604. Parents and Family: Protection Against a Dysfunctional Culture. Great article from Meridian Magazine

This is an excellent article about parents teaching their children to be 
intelligent, disciplined, mature, functional, empathetic human beings capable of seeking, recognizing and honoring truth.

Parents and Family: Protection Against a Dysfunctional Culture

By Sutherland Institute · March 9, 2016

The following was written by Stan Rasmussen.

With increasing frequency, respected thought leaders are discussing legitimate concerns about what passes for intelligent discourse in the current presidential campaign season – a particular lowlight of which is the element of anger. Not just a feature of the dialogue (so-called) among the candidates, it seems as if anger is becoming the one socially acceptable and validated emotion.

Additionally, what previously may have been thought of as “allergy to boundaries” (or as resistance to the gravitational pull of principle, common decency and common sense) seems rapidly to be morphing into an increasingly muscular aversion to any form of personal restraint or self-discipline.

Hardly a basis for optimism about the future. Perhaps there are times when you, too, have wondered: How close are we to living in a post-rational, post-constitutional, post-functional world?

Compounding and possibly accelerating this descent into dysfunction is the disinclination and/or diminishing capacity of some parents to do what responsible, effective parents must do: model, train and teach principles of constructive, mature, responsible living. In other words, parents functioning as parents, not as buddies and thus as enablers of their children’s natural tendencies toward self-absorbed, self-serving indulgence of personal preference and toward the avoidance of matters difficult, unpopular and unpleasant. Rather, as stewards of the training and development of their children into intelligent, disciplined, mature, functional, empathic human beings capable of seeking, recognizing and honoring truth – things as they actually are, not as the child (or the parent, for that matter) prefers them to be – and thus prepared for a life of healthy growth and living; of legitimate meaning and sustainable wholeness; of futurity.

Those who may be uncomfortable with this assessment, or think it inappropriately judgmental, might consider that it’s just turning on the lights: illuminating the need for parents to equip their children to see the inherent linkages between selfishness and the many problematic consequences that flow from it, including and especially the most predictable and ironic consequences of personal unhappiness and misery – of themselves and of those around them.

The failure of parents so to train and equip their children is perhaps among the more significant factors contributing to the contemporary cultural deterioration we are witnessing and that is expanding at a perilously accelerating rate. Maybe Lord of the Flies is not fictional, but a cautionary tale, after all.

There are no adequate substitutes for parents who understand and are committed to modeling and nurturing essential capacities in their children: The ability to see others; to validate others; to empathize with others; to serve others. And thereby to find the happiness, wholeness and meaning of which they are capable and that is attainable only in the context of other-acknowledging and other-valuing – and which will continually elude them unless and until they develop the capacity to see and regard fellow humans as worthy, even holy, others. This perspective and capacity are most frequently and effectively nurtured by mother and father, in the family.

If these are among the reasons most of us regard the family as the cornerstone and bedrock of functional culture, the fundamental unit of society, then why are we allowing the creation, defense and bolstering of surrogate and counterfeit, even if well-intentioned, governmental and civic entities – at national, state and local levels – to “hack at the limbs” of the phenomenon of family deterioration instead of focusing on the roots of it by insisting on the re-establishing of public policy that does not undermine and interfere with the rights and roles of parents but that instead respects and strengthens parents?

Stan Rasmussen is director of public affairs at Sutherland Institute.