Curry and chips
Reading Su's description of Jeyanth's adventures with curry, and particularly the comment about 'evidence that though Jeyanth may look like a white-boy, he's got deep dravidian roots', helped me clarify something I've been thinking about for a while.
If Jeyanth will forgive me for using him to think with, it struck me that it is important that he gets a chance to eat curry (one of the fruits of his 'dravidian roots') and that he gets a chance to eat, say, fish and chips (or some more Australian fruit of his 'white-boy' roots). And it is important that he gets a real chance to grow up liking curry, and that he gets a real chance to grow up liking fish and chips. (Bear with me, there's a serious point coming.) But it is also important that he is allowed to grow up preferring curry, or preferring chips - and even that he's allowed to grow up disliking curry or disliking chips, and admitting that he does so. It's important, in other words, that Chris and Su don't force him to like, or pretend to like, either.
All that seems to me to be involved in bringing Jeyanth up with real freedom. Not simply the freedom given by the absence of constraint, but the freedom which involves genuinely keeping options open for him: genuinely allowing him to have a chance to like both curry and chips. And note that that's a freedom which may involve some constraint; it may involve persisting with curry (or chips) even if Jeyanth appears to go off them at some point. It may involve all those parental games that we play with children to make them eat food they are not sure about.
Why am I labouring this to death? Because there is something there about what it means to bring up children in such a way that they have access to the riches we've accumulated, and yet are not overwhelmed or swamped by them. Something about how that involves a balance between the attempt to keep a possibility present for a child, and the desire to force a possibility on him or her.
This crops up at all sorts of levels. For example: do we (to the extent that we can influence it at all, which may be minimal) try to bring up Bridget bookish or sporty? How do we avoid either forcing on her a copy of our own bookish identity, or trying to live out through her the sportiness we never attained? Not by simply leaving it up to random chance - but by holding both options as open as we can. Giving her both curry and chips without making her like either.
And how does this relate to bringing up Bridget as a Christian? Ah - now that's an interesting one...
But I'm rambling. Time for some pasta (fruit of my hidden Italian heritage?)