IN THE previous entry about Gaga, a reader says that shielding children and adolescents from pop stars may be to their detriment. I have heard this argument before. His point was that young people are later exposed to temptations that they are entirely unprepared for and thus give in to them. But, of course, limiting your child’s intake of toxic vulgarity is not the same as placing him in a locked cell. A child only needs to walk into the local CVS pharmacy and listen to what’s on the audio system to get a warning that sexual depravity exists. 

See the comments in that entry by James P., who writes:

 I want to raise my children to have the moral and intellectual strength to regard popular culture with the boredom, contempt, and disgust that it deserves. Exposure to television — even “educational” television — weakens them, and of course, exposure to evil, however banal and commonplace, corrodes their souls and undermines their character development. One need only meet the coarse, ignorant, and self-indulgent children who are typical products of popular culture and the public school system to understand this properly.

                                               — Comments —

Youngfogey writes:

Evan’s comments on preparing children for the “real world” betray more about him than he realizes. In my work life I spend an inordinate amount of time with late adolescents and twenty-somethings. Few of them are capable of discussing anything except popular culture, and most are capable of discussing even that topic on only the shallowest level. Given this low level of discourse, it is unsurprising that young people not versed in the details of popular culture will seem awkward and uninformed to their peers. They may not however seem that way to adults. 

The argument that one should expose one’s children to popular culture in order to have them seem acceptable to their peer group is based on the assumption ( constantly reinforced by our educational system) that young people should be emotionally oriented toward the opinions of their peers rather than toward earning the approval of responsible adults. It appears Evan has not questioned this assumption. 

The solution to the problem of young people who have been sheltered from the worst of popular culture not being able to relate to their peers is not to be solved by increasing their exposure to the culture, but by their insisting that peers who want to relate to them grow up.

Jill writes:

Our approach to “sheltering” is similar to the kind of training supposedly given to bank tellers to help them spot counterfeit money ie., have them study genuine money over and over until they are able to pick out the fake stuff easily.

Our eight children have been plunged into “real” from birth. We read aloud excellent children’s literature to them until they develop a taste of it for themselves. Of our nine children, several have been very late readers (not reading fluently until the age of 13) but by limiting video/electronic exposure and conversing and reading great books, every one of them loves to read. We also live a very “real” life by practicing hospitality and exposing our children to a people from different cultures, faiths and political persuasions.

We talk, we laugh, we eat great food and we pray together. We hardly need to “shelter” them from anything because they enjoy the life we live (imperfect as we are) and our children appreciate it. Recently our 18 and 16 year old daughters were discussing the Twilight books phenomenon. They were appalled that anyone would take such books seriously. I listened in amazement as my daughters thoughtfully critiqued the books as well as those who purchase them. I have not told these girls they “can’t” watch the movies or read the books, they have no desire to do so. They’d rather read something really good like Jane Eyre and invite a few friends over to try out a new recipe for Crême Brulée. They are alive.

Sheila C. writes:

While I can’t find the exact essay and quotations I want, here are a few other relevant ones; some are short and one is quite long, but if you have the time and space, I think they say something truly important:

 “The role of child rearing is simply to shepherd children into adulthood . . . a child is more like a grape vine which needs to be pruned and fertilized for proper growth . . . Let a grape vine grow wild and it will produce small fruit, if any. . . The truth of the matter is that children are not wonderfully pure human beings who are corrupted by their parents . . . parents, help your children assemble the values, understandings, knowledge, and skills they will need to lead successful adult lives.” Rev. James Woelmer, 2001, Faith Lutheran Church, Plano, Texas.

“There is an attack on childhood. Many people see in children an opportunity to change the culture . . . Children are the stem cells for the culture . . . the environment that you put them in is what they grow up to be . . . And if you can control what they hear, if you could control what they’re told, if you have access to their minds . . . you can make them into just about whatever you want them to be. ” Dr. James Dobson, 2002.

