"Beautify your tongues, O people, with truthfulness, and adorn your souls with the ornament of honesty." – Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah, p. 336.
It is my middle son's birthday today. It is a day to remember his journey from the womb world to this earthly plane and to look at how he has developed over time since his arrival. I see the joy that he has in just living and the delight he takes in getting to know people, to make friends and share with them who he is. Yesterday my husband and I drove to his college to spend the day with him. On the drive down to Niagara, we reflected on the manner in which we had parented. We are reading a book about love and a passage caused us to recall how we had reinforced values of competition, domination and greed in some of the games we played with our children. The book caused us to look at our consumption culture as a place where love is not given the opportunity to be learned and experienced. Greed gets in the way of this process, choking any potential for growth and does not allow us to develop or strengthen our capacity to love one another. It was humbling for us to admit that although we intentionally made space to teach truthfulness and honesty, we simultaneously were reinforcing the very values that serve to undermine these virtues. How alert we must be as parents to giving power to forces that will inevitably destroy the happiness of our loved ones. It is so hard when we live in and amongst such a high level of depravity. With my middle son, I can remember how challenging it was to encourage the practice of honesty. It seemed to be a daily struggle. What I have to admit is that he was a product of our environment. We needed to not only teach honesty but also to model it. I know that because dishonesty is so very prevalent it was also a characteristic of our interactions at home, one which he was sensitive to and learned. I know it is not too late to continue to teach our children the importance of being honest in all that we do and to be sensitive to how children assimilate that which we think we are keeping from them. As this son turns nineteen, I can have open and transparent conversations with him about how I made some pretty key mistakes and share with him the ways that I made them. I believe that as much as we feel that our children are in a phase of learning, that we as their parents are also learning. As we remember how our own parents dealt with the stages of our own growth, we too are learning to move through the pain of the hurt of those times and transform, by acquiring virtues. I wish I was better back then and knew what I know now but I still get to share what I have learned with my boys in the hopes that they will heed the lessons in my mistakes and not carry them forward to the generations to follow.
I believe it is so important to openly speak with our children about what we see as our mistakes - not to dwell on them but to acknowledge them. It is one way to both improve the relationship, but also to open their eyes to how they might do things differently when they become parents.