Parenting for Everyone: Section 1.5. About Spirit

This is the 6th post in my series Parenting for Everyone, which is my summary of the book of the same name by Simon Soloveychik. To see all posts in this series, click here.

In moral life, what is convenient is probably false.

To develop a healthy spirit, we need ideals, a concept of happiness, healthy morality. A man of spirit does not expect easy luck. Having had no major difficulties early in life, he is nevertheless prepared to meet life. He is healthier. He is not subject to heavy moods and gloom. He does not despair. His views are not easily shaken. He does not lose faith in life when confronted with grief and misfortune. He can see good things about people. He is able to smile! He knows happiness and believes in it.

Humanity and strong spirit is what can be developed by parenting. The rest depends on natural abilities and fate.

The science of parenting is not about creating a better life or society. It is about bringing up healthy, independent, honest, kind and happy people, and no more than that.

Parenting is a spiritual process. But how much do we know about the nature and laws of spiritual processes?
We'll come back to this later in greater detail, but for now let us note one common characteristics of spiritual processes: here contradictions cannot be resolved. It is not either A or B, it is both A and B. In a 2-week old suckling, we should be able to see both a child and an adult, not half-child or half-adult.

In spiritual processes there is no measure, no scale, no norm, no golden mean. We should come to terms with these inherent contradictions. We should give children independence and we shouldn't, we should understand them and we shouldn't, we should spoil them and we shouldn't.

These contradictions create tension in our spiritual life. We need constantly to exercise our spiritual muscle, expend our spiritual energies.

It is precisely these contradictions that necessitate parenting and education. If love and conscience, truth and duty, independence and spiritual bond with parents could easily coexist, parenting would not be needed.

Man's educational power is not about authority or strength of character, not even about will or love or wisdom. It is about his spiritual ability to join contradictory spiritual movements together in one, to attain harmony, moral beauty. Educational power does not oppress, but elevates.

With weak educators, everything is flat, one-sided. They try to remove moral contradictions, do not feel them.        With strong educators, on the other hand, everything is rich, like a rainbow, in feelings, nuances, shades and colors, everything is contradictory as life itself, everything encourages the child to accept life in its complexity and inconsistency, strengthens his morals and his spirit.

To sum up, we should try to create a more accurate image of a child and to develop our educational power (ability). This is what parenting is all about.

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This concludes the first chapter of Parenting for Everyone, which is about the aims of parenting, which we can sum up as follows:

1. Independence and Freedom
2. Love and Conscience
3. Happiness and Duty
4. Truth
5. Spirit

Parenting for Everyone: Section 1.4. About Truth

For all posts in this series, go here.

Be yourself, be truthful to yourself. Truth is a key concept in parenting and in the life of the soul.

If man is the measure of all things, than truth is the measure of man. It is the measure of man in relation to the ideal man. Truth is about humanism, compassion, highest respect for human dignity.

Strive for the truth with all your heart, appreciate and respect everyone and yourself as a human being. Strive to ensure that such respect be the norm, that the truth triumphs everywhere, that man never be humiliated, offended, insulted, unappreciated, neglected, abandoned, in the dark, that no one be denied free development of all his powers. To strive for the truth means to assert the dignity of man on earth.

Don't force children to tell you the truth all the time. Let us not be afraid of children's secretiveness. We have no right to the child's soul. Let us be just in the matters of principle, but not necessarily in simple everyday situations. A child may be secretive or deceitful so as not to disappoint the parents, to give a short answer, or because he does not feel like telling the whole story, is afraid to be misunderstood. Let us give the child an opportunity to deceive us merrily.

Telling the truth, being truthful is important. But even more important is truthful conduct.

But it is so difficult to bring up a whole, truthful person.

To grow up as a whole, genuine, sincere person means to grow up without fear of people, their reproaches and ridicule, not to be afraid to look stupid, ridiculous, lagging behind.

For a child to grow up into a naturally kind and hones person, in order that he not try to seem better than he is, we have to reject force and coercion. Through coercion we force the child to do something which is not compatible with his essence.

Only that education is solid that teaches truth, teaches the child to be himself. To be rather than to pretend.

Parenting for Everyone: Section 1.3. About Happiness & Duty

For all posts in this series, go here.

How to bring up children? Every minute and with all your heart, wish them happiness now and in the future. And never get angry at them, never disconnect from them, never leave them defenseless against the fate.

One of the most important aims of parenting is to awaken and cultivate in a child a burning, unquenchable, unstoppable desire for happiness.

The art of parenting is to bring up a modest, unpretentious, generous, non-jealous person, who at the same time pursues higher goals, big life. Striving for happiness is his happiness. He is alive. How can this be achieved? Not by saying no to their desires or by giving in to them, but by cultivating their spirit.

