Most Parenting Choices Aren’t Matters of Morality

Committing to Questions in a World of Assumptions

threatens to arise if we change — all because we’ve attached objective moral value to a subjective choice.

I do believe that love is absolutely right. I do believe that cruelty is absolutely wrong. But that’s about the extent of my strict absolutes.

Everything else I regularly interrogate. And that includes homeschooling, breastfeeding, entertainment sources, and all of my other daily decisions.

If something stopped making sense tomorrow, I would change it. For example, if I found out that I had cancer, I’d enroll my kids in public school tomorrow, and there’d be no guilt involved. If my kids hadn’t breastfed well, I would have given them formula with a clear conscience. Every time I’m in a hotel room or at my in-laws’ house, I have no problem letting my kids entertain themselves with TV.

In parenting and everything we do, we can find ourselves internalizing right and wrong designations based on convention or marketing or indoctrination, without consideration of what is actually best for us as individuals. But this approach can harm our health, our families, and other aspects of our lives.

Continually questioning our choices doesn’t mean continually upending everything. We’ll often find that we have good answers. But we may sometimes discover that we don’t, especially as our kids and our own lives grow and change.

We can only make those discoveries if we commit to questioning despite living in a world that tends toward assumptions and absolutes. It may not be the path of least resistance, but it is the path that brings us nearest to our family’s best interest. And we can help each other along it!