The long handoff

What does it mean to raise a person you do not own? The traditions disagree about almost everything except this: that the work is harder than it looks, and that most of it happens before anyone notices it is happening.

The two children at the gate

Confucius had a problem that any parent of more than one child will recognize. Two of his students came to him with the same question and received opposite answers. When pressed, he explained: "Ch'iu is retiring and slow; therefore, I urged him forward. Yu has more than his own share of energy; therefore I kept him back."^[1] One pupil needed a push, the other a brake. The teaching was not in the rule but in the matching of rule to child.

This is the first surprise of raising people: that fairness is not sameness. The Taoist version is gentler still. The way, Lao Tzu says, "produces them and makes no claim to the possession of them; it carries them through their processes and does not vaunt its ability in doing so; it brings them to maturity and exercises no control over them."^[2] Production without possession. Maturation without control. It is offered as a description of the cosmos. It reads, in any nursery, as an impossible job description.

And yet Confucius is sterner than the Tao. He will not coddle. "I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager to get knowledge, nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson."^[3] Love, in this tradition, is not the absence of demand. "Can there be love which does not lead to strictness with its object? Can there be loyalty which does not lead to the instruction of its object?"^[4] The Qur'an folds the two postures together in a single image: "kindly lower thy wing over the faithful who follow thee. And if they disobey thee, then say: 'I will not be answerable for your doings.'"^[5] Shelter, but not control. Cover them with the wing; do not answer for what they choose beneath it.

The Buddhist note is even more disconcerting to anyone in a hurry to fix a child. "Let each man direct himself first to what is proper, then let him teach others; thus a wise man will not suffer."^[6] Before guidance, alignment. The order matters.

What passes down without being given

Children inherit what we did not mean to hand them, along with what we did. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius opens his Meditations not with doctrine but with a roll call of debts: "Of my grandfather Verus I have learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion. From the fame and memory of him that begot me I have learned both shamefastness and manlike behaviour. Of my mother I have learned to be religious, and bountiful; and to forbear, not only to do, but to intend any evil…"^[7] These are not lessons taught in sentences. They are postures absorbed by living near someone. A grandfather's gentleness becomes a grandson's gentleness by some route that has nothing to do with curriculum.

The proverb is famous, perhaps too famous: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."^[8] It is often read as a guarantee — train rightly and the child stays. But the verb is train, not tell, and the way he should go is, in some readings, his way, the way suited to him. The Confucian image is starker: "The relation between superiors and inferiors, is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it."^[9] Whatever the adult is, the child becomes — not by being told to, but by being near enough to bend.

This is why the Dhammapada places the burden on the parent before the child: "If a man make himself as he teaches others to be, then, being himself well subdued, he may subdue (others); one's own self is indeed difficult to subdue."^[10] And the Gita observes, almost wearily, that "What the wise choose / The unwise people take; what best men do / The multitude will follow."^[11] The pedagogy of being watched.

What is sobering, then, is the Qur'an's note on inherited error: "They found their fathers erring, and they hastened on in their footsteps."^[12] The wind blows in whatever direction it blows. The grass does not check the compass.

There is even a tradition that suspects the whole project of transmission. Lao Tzu wonders aloud: "If we could renounce our sageness and discard our wisdom, it would be better for the people a hundredfold. If we could renounce our benevolence and discard our righteousness, the people would again become filial and kindly."^[13] What if the strenuous teaching of virtue is itself the obstacle to virtue? What if children become kind by being left alone with kind adults, and unkind by being lectured at by anxious ones? The thought is not comfortable. It is also not easy to refute.

The fetter you wanted

And then there is the harder voice, the one most parents would rather not hear, especially at three in the morning when the small body is finally asleep against them.

The Buddha is unsparing. "Wise people do not call that a strong fetter which is made of iron, wood, or hemp; far stronger is the care for precious stones and rings, for sons and a wife."^[14] The chain you chose, and would choose again, is the heaviest one. "'These sons belong to me, and this wealth belongs to me,' with such thoughts a fool is tormented. He himself does not belong to himself; how much less sons and wealth?"^[15] The possessive pronoun is the trap.

The Stoics arrive at something similar by a different road. Epictetus, quoted by Marcus, said that "as often as a father kisseth his child, he should say secretly with himself, tomorrow perchance shall he die." When his listeners protested that these words were ominous, he answered: "No words ominous that signify anything that is natural."^[16] The child is on loan. The kiss is sweeter, not less sweet, for knowing it.

The Qur'an pictures a day of such totality that even the closest bonds dissolve: "On that day shall a man fly from his brother, / And his mother and his father, / And his wife and his children; / For every man of them on that day his own concerns shall be enough."^[17] And the Dhammapada, plainly: "Sons are no help, nor a father, nor relations; there is no help from kinsfolk for one whom death has seized."^[18]

It would be easy to read these as cold. They are not, quite. They are corrections to a particular illusion — the illusion that the child is an extension of the parent, an insurance policy, a continuation. "Not a mother, not a father will do so much, nor any other relative; a well-directed mind will do us greater service."^[19] The point is not that family does not matter. It is that family cannot do for you the one thing only you can do for yourself.

Against this, the same Qur'an offers a gentler verse to balance the austere ones: "Enjoin prayer on thy family, and persevere therein."^[20] You are not the source of their salvation. You are still, somehow, responsible for the household's daily turning toward what matters. Both things at once.

The ones who cannot ask

Whatever a tradition thinks of attachment, it tends to be unanimous on one point: the child who has no parent, or whose parents have failed, has a claim on everyone else.

The Qur'an's rebuke is fierce: "Aye. But ye honour not the orphan, / Nor urge ye one another to feed the poor, / And ye devour heritages, devouring greedily, / And ye love riches with exceeding love."^[21] And again, against an older cruelty: "Kill not your children for fear of want: for them and for you will we provide. Verily, the killing them is a great wickedness."^[22] Even the Prophet's own biography is invoked as evidence of the duty: "Did he not find thee an orphan and gave thee a home? / And found thee erring and guided thee, / And found thee needy and enriched thee."^[23] You were once vulnerable. Remember.

Confucius gives the same instruction in a quieter register, listing the three duties of a decent person: "in regard to the aged, to give them rest; in regard to friends, to show them sincerity; in regard to the young, to treat them tenderly."^[24] And then, in a passage that catches you off guard: "A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?"^[25] The child in front of you may turn out to be more than you are. Treat them accordingly.

There is a verse in Pirkei Avot that lists what suits a righteous life and the world together — beauty, strength, riches, honor, wisdom, gray hair, and children.^[26] Children are placed alongside wisdom and old age, as if they were not a phase of life but one of its ornaments — something the world looks better wearing.

What remains

So the traditions say, in chorus and in disagreement: shape them, but do not own them. Cover them, but do not answer for them. Watch yourself, because they are watching you. Love them without imagining they are yours. Protect the ones nobody is protecting. Know that this is the longest handoff any human ever performs, and that you will not be there to see how it ends.

Questions for the reader

• Which voice in your own life — a grandfather's gentleness, a mother's forbearance, a teacher's strictness — do you find yourself reproducing without having chosen to?
• Where is the line, for you, between guiding a child and grasping at them? When did you last feel yourself cross it?
• If you had to name one thing about parenting, or about being parented, that genuinely surprised you — what would it be, and what did it cost you to learn?