“What’s wrong with me,” her expression told her son, “is you.” I finally heard the voice within . . . And I told it: I want a life . . . Whoever said you can have it all was a fool, or selling something . . . It’s a heavy thing, knowing you can have a life. It means realizing that the house that’s never quite clean, the marriage that requires too much attention, and the family where no one feels appreciated, don’t have to be enough. . . My millennium musings keep bringing me to an unfashionable notion that must accompany any honest discussion of kids: sacrifice. Raising them right means forfeiting stuff.” African American columnist for the Washington Post Donna Britt, Dallas Morning News, December 1999.

Some would argue that I am not allowing my children enough responsibility or enough freedom to be themselves — that I am mothering them too much. Then let me be guilty of mothering . . . For some reason, when our children enter high school . . we believe we are in the homestretch of parenting. We are only fooling ourselves. The twos may have been terrible, but the teen years are terrifying . . . Our kids must be drilled into knowing a very basic law of physics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Marisa Trevino, freelance writer, Dallas Morning news, May 2, 1999

“But it seems to me that nobody is asking parents the tough questions. Questions like: “Where were you during the daylight hours of your child’s preschool and elementary years?” “Were you married to the child’s other parent during these years?” “Did you establish boundaries for your kids and enforce them?” “Did you discuss integrity?” Did you monitor your child’s friendships?” “Did you regulate the things your child watched on television?” “Did you spend time each day playing with your child, laughing with your child, and hugging your child?” “Did you teach your child about God?”

Answers to such questions reveal images of life at home, and home is the center of a child’s world — the place where good and evil originate . . . Home is a child’s sum and substance. Tragically, few parents are at home these days . . . There was a time when all women viewed child rearing as their job . . . today they are told to do what is best for themselves . . . If that means leaving their children in the care of virtual strangers from daylight to dark, so be it . . . Because of that mind-set, infants and preschoolers are scattered at day-care centers across our cities, where – – for a staggering 11 or 12 hours each day — they receive just enough attention to keep them pacified . . . With all due respect, the day-care worker’s top priority is — and rightfully so — getting paid. And the most heartbreaking fact is that most of our little ones are being kept by the lowest bidder! I recently drove through a neighborhood and saw a sign that said : “Cheap child care.” It made me want to cry.

I understand the fact that there are dire situations in which both parents have to work . . . I met Heidi not long ago. She expressed remorse over having to leave her 1-year-old and 4-year-old in day care. “It hurts so much, leaving my babies,” she said, appearing sincere.

So why was she working? I asked, curious. Money. She and her husband just had to have the money. “We have so much debt,” she said,” “I have no choice but to work.”

It didn’t escape me that she was lugging around a $300 handbag and carrying a chic cellular phone . . . But if she was so distraught over leaving her children in daycare . . . couldn’t she find a way around it?”

“Yes, I guess so,” she said, “but we’d have to live in a much smaller house” — she seemed devastated at the mere mention — “and we would have to sell one of our cars.”

Imagine that — actually sacrificing for the good of your children. Clearly, this woman had choices, and it appeared that self-indulgence had won out.

And Heidi isn’t alone. Every day, thousands of children are being sacrificed on the altar of greed and selfishness . . . How have children become so devalued? . . . What does it say about us when our monthly mortgage payment far exceeds our monthly baby sitter’s check?

My prayer is that the current and future generation of new parents will come to realize that being at home during a child’s formative years is the most important contribution a woman can make to the world — period. There is no other task so urgent, no other career so important and no greater calling in all the world than teaching a child how to live.

Dayle Allen Shockley, motivational speaker and author, Dallas Morning News, November 19, 2000.

As an important aside, please note that all quotes from the Dallas Morning News are PRIOR to Keven Anne Wiley becoming editor. None of these authors could get published today; I now get the paper twice weekly for the grocery ads and coupons.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

If Evan’s (dreary, clichéd, shopworn) theory were correct, then the whole history of Christian civilization should be one of unending moral barbarism and frailty in the face of evil, and we should now be enjoying a dawning age of spiritual fortitude. 