Unhappy parents cannot bring up happy children. It is impossible. Freedom is taught by freedom, responsibility by responsibility, love and conscience by love and conscience, and happiness by happiness.

To live together in peace, people need to have a similar concept of happiness.

In final analysis, it's all about finding one's purpose in life and serving that purpose honestly.

Do what ought to be done, and what will be will be.

Happiness implies doing one's duty by serving one's purpose in life. But if we want to teach duty to our children, let us be careful with the word duty. We shouldn't use the word "duty", "you must" for reproach or to force a child into something.

All the misery in the world comes from wrong upbringing, whereby duty is considered a burden, a necessary evil, associated not with joy and happiness, but with hardship. We are not taught to do any job with pleasure, to accept any duty for truth. An ill-bred person is unhappy even from a slightest inconvenience.

In a good family, no one is reminded of their duty, no one watches whether and how the other does one's duty, but everyone joyfully performs their duties, gradually infecting the children with the joy of any work.

If we manage to marry duty and joy in child's mind, nothing more is needed for good upbringing.

One woman, a scientist, said: When a person's spiritual aspirations are fulfilled, than he feels happy.

Childhood is not a preparation for the future life, it is life!

Do not hurt small children, it is a risk to their health.

Parenting for Everyone: Section 1.2. About Love & Conscience

This is the third episode in my series Parenting for Everyone, which is my summary of the book of the same name by Simon Soloveychik.

People often say about their children: "Let him (her) be a good person, that'd be enough." Good means kind and honest.

We all think of ourselves as kind. Why then is there so little kindness in the world?

It is possible to bring up kind and honest children under almost any circumstances. But to do that, there must be at least one person around them who sincerely and deeply believes that kindness and honesty (or, which is the same, love and conscience) are the most important things in the world, let alone that they are not signs of weakness or silliness.

Love and conscience rule the world! This is the essence of parenting.

Love and conscience are the oxygen of the ethical atmosphere. The union of the two is the key. Conscience is uncompromising, love forgives and reconciles.

Love alone, without truth and conscience, is not enough to bring up a child. Responsibility alone, without love and kind heart, will ruin him.

If we wish that our children develop into kind and honest people, it is not enough, however difficult, to show forth these qualities towards them. We must also believe in love and conscience.

Parenting for Everyone: Section 1.1. About Independence & Freedom

This is the second post in my series Parenting for Everyone, which is my summary of the book of the same name by Simon Soloveychik.

The first chapter of the book can be called The Aims of Parenting. I will divide this chapter into sections according to the major aims of parenting:

1. Independence and Freedom
2. Love and Conscience
3. Happiness and Duty
4. Truth
5. Spirit

The first aim of parenting is independence. Man as master of his own life.

Education does not automatically lead to independence, unless one develops inner independence.

Independence means freedom. Freedom is determined by what is the source of punishment in one's life. A non-free person is punished for his mistakes by somebody else (parents, boss, the law), while a free person's punishment comes from inside, from his own conscience. For many people freedom is unbearable, for it implies hard inner work. People try to escape freedom, escape life's hard choices. They are too dependent on others, like colleagues, spouse, on the dark forces coming from the depths of the unconscious.

But why, having outer freedom, are some children and teenagers truly free and uninhibited, while others become lax and rakish? The difference lies in how they got their freedom. What's important is not freedom itself, but one's effort to obtain that freedom, the process of self-liberation.

Lack of attention, lack of interest and involvement on the part of adults does not lead to inner freedom, because the child is fighting for himself in the company of peers and that takes all his energy. When a child has to free himself from his parents, he may get outer freedom, but only to exchange it for a different kind of dependence, the dependence on one's peers.

If there is peace and love in the family, if the child feels free from the very beginning, then his desire for self-liberation growth, he strives to become better, stronger, to achieve mastery in what he does.

Striving for self-liberation, supported by adults, results in a truly independent, free, uninhibited person.

Parenting is about learning freedom, learning self-liberation.

When children are little, it is about freedom under supervision. So try to avoid too many "don't do that". Create a safe place for a child to explore the world independently. Let them do their thing in their uninhibited striving for independence. If we help develop freedom at 5, then at 15 the teenager knows how to deal with it.

Here is another very sharp observation: Many of us believe that one can learn "everything about parenting" from one conversation, radio program or a newspaper article. Many believe that there is a prescription for independence, and another one for bravery, and yet another one for honesty. We think that all the faults of a child are akin to a collection of ailments, and that there is a separate pill for each one of them. But no, this is a total misrepresentation of reality.

