Dealing with Moral Crises : Part 1

Religious Education in the Family
by Henry F. Cope

(Page 19 of 28)

Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness, occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our children - or of our neighbors' children - to a focus and throw them in high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule, when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of development.

A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.

Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt, as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort of training.

1. The Promise of Imperfection

The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the perfect tree in the sapling. Character comes by development; it is not born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper, sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?

When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the development of those powers, their training-field and school.

Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other, in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him to be born six feet tall.

A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent, then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not. And is it not to be the same with the child?

We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.

2. The Collision of Wills

Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of will.

When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive, Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle and adjust itself with all other persons.

When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take time to think what it means. Keep your temper. Do not break before the other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied. From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from force and tradition to a moral plane.

Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request. You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his life.

Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an unjust man.

Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience. Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration - as a drop of acid on a finger tip - than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in other cases.

Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.

Copyright 1915 by The University of Chicago