Leave us say I don’t think the available evidence supports the idea that children exposed to the horrors of modern popular culture grow up to be more morally upright than those who are not. It is an intuitively silly notion that we should encourage moral uprightness by deadening a child’s sense of horror through exposure to depravity, and the logic of this commonplace excuse for parental laziness has always escaped me. The idea seems to be to create calluses on the soul so that a person becomes unaffected by similar stimuli later. It evinces an extremely stunted understanding of concupiscence at the very least. We only deaden a soldier’s response to gunfire so that he can participate in battle later, not in order to make him a pacifist. It reminds me of the old joke—“This milk is so sour it might make me sick! Here, taste it yourself and see…” 

I am also very unimpressed with similar arguments to the effect that the intellectual and moral squalor of a Lady Gaga or Madonna is redeemed by what she supposedly “teaches” us about the evils of contemporary society. This is a common rhetorical backstop for conservatives who don’t want to appear to be prudes. I once heard Thomas Hibbs, the culture critic who writes about American popular culture from a basically conservative point of view, make the claim that conservatives go too far in their criticism of such appalling nihilistic trash as Pulp Fiction. Why? Well, because such films teach us something about the nihilism of our own society, of course—they help us understand its pathologies by putting them baldly on display. 

This is tantamount to saying that we should be thankful for the existence of cancerous tumors because, after all, they’re really helpful in identifying people with cancer. One suspects that men like Hibbs use such arguments because they are unwilling to state the plain truth that the only real utility of such garbage is to give men like himself something to write about. 

Anyway, I am through with arguments for the exposure of our young people to full frontal wickedness, as I am through with suggestions that such exposure produces either moral vigor or sophistication in the viewer.

Laura writes:

If Evan’s (dreary, clichéd, shopworn) theory were correct, then the whole history of Christian civilization should be one of unending moral barbarism and frailty in the face of evil, and we should now be enjoying a dawning age of spiritual fortitude. 

I think Evan would say that this is not quite true because in previous ages, individuals didn’t need to be trained in the ways of barbarism so that they could fight it and resist it. Now that we live in that sea, we must treat our children to swim. But, as others have said, and Sage argues, we teach children how to resist depravity by developing strength of character and telling them explicitly what behaviors are sinful. We don’t teach them morality by conditioning them in immorality.

John E. writes:

Evan’s comments in the Gaga thread seem to be a call, popular among many Christians, to “engage the culture.” Anthony Esolen has written some good words that hint at the possible futility of such an engagement “when there is no culture to engage.” He suggests that the first task is “to revive the memory of what a culture is.” He goes on to say, 

If that declaration seems provocative, I ask you to consider that word “culture,” and to cease using it to denote the habits and fads of the masses. For the “masses” do not produce culture. The people do, when they cherish and preserve and pass along to their descendants what is most dear to them: their memorials and feasts, their music and dances and rites of passage and of courtship; their know-how, their moral laws; most important, their worship. There is no culture without cultus. Without a common belief in God or the gods, you do not get ancient Athens and the Parthenon atop its rocky mount. You do not hear the Psalms in the synagogue. Michelangelo does not sculpt the David as a tribute to the patriots of his native Florence.

Esolen is quite patient with a rather insolent commenter named “NTB” in the comment section of this article, and the fruit of the exchange, solely to Esolen’s credit, is worth reading, I think, even if what he was saying appears to be lost on the commenter who provoked the exchange.

Sage writes:

Your write that, “I think Evan would say that this is not quite true because in previous ages, individuals didn’t need to be trained in the ways of barbarism so that they could fight it and resist it. Now that we live in that sea, we must treat our children to swim.” 

Yes, that does seem to be the argument. But as the analogy suggests, we are then teaching our children to be at home in such an environment. It is important to remember that evil is more seductive than good, and does need encouraging. Preserving our children’s capacity to recoil from evil is more useful than teaching them to just take it in stride. As others in your thread have suggested, acculturating a child to such things is only useful if a parent’s task is to help him to conform. 

On a not-unrelated note, the number one argument against homeschooling—and the worst, in my view, since it seems to miss the entire point of the exercise—is that homeschooled children will not be able “fit in” with most other people. They won’t be able to take the same experiences and values for granted between themselves and their peers. 

Never mind that all the anecdotal and formal evidence points the other way. The point of “sheltering” a child in this way is precisely to prevent their fitting in, at least inasmuch as fitting in entails having shared values and priorities with the larger society. The point of a moral education is to prepare a child to see the good, and to prefer it. Once this is more or less accomplished, a young person will be able to work out entirely on his own that the guttural trash emanating from the low-rider next to him in traffic is not to be preferred to the folk dances of John Playford.

Laura writes:

Exactly. As I said before, parents today should raise human beings who are maladjusted and who don’t fit in. 

B.T. Carl writes:

I agree that good parenting these days largely requires that one’s children not “fit in.” It reminds me of a story my wife tells from her childhood. She once complained to her mother about wanting something, offering as justification that “lots of people have this!” Her mother forcefully replied, “We are not people.”

I would only qualify that there certainly is a society into which I want my children to fit, a company I hope they are able to join fully at the end of their lives. My primary task as a Catholic father is to do all that I can to cooperate with God’s grace in forming them for that city. I wouldn’t say that I am seeking to raise maladjusted children, but children adjusted to the true and lasting good.

Laura writes:

Exactly. That’s an excellent clarification of what I was saying.

Nathan writes:

I think you were right to recognize that there is not an absolute choice between sheltering and exposing children to socially harmful practices. Shelter vs. Exposure appears to be a false dichotomy that fails to represent the complex, practical nature of raising children.

In regards to practical affairs, I thinking raising and educating children on socially harmful activities is a matter of introducing the subject matter to them in the right context, to the right degree, and with the appropriate command to avoid it. And by introduce I certainly do not mean an engaging in the activity itself, but rather a sincere attempt to have you and your child come to a sensitive understanding about what it is and why it is wrong. Thus you don’t simply hide the entire subject from their awareness, but at the appropriate time – talk about it, what’s wrong with it, etc. Since children are cluelessly unaware of the nature of much of social and pop culture – when they are introduced to socially harmful activities, they will not understand quiet how to process it, being subject to their untrained emotions and feelings. Consequently, this type of social education becomes a kind of pre-emptive strike. You equip your child with the right information – or more importantly, the right sensibilities with which to approach the subject matter (careful and understanding avoidance).

While there are so many parents out there who fail to instill the right virtues in their children because they absurdly wish their children to go through life ‘making their own choices’ – i.e. without the appropriate moral guidance, I think there are too many who think a harsh command is all that is needed. And of course with children and teenagers’ concupiscient curiosity, unexplained commands are likely to fail.

I think it’s important to emphasize that this is practical endeavor, requiring prudence/practical wisdom to determine the reasonable course of educating the child. It will differ based on subject matter and the child’s existing awareness and contact with the subject in question.

Laura writes:

These are essential points.

Moral training is like physical training in important ways. A child doesn’t become a competitive cross country runner by taking a few long jogs; similarly, he won’t necessarily reject bad habits or activities simply because he is told once or twice that they are harmful. One has to build up virtue gradually. As Aristotle pointed out, ethical training involves habituating individuals to the good. Artistotle, by the way, would have been an avid reader of The Thinking Housewife if he were alive today and if his philosophical bent were protected from modern specialization. The preservation of this moral training in a culture absolutely depends on traditional sex roles and hands-on child rearing, so he would have endorsed these things. Gee, I wonder whether he would have sent in comments. Actually, I think I might have discouraged that.

Mercedes Dugger writes:

Thank you for the excellent posts today on Epicureanism and especially, Lady Gaga – Scott M.’s comments were especially insightful.

It’s gratifying to see that so many of your readers reference C.S. Lewis, probably the foremost defender of Christian morality in the 20th century. It’s too bad his books are not required reading in our schools, because the clarity with which he writes about morality could be understood even by school age children.

Thank you again for your thought-provoking work today.

Laura writes:

You are welcome. I don’t need Aristotle as a commenter; I’ve got enough perceptive readers as it is.

The idea of Lewis being required reading in our schools – well, I would happily pay twice my school taxes.

Nathan writes:

Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics offers far more wisdom than anything the moderns have written. Especially so when you consider the moral education of children. I can’t imagine teaching a growing child that – when faced with difficult moral choices – he or she should ‘maximize pleasure’ – or utilize some form of the categorical imperative.

Laura writes:

It is one of the greatest child rearing manuals ever written.

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