What’s My Motivation?
I’m thinking today on the motivations a parent might have to send their child to school. Some people have enslaved themselves to debt or demand a certain lifestyle that they feel it necessary to have both parents working & making money, which in turn leaves little time to educate (or even watch) their child — that’s a common problem in a life devoted to the American dream.
Others have doubts about their ability to properly teach their children, and that’s a separate post (but in short — God didn’t give you your children on accident, hoping that you’d find someone better suited for the task ASAP).
The most baffling (to me) are those believing parents who simply do not want to spend the time or take up the task of educating their children. It is a burden that would interfere with a preferred daily lifestyle. It is a belief that the possible difficulties facing a parent taking up the role of educator is just too much (we’d fight too often!) and therefore best if the problem is placed in the lap of a dedicated teacher making far less money than they deserve.
Consider this by R.C. Sproul, Jr. -
…we should understand that teaching our children is our delight, our joy, our opportunity. When we see spending time with them as a burden, rather than a joy, we see further evidence of how encultured we have become. Children, biblically speaking, are a blessing from God. And we ought to seek out time with blessings from God, not plot out ways to avoid them, or hand them over to others.
And yet, the mother portrayed in the comic above, though no religious convictions are attributed is just as easily the Christian mother as she is a pagan mother. How did we get to this point? We’ve reached a point where the daily routine of school-aged child is spent in a class, away from their parents. Evenings are spent in a frantic rush to play sports, do homework, watch TV, play video games and get to bed in time to do it all again. Weekends are much the same. Seasonal vacations are short and the arrival of the routine is met rarely with gladness (save for Mom & Dad) but rather with glum fatalism.
Children desire to be with their parents because God has created them to be under their care until the time comes to “leave and cleave”. That they prefer the company of their parents to that of their teachers, nursery workers, day care attendants, is clear. That so many parents could make such a reality, could grab hold of this brief time God has blessed them with, but instead choose an empty home from morning until afternoon and an obstacle course filled with recitals, games, and practice, practice, practice makes me befuddled. I don’t get it. I see it as the primary driving force to have your children away from the home and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Is this time truly so tedious? Is the cost truly so high?
