Conferences on the Virtues
By Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Number 83
Duties of Parents Toward Their Children
Question three
of the section on PIETY is concerned with…
The
Duty of Parents Toward Their Children
The
duty is threefold. It consists of
i.
Loving them with an altogether special love, for
the rest of their lives.
ii.
Educating them for life in this world and for
life in the next.
iii.
Providing for their material maintenance and
sustenance until the children are able to support themselves.
The
special love is to be affective and effective; internal and external; natural
and supernatural.
1. Love
is both affective and internal when the parents sincerely desire true
good for their children. The good they
desire must embrace both body and soul, both the present and the future. They must respect, however, the pre-eminence
of the spiritual good of their children’s souls over the temporal good of their
bodies.
This
love, however, is to be moderate, in the sense that it is neither
excessive nor insufficient, and regulated by Faith.
It
is immoderate and excessive when it becomes an idolatrous
affection. This results in spoiling the
children, caving in to their every whim, never correcting their faults nor
imposing necessary discipline.
It
is immoderate and insufficient when all the children are not equally loved and
cherished. This happens whenever any
kind of discrimination is shown in dealing with the children, such as by
favoring some unduly, and/or being unduly severe with others.
Parental
love is immoderate also when it is egotistical, as when the parents seek to
serve themselves in their children rather than to love the children for the
children’s own sake and for God’s sake.
2. Parental
love is both effective and external when the parents not only desire the
greater good of their children, but also do all that is reasonably within
their power to confer that good upon them.
The good of the children’s souls is to be paramount, to which all other
goods are subordinate. Both of these
goods are achieved mainly through education.
My
textbook has some interesting observations to make about education:
Education
is the progressive and harmonious development of a child’s powers and
faculties, by means of which they grow from being infants to perfect
adults.
It
is progressive because by nature a human being grows toward perfection
only in discrete steps and in virtue of overcoming a multitude of obstacles.
It
is to be harmonious because the powers and faculties, natural and
supernatural, bodily and spiritual, are to be cultivated and integrated in
proportion to their importance for a complete and balanced maturity.
Spiritual
education is given prime importance through the
eradication of evil tendencies, the overcoming of rebellious passions, and the
strengthening of good qualities and virtues.
Neither
is the body to be neglected. It is to
be kept healthy and capable of functioning as perfectly as possible so that it
is a suitable instrument in serving the mind and the soul as they carry out
their respective activities. The goal
is: A sound mind in a sound body (Mens
sana in corpore sano).
Education
must also be fitting (congrua, in Latin), that is, appropriately
manly or womanly, i.e., reverently respectful of the God-given, complementary
gifts and characteristics of the male and female natures, as well as directed
toward the fulfillment of the child’s future vocation in the Church and in the
world.
Finally,
education is to be Christian that is directed toward the attainment of
the child’s supernatural destiny.
ii.
The spiritual education of the children includes
five essential components, some of which have already been suggested above.
1. Religious
and Christian instruction.
While they are still young, the children are to be introduced, according
to their capacity, to the truths of our Faith.
They are to be taught about God, Jesus and Mary, the Angels and
Saints. They are to be taught how to
make the sign of the Cross, how to say their prayers, and how to distinguish
between right and wrong, between what pleases God and what offends Him, and
that to choose to do what is wrong and offends God is a sin. Children are to be informed of the duty to
keep the commandments of God and are to be properly prepared to receive the Sacraments
in due course.
2. Discipline. To the extent
appropriate, the parents are to introduce children to pious practices and
suitable religious devotions.
Especially they are to help the children acquire the most necessary
Christian virtues: piety, obedience,
charity, justice (fairness), sincerity (purity of heart), honesty, gentleness
(meekness) and chastity.
3. Good
example. Remembering
that actions speak louder and are more persuasive than words, parents are to
set the example of an upright Christian life and to avoid whatever might give
scandal to their children.
4. Vigilant
custody. They
are to protect the children against anything or anyone who might inflict moral
harm upon them: bad companions, bad
books and pictures, immoral movies and TV programs.
Along
with the above, parents are to train their children to assume responsibilities
within the family and faithfully to discharge them for the common good.
5. Correction. As the faults of the children begin to
appear, whether deliberate or indeliberate, the parents are obliged, not only
to correct them, but to do so with kindness, moderation and discretion, and,
above all, with firmness. If parents
were to manifest anger, impatience, or to be harsh and severe in seeking to
correct their children and instill virtue, that would be an exercise in
futility.
iii.
Supporting the Children.
Support
of children includes not only providing for their material needs of food,
clothing and shelter, but also extends to providing the help they need to
attain human maturity and be equipped to embrace and find happiness in the
fulfillment of a vocation for the good of the church and society.
1. Letters
and Arts.
First
of all, children need to learn to read and write and to acquire skills that
will enable them to be self-supporting according to a decent standard of living. Nowadays this includes providing them with a
good high school education, at the very least, and in accordance with the means
of the parents, a college education as well.