The rest of this book is devoted to this seemingly simple question: How to bring up an independent person?

Here, for the time being, are some simple rules that we can teach our children to prepare them for a life among peers:

1. Don't take things away from others, and don't give away all your possessions. LL: I find the first part of this statement debatable. In my opinion it is ok to borrow other children's stuff for a while and to give away your own stuff in the spirit of sharing.
2. Give if asked, try to defend your stuff if they attempt to take it away.
3. Do not fight if not offended.
4. Do not feel offended without a reason.
5. Do not offend anyone.
6. If they ask you to play - go and play. If they don't ask, ask them yourself, this is not a shame.
7. Do not tease, do not sulk, never ask twice.
8. Do not cry about your grades, be proud. Do not argue with teachers about grades and do not resent the teacher because of them.
9. Do not give away your friends behind their backs.
10. Do not be too dirty or too clean, children like neither.
11. Say this more often: let's be friends, let's play, let's hang around together, let's go home together.
12. Remember, you're not the best, nor the worst. Go to school and may you enjoy it! I'll be waiting and thinking about you. Be careful when crossing the road, don't hurry!

Parenting for Everyone: Part 0. Introduction

In this series of blogs I'll be exploring the book Parenting for Everyone written by the Soviet-Russian-Jewish philosopher, educator and journalist Simon Soloveychik.

Soloveychik was a truly remarkable figure and deserves close examination by anyone interested in parenting and education of children as free individuals. I recently read his Last Book (in Russian), and I was greatly impressed by the depth of his insights and his sharp, penetrating thinking.

When starting with Parenting for Everyone, I decided not just to read through the book (as I usually do), but to give it more thought and attention, in order to better understand its ideas. This blog series will serve exactly this purpose for me, and I'll be happy if other people will also find it helpful. By the way, I am reading the book in Russian on this website.

Soloveychik starts off by defining pedagogy (педагогика) as the science of the art of child rearing / parenting. He writes:

We all have to educate each other, because we don't know how to educate small children.

The art of parenting is as old as the mankind itself. The ancients considered it to be a very difficult task, the art of arts. As any art it is easier to learn than to understand. Education of children starts with the education of their parents.

There are three ingredients involved in parenting: parents, children and their relationship. These are respectively the subjects of the three parts of this book.

This book examines parenting of ordinary children, and not of the so called "difficult" kids.

The question is: Why under similar circumstance, children in some families develop well and in others poorly.

The science of parenting does not prescribe how to live or how to be, it does not even prescribe recipes for parenting. It just examines which circumstances are conducive to children's well-being and which are not. This is also the major topic of this book.

What do we want from children? Joy! What is needed so that the children keep bringing us joy in 5, 10, 15 years?

We have two mental images of our child: the image of an Ideal Child and that of an Ideal Adult. The former image is of a child which is easy to control, the latter is of an independent person. These two images contradict each other, and this is the primary reason of our disappointments in our children. By making children conform to one of these images, they are unable to conform to the other. So first we need to take care of this image of an Ideal Child, so that it naturally flows into the image of an adult.

Being imperfect ourselves, we cannot bring up perfect children.

So let's start by defining the image of an adult that we want our child to grow into.

My First Wikipedia Article: Vera Lothar

I love Wikipedia. I can't imagine life without Wikipedia. I look up lots of stuff on Wikipedia. I've been using it for years, and I donate annually to Wikimedia Foundation.

But I had never contributed anything to Wikipedia. I felt there is nothing I can write about, and that there is always somebody who can write better than me on any specific subject.

However, recently, while reading a book by Simon Soloveychik, I was deeply moved by the remarkable, yet tragic fate of a talented French pianist Vera Lothar-Shevchenko, who was educated in Paris and Vienna, married a Soviet engineer in Paris and moved to the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Her husband and herself were soon condemned to the Stalinist prison camps, where she spent 13 years.

After she'd been released, she spent years teaching and performing in provincial Siberian cities of Nizhny Tagil, Barnaul and Sverdlovsk, until she was discovered by Soloveychik (then a correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda). She was then invited to move to Novosibirsk, where she lived happily and performed until her death in 1980.

I was surprised to find out that there is very little information about Vera Lothar and no Wikipedia article about her. So I wrote one myself. You can read it here in Russian. I am also planning to write one in English.

Writing a Wikipedia article turned out to be not so easy. Wikipedia uses its own markup language, with many templates, and it takes some time to get familiar with it. Also, the first version of the article was immediately changed by somebody else, which was a little painful at first :) But I got over it, as I realized that Wikipedia is a cooperative endeavour, with many people collaborating on articles and improving their quality all the time!