probably won't happen, but...

[tim]

A friend's Facebook comment on my previous post prompted me to ask myself: what would the world look like if parents were as concerned with raising their children to be ethical human beings as with protecting them?

Comments

[tim]

You can do the wrong thing with the right intentions, but you're certainly not going to do the right thing by accident.

I'm thinking specifically, though, of people (like the self-identified feminist parents mentioned in the previous post who won't let their sons wear pink) who know what it means to be an ethical person (that is, if you asked, they would tell you it's wrong for a kid to bully another kid because he's engaging in some gender-inappropriate behavior) but are actively choosing not to teach that to their kids.

[luinied]

Knowing what it means to be an ethical person doesn't entail knowing how to raise someone else to be an ethical person, though. And I've had this tab open since yesterday thinking I had something more insightful to say here, but I don't think I really have anything beyond "raising kids to be a certain way is really hard". If I were even considering raising kids myself someday this would probably be one of the things I'd regularly panic about.