TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN WELL

"Most children and adults will express the belief that it is wrong to allow others to suffer, but only a subset of them will conclude that they themselves must do something....
"Everything that psychologists know from the study of children's moral development indicates that moral identity - - the key source of moral commitment throughout life
- - is fostered by multiple social influences that guide a child in the same general direction. Children must hear the message enough for it to stick."William Damon, "The Moral Development of Children," Scientific American, August 1999

"To a certain extent, we [the pro-abortion movement] are preserving the status quo, which tends to attract an older audience. The anti-abortion movement is the counter-culture movement. It's very easy for young people to romanticize life."
Frances Kissling, executive director, Catholics For a Free Choice
St. Louis Post Dispatch

In a culture where bytes of anti-life information seem ubiquitous, you'd half expect young people to be hard-wired to be pro-abortion. Indeed, when you add the touting of "tolerance" as the supreme (if not only) virtue, it would seem to be highly unrealistic to expect impressionable adolescents to resist the siren call of "choice."

Yet, of all the good news of late - - led by the decline in the number of abortion fatalities - - right near the top is the manner in which younger Americans seem almost magnetically attracted to the pro-life movement. Let me remind the adults in our Movement: pro-life is not a hard sell to teens. Despite millions of words of pro-abortion propaganda, most young people intuit that abortion violates their moral grammar.

Someone once said that the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis abhorred the idea that, doctrinally, he would ever write something "original." He understood that what had stood the test of thousands of years did so for a reason. But it was his great gift to make everything old seem new, everything that might have appeared stale fresh.

Likewise, the enthusiasm and verve of pro-life youth will guarantee that the core pro-life message is transmitted intact. To borrow from music, they will take what we have said and put it in a register that best resonates with what they call the "Roe Generation."

Empathy for the downtrodden and the weak seems to be part of most teenagers' DNA. A surprisingly large percentage exercise that quality in the service of others. For instance, according to the William Damon article (mentioned at the beginning), between 22% and 45% of teens volunteer in community service, depending on the region of the country in which they live.
Moreover, every parent admires that adolescents have a very low threshold for unfairness. After all, what typically do we hear when a young person's sense of elemental justice is violated? " That's not fair."

We address the many ways young people are meshing into the pro- life movement on pages 18-20 of this edition of NRL News. In the months to come we will give more and more attention to the "Roe Generation."

Kids don't ordinarily need an elaborate lesson in embryology to grasp that what is kicking inside a woman's womb is a baby. Nor do they need to follow a paper trail of court decisions to know that Roe v. Wade turned common sense on its head. Nor, at the end of the day, do most adolescents need much coaxing to understand that arbitrarily assigning legal protection to people based on their ability to protect themselves spawns injustice, inequality, and inhumanity. They thirst to right the "unrightable wrong."

Young people also flock to our ranks because they are not boxed in by fallacious and misleading suppositions. They are not like adults who are all too ready to separate heart and head; to isolate feelings and knowledge in separate airtight compartments; to imagine when it comes to abortion that compassion and reason are combatants, when in truth they are allies in defending the claims of the vulnerable.

In his article for Scientific American, William Damon summarized in broad strokes what is known, or at least conjectured, about how a child "acquire[s] mores and develop[s] a lifelong commitment to moral behavior, or not." The piece is very useful and I draw heavily upon it in the remainder of this editorial.

Damon explains that research is clearly showing that even young children have a much richer motherlode of "positive morality" than they are typically given credit for. While he writes at length about the competing theories of how children develop their initial set of values, he argues that "the key question is: What makes them live up to their ideals or not?"

For instance, in the abstract children may voice an egalitarian fairness that is most impressive. But what moves a person (young or old) from saying "People should be honest" to "I want to be honest"?

Those who do make this leap to moral maturity are characterized by "a high level of integration between self-identity and moral concerns," Damon writes. What is fascinating is that those who don't may be just as aware of moral problems but they do nothing about them, because "the issues seem remote from their own lives and their senses of self."

But inaction, for the former group, "strikes at their self- conception." Their concerns about suffering "are central to the way they think about themselves and their life goals, and so they feel a responsibility to take action, even at great personal cost." They cannot sit idly by while injustice reigns.

To return to our question - - the one that is critical for us as we think about the future of the pro-life movement - - what influences how a young person acquires (or does not acquire) this "moral identity"? What serves to enrich/stifle what appears to be "a number of inborn responses" that "predispose children to act in ethical ways"?

Well, everything you'd expect - - from peer groups, to church, to the mass media, to school, etc., etc. But at the top of the heap - - at least for those children who still live at home - - is their parents. By our behavior we will (to borrow the famous song title) "teach our children well" or ill.

Damon talks of a "moral charter" to foster moral learning - - a set of fundamental values, such as honesty, that all institutions (schools, mass media, the family) ought to be able to agree are crucial and promote actively. Alas, there are very few "consensus" values in our culture. It would be wonderful if respect for unborn children was one of them. For now, it is not.

But this is already changing. Frances Kissling was more right than she knew. The generation that elevated abortion to a kind of secular sacrament is passing. Its replacement will be a counter-culture, one that finds bizarre the passing notion that the well-being of mothers and their unborn children are mutually exclusive. Leading the charge will be the children of pro-life parents. Your shining example of faithfulness and dedication, of altruism and selflessness, is illuminating their way, not only guiding their steps but bequeathing them the resolve to stand up when, on those occasions, it seems as if darkness has prevailed.

Each, then, has a role to play in awakening America's slumbering conscience. You should be enormously proud of them. They should be proud to be your children. Together, we can change the world.

dha