Topics Education

Question Dear philosophers, this is a question from a fresh mother who has a teenage kid. Every time she asks some questions about the truth of life and world, I feel cornered. I hope she could grow up into a person who has her own judgements and ability to reflect independently. I don't want her to be influenced by her mother's words as I was. What should I do?

Accepted:
April 25, 2006

Comments

You could share with your daughter not just your views and opinions on these matters, but the reasons you hold them. You won't indoctrinate her if you're also candid about uncertainties you might have, and about the route(s) you took in developing your own views--the questions that burned in you, your changes of heart, and so on. In fact, you will help teach her how to form reasonable views of her own.

I wholly agree with Joseph Moore's reply and wish merely to add to it. As much as I understand not wanting to be too heavy an influence, your role as mother does not give you the moral option of not being an influence--that is just the way it works, and I'm sure you do know that. So, the only question is: What sort of influence do you wish to be? You can influence your daughter in ways that will strengthen her ability to make sound independent judgments, and the best way to do this is to model the process for and with her. She needs the raw materials, to do the job--just as we all do. One does not become independent through ignorance--ignorance takes us in the very opposite direction. So for Heaven's sake do not refuse to answer her questions and thus leave her in ignorance!

By showing her how you reason, and how you are willing to attend to her reasoning (and to show the respect of challenging and correcting her reasoning, when it seems flawed to you), you will promote far better the result you desire in her. If you refuse to answer her questions, you also refuse to provide her with the tools she will need to function in the world--but be careful about the way you answer, for what you do when you answer (or worse, don't answer) will model for her what she should do. Be honest, be thoughtful and deliberate, and by all means engage her in the discussion. When she asks, "What should I do?" one of the best first things to reply is, "What do you think you should do?" That is how a discussion begins, and out of that kind of interaction, one learns how to deliberate well.

When I first read our interlocutor’s question, I too was tempted torespond that mothers have no choice but to influence their children’svalues and beliefs. Every action, statement, and gesture of a belovedand respected parent signifies to young children who are desperate tomake sense of their world what it is reasonable to believe and how itis reasonable to act. Such signals in early childhood provide theultimate basis for what most children could even understand as a reasonfor action or belief during more sophisticated philosophical musingswith their parents when they are teenagers. To this extent, I think, itis impossible for children ever to gain complete cognitive independenceand distance from their parents, and for this reason and many others,the responsibility of parents often feels overwhelming.

But, ona second reading, I was struck by her description of herself as “afresh mother of a teenage kid”. I’m also a mother of a teenage daughterand I hardly feel fresh. I wonder whether our interlocutor has recentlyacquired the role of mother, perhaps as a result of becoming a newmember of a now blended family or as a result of having adopted ateenage child. Then, I would think, it would be quite difficult to knowexactly how to respond to a new daughter’s request for insight: as amother, one is expected to take on the role of a moral authority, butas a person who is new to this role, one hardly feels prepared for oreven entitled to take on this awesome responsibility. Perhaps, thistension accounts for our interlocutor’s feeling “cornered” by herdaughter’s questions about life and ethics– she feels at once requiredand not permitted to respond.

I was also struck by ourinterlocutor’s feeling ill-served by her own mother’s words. Was hermother’s failure really one of a lack of philosophical sophistication,of not explaining sufficiently her reasons for belief or action, or was her failure simply that the beliefs and values that sheinevitably promoted did not, in the end, serve herdaughter well? I wonder whether, as a result, our interlocutor now finds herself at aloss about what it is reasonable to believe and to do, in which casethe responsibility of a mother’s moral authority would seem even moreterrifying.

If I am right in my rather outrageous suppositions,then I think that our new mother’s anxiety can be somewhat relieved. Asa new mother to an almost adult child, one cannot, even if one feltprepared to, serve as the sort of moral authority that parents whosechildren grew up with them necessarily serve. A teenage child hasalready formed her most basic assumptions about the world and how tonavigate her way in it. While the ideal relationship of a new mother toan almost adult child is not the same as that between two friends, itseems to me that the ideal of friendship is a much more appropriate model for such relationshipsthan the more standard ideal that is held up for mothers and daughters.As in a relationship between two adult friends, new mothers and teenagechildren enter their relationship with separate histories and havingalready developed their own fundamental beliefs and values. To theextent that either is still baffled by the world in which they live,they can work together, as good friends do, to make sense of it all, bysharing their different perspectives and experiences that led them tohold the convictions that they do and to be perplexed by the puzzlesthat remain to be solved.