Many years ago Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving that children need two things: milk and honey. Both are necessary to thrive as human beings. Milk symbolizes the necessities—like good food, brushing your teeth, drinking your milk and plenty of sleep. Honey is just as important. It means finding sweetness in life, like beauty and goodness that nourishes the inner person. Fromm goes on to say that most parents are good at providing milk, but only a minority provide the honey that children need. Life is more than meat and potatoes! This is an idea that should stimulate and challenge parents to think about the way they use each day. Consider your own family "honey ratio."
If you are going to give honey it means you need to love honey and have some in your life to give to your children. Where do you find honey? Good books are full of honey. That’s why children say, "Read it again!" when you’ve already read the story twice. It reminds me of the proverb that says Pleasant words are like a honeycomb; sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. Children know.
I absolutely love that idea, and I think it's true that to give our children honey we need to be able to show that we savor it, too. I wonder a little, though, what that looks like in our world today.
Before I was a mom, I taught at a private school whose mission statement included our dedication to "the discovery of truth, the creation of beauty, and the practice of goodness." We genuinely gave our students the very best of honey - Dickens, Twain, Tolkien, and Thoreau in the junior high and freshman years; Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and Austen in the senior high. We even evaluated students on their "sense of wonder" and "depth of inquiry." However, as much as our parents and students were sold on our curriculum and methodology, we still live in an achievement-oriented culture and the process of engaging these texts often ceased to an end in itself. Instead, showing that one had an adequate "sense of wonder" was the way to get an A in the class, to get the scholarship, to get into the best college, to get the best job...and a lot of joy got lost along the way.
Do you have any suggestions as to how parents can retain the joy of honey in the midst of unrelenting pressure to achieve - in a culture where even wonderful engagement with great literature can quickly become a means rather than an end? Maybe I'm asking for a whole other post, rather than just a reply :)
— by Sarah on September 16, 2008