2. Advice
and Counsel.
When
it comes to their children’s choice of a vocation or profession, the parents
are to be ready and willing to advise and counsel, without, however, seeking to
impose their own will and wishes upon the children.
The
parents are well equipped to do this in virtue of their own personal life
experiences and of their personal knowledge of the respective children’s gifts
and talents, weaknesses and strengths.
3. Financial
Aid.
Under
this heading, my textbook states:
a) If
they are rather well off, parents are expected to provide the financial
resources their children need to pay for the education, training and
professional skills the children will need to maintain themselves and their
families (if they marry) in a decent standard of living.
b) Where
it is the custom, parents are to provide their daughters with a dowry that will
permit them to marry according to their station in life and in accord with
their human dignity. The exception is
when the parents cannot in conscience (justifiably cannot) approve of the
marriage the daughter proposes to enter into.
c) The
parents are to use reasonable diligence to preserve and leave behind a modest
estate for the children to inherit (cf. 2 Cor. 12:14).
It
would be a sin (more or less grave) for the parents to squander their resources
to the point of being totally incapable of caring for the children and thus
leaving them indigent.
The
duty to provide for the needs of their children ends only when the children
leave the household to marry and/or become self-supporting.
Even
then, should the children fall into material or spiritual need, the parents are
the first to be obliged to go to their aid, not only out of charity, but also
because of the special duty imposed by the virtue of piety.
Observations…
1. In
the event the minor children cannot rely upon the help of parents because of death
or incapacity, it then becomes the duty of close relatives and Godparents to
supply, according to their ability.
2. Teachers
have a duty toward their students that is based on piety, first of all,
because they have undertaken to share in a parental role. But it is also based on Justice, because the
teachers accept monetary compensation for their efforts.
Hence
it would be a twofold sin were teachers to:
a. Fail
to acquire the necessary training and skills to teach; fail to be diligent in
their daily preparation; teach false of useless knowledge.
The
degree of sinfulness of the above would depend upon the overall importance of
the subject being taught.
b. Fail
to try to correct the bad intellectual and moral habits of the students; fail
to exclude students whose bad habits prove to be incorrigible (after diligent
and reasonable efforts to correct them).
c. Unjustly,
indiscreetly and without a sufficient inquiry into causes, punish the students.
d. By
their bad example, corrupt the morals of the students.
Any violation
of the virtue of Justice gives rise to an obligation to make restitution. Since it is difficult to find in this life a
suitable manner for a teacher who has sinned in one or more of the ways just
mentioned to do so, the restitution would have to be made in Purgatory.
In ancient
times, when entire families were servants in the households and estates of
wealthy landowners, the landowner was also obliged in virtue of piety, to
extend to the servants the same kinds of care and treatment that parents owe
their children.
These include a
special love, as well as intellectual, moral and spiritual education
(particularly in the case of minors), and decent and fitting food, clothing and
shelter.
Nowadays such
situations hardly, if ever, occur.
Nevertheless employers, whether individuals or corporations, have a
similar obligation toward their employees.
But that obligation is met by the employer seeing to it that the
employees receive a living wage.
Question
4 – The Duties of Spouses…
My textbook
states that certain of the duties of spouses are grounded in the virtue of
Justice, and others are grounded in the virtue of Piety.
The former, based on Justice, consist in the duty
1. To
administer the common resources prudently to the advantage of the family;
2. To
be a remedy against the concupiscence of the flesh;
3. To
remain faithful to the marriage vows.
The duties
based on Piety, which in turn flows from the Natural Law and is buttressed by
Divine Positive Law, are also three:
1. Mutual
love and affection;
2. Mutual
help and consolation;
3. Cohabitation
My textbook
then speaks of the special duties of husbands and the special duties of
wives. As they are stated, it is clear
that they proceed from a social climate that preceded the emancipation of
women. They expand upon the admonition
of St. Paul to wives that they be submissive to their husbands, and also
reflect that state of affairs when women were deemed to be incapable of
self-governance, that is, the equivalent of minors, by civil law.
Unfortunately,
the text does not insist upon the husbands loving their wives as Christ
loves His Church, that is, undertaking all the suffering necessary to win
eternal life for His Spouse, the Church.
If wives were to see that their husbands loved them to that extent, the
problem of submissiveness would vanish into thin air.
Let me also
hazard an observation. If husbands were
to remember what the verb “to husband” means, they would realize that a
wife is a very precious asset, capable of producing abundant and valuable
fruits to enrich himself personally and the entire family unit. It then becomes his duty to see to it that
his wife has all that she needs to nourish, develop and exercise her manifold
and rich gifts, talents and resources of mind, heart and soul.
Let men remember
that in the very important matters of loyalty, fidelity, self-sacrifice,
devotion, capacity for suffering, generosity, perseverance and the like, women
are by far their superiors. No wonder
St. Paul says in the passage referred to (Ephesians 5:21:32), that a husband is
to cling to his wife, and not the other way around.
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