Raising Your Future: Nurturing Children to Be Responsible

By Frederick E. Von Burg

Raising Your Future is a tour of the mind of the child as well as a tried and tested method for teaching responsibility. There are many influences that determine how a child turns out, including many over which we have no control, such as genetics, peer influence and other environmental factors. This book deals with the parental factor, and how we can maximize the optimum parental influences to direct a satisfactory outcome, all things considered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 29, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469701837

Frederick E. Von Burg

Frederick Von Burg grew up on Long Island, and worked as a teacher to support his wife and three sons. His interest in the mountain men of the West came when he picked up, in a school library, a copy of Jim Bridger's biography. He researched the Blackfeet Indians and wrote his third book, "Keep My White Sneakers, Kit Carson," while visiting his oldest son in Princeton, New Jersey. Years later, while visiting the same son in Denver, Colorado, he came to appreciate the beauty of the West.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

The Spring of Life

The Historical Authority Pattern

The Gardeners

The Four Periods of Growth

The Exploratory Years

The Playful Years

The Rational Years

The Independent Years

Encouraging Normal Sexual Development

A Small Dilemma

Fertilize and Prune

Pruning in School

Environmental Discipline

The Father’s Role

The Mother’s Role

Two Vignettes

Some Cardinal Rules of Child-Raising

Holding Back the Chaos

Television and Children

When to Spoil Your Children

The Single-parent Family

Freedom Versus Discipline

The Rewards of Adversity

About the Author

Bibliography

To Loretta my wife, Frederick, Jr., Paul, Gregory, and all the young people who have influenced me, and to my parents and teachers, who made me receptive.

Preface

Though no teacher or parent lives long enough to fully evaluate his or her work, one can make a sort of progress report.

My primary goal in raising three sons according to the principles set forth in the book was complex, but at the least, it was to make them independent and responsible. I didn’t try to make them perfect, though that was a point of reference; I just hoped they wouldn’t make the big mistakes. And if they did, there is something we must leave to the God of eternity. In raising boys, you also discover some things about raising girls, so where applicable, I do generalize in this book.

Of course there were disappointments, and heartbreak, but that is to be expected when you raise someone to be independent of your guidance. There were careers that I would have liked to see them enter, but the world is so full of opportunity I can’t really say I am terribly disappointed. That they would reject some of my values was inevitable, for I taught them to think for themselves. Certainly there was peer influence, the influence of the culture and society, and also genetic influence, some of which I wish I could have avoided transmitting to them.

I respect their right to privacy, and so I can only speak of the living in general terms. But suffice it to say that on at least two occasions I felt the impact and relevance of the story of the Prodigal Son, as told so simply and beautifully in Luke. I have found that one of the roles of a father is to forgive, and to help the son or daughter start over or see other options.

The age of independence comes later nowadays, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five years old, and if the offspring goes on to medical school or some other form of graduate education, the age of independence is delayed. It is not a hard and fast date, postponed as it is by sickness or cut short by the exigencies of life.

As Longfellow has said, A boy’s will is the wind’s will… and I think it applies also to the girls today. We parents must accept a certain degree of unpredictableness, if we choose as one of our aims the development of a boy or girl’s will. To this end the method outlined in this book is, I think, a synthesis of what is best in European and American child raising. It incorporates European authority with American freedom. The former is necessary for responsibility and the latter for creativity.

Too much authority can inhibit some of the traits we want to bloom, and too much freedom for the growing child can have the adverse effect of cutting short his or her development with a premature willfulness, a false maturity. It is the kind of arrested development we still associate with the flower children of the Sixties. The exceptional ones among them went on to reject the drug culture they had embraced, and continued their discarded education on their own. They achieved, belatedly, what their frustrated teachers and mentors had been aiming for originally. Perhaps they could learn no other way that he who neglects the legacy of the past is not only destined to repeat its mistakes, but is doomed to enter into new labyrinths with doubtful exits.

Freedom in the classroom is usually not an end but a means to an end. For years in my work as an English teacher I tried to elicit from the students their peak creativity. I always found that at such moments my class appeared, to the outside observer, disorderly, with the children exercising an unwonted freedom. But I knew from experience that this was the price I had to pay for remarkable compositions, or just for unexpected flashes of insight from the mediocre or poor students. To allow such freedom on a daily basis would have been counterproductive, since it would hinder the other kinds of work that a student must do, such as read great works of literature, pay close attention to a difficult point of grammar, or catch the elusive emotion of a poet. Freedom is not a goddess but a means to God. If this alienates some, let me ask what they would call all that is noble, good and admirable in a universe that so far is populated by humankind.

This book does not pretend to be a psychological text. It is merely a celebration of the human, growing mind, as outlined by Jean Piaget and applied by myself. Without application, the theories of famous psychologists are, after all, so much talk. This book is then a recounting of my experiences applying the theories of Jean Piaget, and a celebration of the human mind, symbolized in the seashell known as the chambered nautilus. I thank all my sons, my pupils, cooperative and uncooperative, and my wife, for the rich experiences with which I have filled this book.

Of the three young men I helped raise, one has already completed his sojourn on earth. All of them have excelled in their chosen fields, and the prognosis is out of my hands. I feel they are as ready as I could make them to meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.

All of them became magnanimous, and in struggle and adversity they have evinced good character. They are and were human, but in their weaknesses lay their strength, if I may allude to St. Augustine and Longfellow.

