Aquinas on Parenting

Ok, not exactly, but one of many sections in Lombardo's book that struck me as being highly relevant to parenting was a bit at the end in which Lombardo applies St. Thomas's understanding of the emotions to the task of preaching.

Aquinas outlines three facets of successful communication, specifically of religious truths, which it seems can come into play separately or together. The first regards "instruct[ing] the intellect," and but the aim of the second two are "to move the affections," both "to delight his hearers" and "in order that others come to love what the words signify." Lombardo argues that good preaching encompasses all three, and, while parents will employ different means besides sermonizing, I think that is also true of disciplining children.

It begins

But it is not enough that in preaching or childrearing, we appeal to both intellects and affections, but "good preaching appeals to the right kinds of emotion, and the right balance of emotion." Aquinas divides the passions into two categories: the first order "concupiscible" passions - desire, pleasure, aversion, and sorrow - and the second order "irascible" passions - fear, anger and daring. The irascible passions are mean to serve the concupiscible passions, and Lombardo follows Conrad Baars in arguing that many psychological problems come down to disordered relationships between emotions, particularly the irascible passions usurping the primary motivational role meant to be served by the concupiscible passions, so that we are driven by fear or anger rather than love or aversion. Even worse is when the irascible passions are aimed at the concupiscible passions - Baars argues this is basically what neurosis is - such that we are afraid to feel sorrow, for example, or become angry with our own first-order emotional responses to things.

So don't overdo it with the fire and brimstone. Lombardo:

[A] preacher who presents fear as the primary motive for avoiding sin implicitly conveys a warped understanding of morality, as well as a warped understanding of Christ's teaching. In fact, such preaching not only fails to convey a correct understanding of virtue, it actually encourages vice, insofar as it encourages exaggerated and disproportionate fear. 

Echoes of Alfie Kohn! But of course, there are things we should be fearful or angry about (and indeed, St. Thomas wrote that a man who doesn't feel angry at, say, injustice, is not truly virtuous), and I think that sometimes attachment parenting folks slide into suggesting (or in Kohn's case, very deliberately argue) we should never appeal to fear or anger in disciplining our children. It seems to me that this goes along with other modern anxieties about authority; we'd rather exclude certain things from the outset - even exclude authority itself, rather than risk it being used unjustly.

But Lombardo continues:

Good preaching might appeal to fear, but not in a way that gives fear, implicitly or explicitly, a disproportionate place in the moral life. Just as virtue is first about the concupiscible passions, and only second about the irascible passions, so too is good preaching. Good preaching primarily inspires desire and delight or aversion and sadness (depending on what is being discussed). It only secondarily inspires irascible passions such as daring, fear, and anger, and only insofar as these help achieve desirable ends and help avoid what causes pain or sadness.

In parenting, we should strive to move our children primarily through delight or sadness (thinking here of Neufeld's advice: "When things aren't working for the child, draw out the tears instead of trying to teach a lesson"). This isn't so much about using or not using specific "techniques" (time outs, gold stickers, whatever); this is an art (1 Cor 10:23). "To appropriately engage the [child] on an affective level," writes Lombardo,"the task of the [parent] is twofold: to know well the structure of human emotion, and to know well the audience and its psychic terrain." Some mothers seem to get this intuitively, but not me, so it's helpful to have it spelled out!

Later, I'd like to think some more about the mechanisms by which we move the affections and attach them to appropriate objects, the tricky - at least in practice, for me - distinction between aversion and fear, and also "the primary requirement for effecting preaching [parenting]."