my actions.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
