Good Things Inherited?

I’m not quite sure how or when this happened, but Elliot recently declared how much he loves brown bread. I can honestly say I didn’t know that about him. While I confess to being acutely aware of the benefits surrounding brown bread for health, nutrition, bowel movements and the like, I must also confess to being remiss in exposing my children to it. On reflection, my own preference for white bread is more than likely an inherited tendency rather than it being the result of any considered experimentation on my part. 

When I questioned Elliot about his newfound love, he said it was because whenever Dad took him out for brunch (which occurs in the weekend when it’s my turn for a lie in, the cereal has run out, and imagination around alternative options is null and void), his favourite thing to order is an egg sandwich on brown bread. I was thankful at least I knew how much he loved eggs otherwise the shock might have been more than I could process in a single revelation. 

It got me thinking about how much of our children’s likes and dislikes are simply inherited from us. To what degree do we expose them to new things we might never have even tried or liked ourselves? Just because I like white bread, I’ve always offered that to my children. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, it’s just the way we tend to be. I have a friend who is a vegetarian and consequently she’s never given her children meat. One of her boys came to a birthday party of ours once and I was under instruction not to let him eat the savaloys or sausage rolls. Naturally I respected her discipline around that; but I could tell they really wanted to eat them. I wondered at the time whether their imposed deprivation was a good or a bad thing. I would have understood it more if my friend’s personal position was ethical, but it wasn’t - it was just that she didn’t like the taste of meat herself. I guess in hindsight now after the brown bread incident, it’s just a more extreme example of how we pass our own ideas onto our children. 

More often than not I think, we get our ‘foundation’ ideas from our own parents... and so the cycle repeats itself. It reminds me of the story about the woman who cut the ends off the Xmas ham before she baked it in the oven. Her child asked her why she always did that, and she replied, “I’m not sure what the reason is, I just know it’s the right way to do it... ask your Grandma, she’ll know.” So the child asked her Grandma, who replied, “Well, I’m not sure why your Mum does it, but I did it because my oven tray wasn’t big enough to hold a full ham.” And there it is. We repeat history; we believe it is so and we never question it. 

Because our children are young and impressionable, they simply go along with us because in truth we’re all they have to go along with, at least in the early years of their lives. Are we doing them an injustice by teaching them our ways? Are we (albeit unconsciously) ‘programming’ them? They often grow up talking like us; acting like us. I guess the reality is that we can only teach them what we ourselves have learned.  

It’s not just our personal tastes and likes we pass onto our children; it’s preferences, prejudices, beliefs and opinions too. That’s a whole lot of baggage for a new soul to absorb. They're born perfectly clean like a blank canvas: unaffected and free; unbiased and innocent. Then we start to paint them. I’m not entirely sure the spirit with which they came into this world is fully nurtured by us limiting their design to the colors of our own palette. The words of the great Kahlil Gibran have always resonated strongly with me:

“Your children come through you; but not from you.

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts;

For they have their own thoughts.

You may strive to be like them;

But seek not to make them like you.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

Our children, although little and precious and in need of our protection, are individual souls in their own right. Sometimes we forget that. 

So what can we do? We can do our best. We can teach them what we know to be good and right. Ideally, we can teach them to live a life without prejudice or judgement, whatever our own beliefs might be. We can teach them to always be true to themselves and to always be honest, despite what we might think. If they want to eat a sausage roll or brown bread, we should make ourselves approachable enough for them to tell us so and know absolutely that we will respect their view. We can teach them to live their lives with an open mind; to know that just because we do or think something, it doesn’t mean they have to. Above all, we should respect their choices in life. What an amazing thing it will be to watch them create their individual art as the patterns of their own soul emerge. 

Mum’s the Word: