Raising Weird Kids
Some thoughts on parenting.
I want my kids to be weird. But not too weird, you know? I am a father to five delightful children (2, 4, 6, 8, and 10yo), and my duties and responsibilities as a father are a joy in my life, even if they do not always feel that way. An interesting thing about parenting is that there is no practice round; you move from never having been a parent to being a full-time parent with one wonderful and miraculous moment: childbirth. Those early days of parenthood are fond memories as I marvelled at the little man God blessed us with. While we can wax eloquently about the wonders and delight of parentage, there is still an odd thing about parenting: rarely is there a plan in place to raise our kids, and if there was a plan, it never survives first contact with the enemy, I mean children. Parenting philosophies shift and change over time.
Some years ago, the always interesting writer, journalist, and thinker, Rod Dreher wrote Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. The title comes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speech, which is the same name. In this book, Dreher retells stories from Christian anti-communist dissidents in the Soviet Bloc. He focuses a large portion of this book on the Benda family. This family lives in Prague and was instrumental in the Czech anti-communist movement that helped get Vaclav Havel elected, which was a landmark moment in the Czech story of freedom and autonomy from the oppressive Soviet regime. Dreher shares two features of the Benda family, both of which impacted my parenting. We live in a post/anti-Christian world (depending on who you read), and my kids are not growing up in the same generically Christian Canada that I did. The world has its own catechesis of our children, and it is barely based on a Christian worldview. The same was true for the Benda family in Prague in the 70s and 80s. Because of that reality, the Benda family did two things to raise their kids as devout Catholics and as free thinkers in a culture where neither were welcomed or encouraged: they raised their kids to be weird, and they read them The Lord of the Rings.
Weird kids are a good thing, but not too weird. It's an odd descriptor, but no one really wants their kids to be ‘that’ kid at school. However, I also don’t want my kids to simply move along with culture without a second thought. This is the heart of the Benda parenting philosophy: to ensure their kids were not afraid to be weird in the eyes of the world around them.
“In this way, the Benda children say their parents vaccinated them against the disease of communist ideology, which was everywhere. They brought them up to understand that they, as Christians, were not to go along to get along in their totalitarian society. [The Bendas] knew that if they did not strongly impart that sense of difference to their children, they risked losing them to propaganda and to widespread conformity to the totalitarian system.”[1]
Depending on your outlook on the Western world, this may seem extreme or perfectly reasonable. Regardless, the principle stands true: to raise Christian kids in the world is to raise them weird. Just weird enough that they can be free thinkers and not “go along to get along.” This sentiment has radically informed my parenting philosophy as I hope to instill free-thinking, Christian identity, and a critical mind for culture in my kids. Success in this regard is a hard metric to measure.
Secondly, the Benda’s read The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien to their kids. More than that, Kamila (Mom) Benda read aloud to her kids every day! The Benda’s saw this as an instrumental act in their work of preparing their kids for Christian resistance in an anti-Christian society. Aside from The Lord of the Rings Kamila read all sorts of fairy tales, adventures, and others. However, The Lord of the Rings was the cornerstone.[2] Dreher inquired of one of the Benda children:
‘ “Why Tolkein?” … ‘ “Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that in their story” - that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron -”was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”
“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on the one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward you have to solve problems at home, within the Shire.” ‘[3]
The Benda’s constant exposure to the world of Middle Earth (among others) taught their children all kinds of truths about the world through grand narratives. To really bring into perspective the scope of this practice for the Bendas, Kamila, a full-time professor and active anti-communist dissident (mainly through her work of hospitality, more on that another time!) would read to her children for two to three hours every day!
These are two parenting practices and philosophies that I have adopted into our family. We (that is, my wife and I) have always had a strong mind about reading to our children, but we have increased that as our kids have gotten older, not decreased. When my eldest was four years old, I read him The Hobbit for the first time. Since then, we have reread it and read countless other books, and I have begun reading The Lord of the Rings to him.
These stories are powerful, I think more powerful than adults sometimes realize. A few weeks back, I sat on the couch reading to my son, and we managed to read the entire saga of the Fellowship’s journey through the Mines of Moria, which concludes with the epic standoff between the deep, dark evil Balrog and Gandalf, their leader and counsellor, in which Gandalf seemingly falls to his doom. I read the section, inwardly marvelling both at Tolkien’s prose and Peter Jackson’s adaptation with a keen sense of my son’s tense body beside me on the sofa. After concluding the reading, we had some review and discussion of the text as we always do, and he was in tears, struck by the terrible tragedy of Gandalf, the helplessness, and hopelessness the Fellowship experienced as they exited Moria with a horde of goblins and orcs on their tails. As our review conversation moved towards the pivotal moment with Gandalf, my son choked up and a few tears welled in his eyes. He, along with the rest of the Fellowship, experienced the hopelessness of an important journey without Gandalf!
That moment was a stark reminder of the power of these stories and the indelible marks that they can have on our persons. In an effort to raise my kids like the Bendas, I hope these moments of reflection on Tolkien’s words make my kids just weird enough to be passionate Christians who seek to build the kingdom of God wherever they go.
[1] Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020). 139.
[2] Ibid, 138.
[3] Ibid, 138.
This was written for and originally posted at Kerux, the student blog at Calvin Theological Seminary