Acknowledgements

I owe the inspiration of this book to my wife and children, both my own and those whom I nurtured for a brief moment in time. Then there were my parents, Frieda and Emil, and my teachers, symbolized by Sister Maura and Brother Augustine; my editors, Dee Josephson and Sondra Mochson; my computer mentors, Joseph Malone and Bruce Mandel; and the many relatives with whom I learned and discussed. Going back 2000 years, I owe much to a Galilean whose influence touched me still.

The Spring of Life

For me, a teacher, the spring was repeated every fall, when I met over a hundred new faces in my classrooms and watched their reluctant but curious reactions to a new school year. There was a vernal quality about this time of year indoors, leaving the dying year outdoors to continue its denouement in a last conflagration of color. Inside the buildings a budding of knowledge took place in most cases, the reawakening of dormant skills, the warming of interest, the intensification of learning activity.

As the school year progressed, it became a tidal wave of human strivings and caused a spillover of unchanneled energy, so that I realized that I was really not what the textbooks had told me a teacher was, a father or mother in loco parentis to these kids. It came down to the fact that I was a stranger who must flow to some extent with the tide, to such a point that as a parent I would have considered reprehensible. This thought, which I first regarded as a craven intruder into the complacency of my mind, continued to assert itself as I found that for the sake of peace I must overlook certain transgressions, forgive to the point of foolishness, and repress anger and hurt far beyond what is healthy in a parent. What few people realize, and what I had discovered almost reluctantly, is that some of the qualities that make for a good teacher make for a bad parent, and vice versa.

What I am saying is the gardener does not use the tractor like the farmer. The farmer, on the other hand, ignores the petty weeds, eschews the staking and binding of tomatoes, and loses tons of produce to small errors and miscalculations, as for example the fall-off when, as his harvester runs through the field, he hesitates in putting a new crate under a moving conveyor of onions.

The teacher, like the farmer, is a mass producer, who deals more impersonally with the products raised in the attentiveness of the home—the hothouse. The average parent does not realize the importance of her or his own role and often misses the home-school connection. In the most unfortunate circumstances, the parent regards the teacher as a competitor for the child’s love and respect, rather than as a complement, an advisor limited to school subjects and some few civilizing deportments such as punctuality. For education to be effective it must be a continuum from the home to the school. Although teachers find that parents are allies in achieving educational goals, they also find that parents can be the worst of enemies in sabotaging the teachers’ best efforts.

Actually, the parents have been working long before school starts, while snow still covers the child’s understanding. In the warmth of the home minute attention is given to the details of the child’s upbringing. No action of the child is wasted, for the parent approves or disapproves of everything the child does, and there is almost instant feedback. Both parents are needed, and though in psychological terms the mother was often considered the nurturer while the father was the one who socialized the child or helped the child fit into the larger society (school, the community, the state), their roles are actually interchangeable, depending on circumstances. One complements the other and the saying, Two heads are better than one surely applies to the heads of the household when they work in harmony.

Why do I dwell on the differences between a teacher and a parent when for years people have dwelt only on the similarities? It is because I am both, and I have felt these differences in a deeply personal way, so that my role as a parent hampered my role as a teacher, and vice versa. The intelligent man distinguishes, is a quote attributed to Thomas Aquinas, and for the sake of survival I had to distinguish between the role of a teacher and that of a parent.

Maybe that experience gave me an insight into the vital parent-school connection and I saw both roles, their uniqueness, and their potential in educating children. That is their common goal.

I can’t think of a worthier goal. Without education our civilization would grind to a painful halt, for we would only have barbarians to carry on the process of human life. Of course, I am using the word education in its widest sense, the sense that includes everything mothers and fathers, wittingly or unwittingly do as they raise their children to adulthood.

Mere physical growth does not mean automatic education. The quality of a child’s experiences is recorded subconsciously, as though on indelible videotape, to influence him or her throughout life, for the images of those experiences are the building blocks of the mental life, both conscious and subconscious, that shape decisions, outlook and attitude.

Of course this is an oversimplification, since good experiences alone do not necessarily make for a noble individual, the kind to be admired. There are other ingredients, to be sure, and the individual herself, by her choices, has an important say in the outcome of the final individual.

The beauty of it is that the individual is never a final product, not until death. And I suspect that even after death there are subtle changes in the way the life of a person is perceived. Life is change, and education is change. Kids don’t know that education is life, even though not all life is education.

Children of all ages should see that what they are taught at home and what they are taught at school dovetails. Their parents and teachers are often the only adults in their lives stable enough and secure enough to forget their own problems to nurture others. And in most cases, you can also rule out their peers.

I recall an experience, the import of which did not hit me until recently. At about five years of age I was at play in a large garden, which adjoined one of those unindustrialized-looking, clean, faintly humming Swiss watch factories, one wing of which was undergoing new construction. It was Sunday, and the whole complex was devoid of construction or factory workers. I eyed a simple pulley, by means of which I had observed workmen raising buckets of fresh-mixed cement to the second and third story of the factory. I decided I would raise myself, and so, putting my feet into the bucket, I seized the loose end of the rope and began to pull.

An unexpected thing happened. My feet slowly rose while my upper body descended, with the net result that I stayed on the ground whence I had started.

Calling one of my brothers who was a year and a half younger than I and physically about the same weight, I sat down as best I could in the bucket while he heaved strenuously on the line. There was very little upward movement as both his and my attempts at raising me came to nothing.

The incident carries some symbolism. The child cannot raise himself either alone or with the help of his peers. He needs the guidance of an adult, and a responsible one at that (simply raising me to the third floor could have ended disastrously). Education requires a leader. In Latin the word educere means to lead out. If we are to be led out of the figurative darkness of ignorance the guide must know the