Something for my sons…

I’m a single Father. I don’t get any breaks. I wade through every day, first at work, then at home with my beautiful 3 year old son. I can honestly say; I’m tired most of the time. Mentally, physically, emotionally tired. Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving every minute of it, but it is just me raising this little knight and trying to teach him what it means to be a strong, upstanding young man.

I’ve been asked often about how I’m raising him. I’ve got two other boys and I try to be a good example for them as well. But they don’t live with me, so they don’t get to see it day in and day out. But I found myself thinking about that question.

“How do you raise a child in today’s World?”

I look around at the kids that live in our World and I’m amazed at what I see. Where are the values? The morals? Hell…where are the good old fashioned beatings that kept kids straight when I was young?

Now, please, don’t think that I’m simply going to beat my son straight. :-) Tempting…but no.

He WILL know what consequences are and he will have a firm foundation in the things that I believe in as well. What are those things? I’ve talked about them all here before.

• Honor
• Integrity
• Respect
• Faith
• Honesty

To name off a few.

I listen to kids today, little kids 8 or 10 years old, talking back to their parents. In some cases, cussing them out too. I have never been tempted to smack another person’s child, but I HAVE been tempted to smack the parents. What in the world could they be thinking?!

I will admit; I got into my fair share of trouble as a kid. But I had a healthy respect for my parents. Often, my Mom more than my Dad and I couldn’t even conceive of swearing at them. I think I’d still be picking my teeth up, even now.

What’s worse is that I hear some people and media, deriding them very values that I hold most dear. My core values aren’t espoused anymore. No one wants to teach a child these things. Many would rather leave it to TV and then blame a teacher for a child’s behavior. That offends me. So I do the only thing I really can. I will ensure that MY sons know what I believe and how to be their own knights.

I found this quote today. I think that it pertains here, even though it was made a long time ago to a very different audience. So please, enjoy the words of General Douglas MacArthur regarding a few core values and what they provide.

“Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.”

General Douglas MacArthur