Balancing Love of Child and Love of Neighbor in a Competition-Fueled Society
If you’re like most parents, you care more about your own kids than you do a stranger’s kids. In fact, if you didn’t, we would worry. But can we take our love for our kids too far?
Our natural parental instinct is to help our kids succeed, so we try to give them every opportunity and advantage that we can. For parents with economic privilege, this might mean enrolling our children in an expensive private school or hiring a private SAT tutor. It might mean taking them to the museum and the ballet and France. When surrounded by expendable income, the greater danger is not in giving our kids too little, but in giving them too much. As much as we love our own kids, our love and compassion are not meant to be limited to the branches on our family tree. If we give our own kids big head starts, that makes it significantly harder for other kids to keep up.
In late 2018, The Atlantic reported that attending elite colleges does little to nothing to improve the economic outcomes in adulthood of boys who grow up wealthy. “But if you’re not rich, not white, or not a guy, the elite-college effect is huge.” As parents, how can we navigate the tension between our moral ideals of justice and equality and our desire to give our own kids the best opportunities we can?
…Click here to continue reading this article at Sojourners
If you like this article, you might also be interested in:
- What Should Churches Do With Questioners? (at Red Letter Christians)
- 5 Great Articles on How to Be an Ally for People of Color
- When Your Faith No Longer Feels Familiar (at InterVarsity’s The Well)
- 4 Strategies for Having Fruitful Conversations about Science and Origins (at BioLogos)
Also published on Medium.
Join the conversation here!