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11. The family; personal growth in the context of sexually structured love

The human person is born of love; is born for love; is born to learn to love. This, as the summary of what should be the human condition, holds the key to our true growth as human beings. If we need education, it is in love above all that we need to be educated. The natural context, the first school, of this love is the family.

Love, genuine love, cannot be given without a person's wanting to give it. Love, however, can be received without wanting it [1]. The newborn child does not have the will to love; it can not give a true love (it will - or should - learn to do so later). But it can feel love - or its absence. "The infant is more of a passive recipient of love than an active lover, and it cannot bear hostility" [2].

In his initial experiences of life, the child needs to feel himself the object of a true love which is constant and sure. This is the natural task of the family: parents, sisters, brothers. When this task is fulfilled within the child's first years, it is not difficult for him to begin to understand that the love which he has enjoyed was the result of an effort, and that he ought also make the effort to love.

However, if one lacks in infancy this experience of feeling loved - freely and without calculation - the natural desire to be the object of love remains frustrated. This frustration creates and intensifies the sense of loneliness, favoring the development of self-pity that can easily become pathological, especially in adolescence [3], and even turn in time into a radically antisocial attitude.

It is almost as if we have to be loved by others first before we can set out to love them. If a child has no experience of disinterested love, why should he or she move out of self-protection or try to rise above it? "If I am the only one who loves myself" ... It is different if the starting point is: "I know myself loved; now what attitude do I adopt towards others?"

In a normal family environment and in normal circumstances (in those that should be normal), a child develops under the influence of gratuitous love. Usually his emotional reaction is strongly positive, and this reaction facilitates the long process by which one becomes aware of and learns to fight one's natural self-centeredness, as this begins to make itself felt. What is necessary is not that the child be always satisfied with the love that he or she receives, but that this love be true and genuine.

True love knows when to be demanding. Its demands can provoke a crisis in a child who does not want to embark on the way of coming out of self and responding to values. Parents who are not demanding (justly and patiently) with their children do not give them genuine love; and the children will almost certainly remain selfish. It is easier for a child who has been the object of a generous and unconditional love to react positively (perhaps after some initial hesitation) to the corrections that genuine love does not omit, coming to understand that these corrections also come from love. This way the framework is created for the fundamental experience through which he learns that love is pleasant to receive but difficult to give; that having himself been beneficiary of the generous efforts of his parents (and of his older brothers or sisters), he also must now strive to love: in other words, to think of others, to listen, to be patient, to serve, to forgive ...

The inevitable first clash of self with its surroundings is produced in the family, which provides the one setting where self-restraint can become more than a matter of acting under fear or coercion, being eventually lived as a willed response to what perhaps initially seemed frustrating, but in the end is sensed to come from love.

These lessons of love-donation-service create an environment which favors education in freedom. They teach in a practical way that precisely because we are free, we are - we ought to be - responsible. We have seen how freedom and responsibility must go together. It is because I am free that I am necessarily responsible: towards myself and towards others. Since my freedom enables me to choose, it is I who am responsible for my choices and for their consequences. Wanting to have freedom of choice without assuming the corresponding responsibility is characteristic of a person who is immature or selfish or unintelligent; or perhaps all three at the same time.

Each one is free; with a freedom however that needs to be developed and consolidated, and that can even be lost. The free actions of each one also influence the life of others, making us responsible for at least part of their life, just as they are for ours.

A person is never so unique, or in a better position to appreciate his or her uniqueness, as in the family. "The family is the place in which each human being appears in his or her own uniqueness and unrepeatability. It is - it should be - the kind of special system of forces in which each person is important and needed because that person exists and because of who that person is" [3] - i.e. a unique son or daughter of one's parents, a unique brother or sister of one's siblings.

Along with the sense of personal uniqueness, the family offers a specially favorable framework for growth in interpersonality. The education in interpersonal relations proper to the family can be seen under two particularly important perspectives: social and sexual.

Interpersonal relations in the family: education for social life

The family is a strongly anti-individualist factor. Sharing is its tonic; solidarity its style. Therefore any social rebirth - that seeks to base its cohesion on something more powerful and positive than individualism - has to begin in the family.

Undoubtedly one cannot correctly understand this formative role of the family without rising above the mindset which regards the general goal of education as that of forming independent persons, that is, persons who are self-sufficient, separate and "not-connected". This mindset has tended to be dominant in modern educational psychology, but many experts are now beginning to cast doubt on its validity. "If society favors the separate mode over the connected one, it is a problem we all must address. In this context our profession may have a special responsibility - to reexamine the concept of separation-individuation as the major goal of adolescence [the goal of building of a non-dependent personality]. We need not consider the complete differentiation of the self from the family to be the ideal goal. Individuals who retain strong ties and an orientation to relationships may be more, rather than less, mature than those who separate more completely from the family" [5].

a) In the first place, the family is a school of understanding of authority.

The family is a school where authority can be seen as the difficult exercise of duty rather than the arbitrary wielding of power, and where the concern to exercise that duty in a just fashion can prove itself. It is the (by no means easy) task of parents to exercise authority so. One should add that parents who take the time to reflect need not even find it such a difficult task. In a recent televised discussion between parents on what to permit or to deny teenage children, one father recalled an approach he found effective with his fourteen-year-old daughter. Challenged with an over-urgent request, "Daddy, is it all right if I go out with Tom and his friends tonight?", the father replied: "If you want an answer right away, then the answer is No. Now, if you are prepared to sit down for ten minutes, tell me about the plan, and discuss it, then it is just possible the answer may be Yes". He was teaching his daughter that decisions, including permissions, require thought.

If a child does not learn in the family that authority can be respected as a power coming from and appealing to love, he or she is not likely to see it later on as anything other than a force to be evaded or resisted. A society where authority is so conceived - as physical or coercive power, no more - rests on a shaky foundation.

b) The family is also a school of fraternity; of participation, generosity, co-responsibility, disinterested and gratuitous service, within a community.

Wise parents will find ways of involving their children, or at least the older ones, in decision-making about family affairs. This prepares them for a more participative approach to social living later on.

The full importance of the sibling relationship emerges only if we consider its social as well as its personal dimension. What is at stake here is strikingly brought out if we think about the predictable consequences of a situation in which a brother-sister relationship is not possible - as happens more and more today in one-child families, where there is no sibling to relate to. In the past such situations tended to be an exception; today they are becoming the rule in many parts of the West.

A child with several siblings, even if he or she has more than the normal dose of human self-centeredness, will find it hard to resist the solvent force of family life on individualism. The same child without any sibling will lack the natural environment to purify his or her individualistic tendencies. Even if the parents make every effort to be firm and just, the handicaps of the one-child situation usually can only be very partially ameliorated. If the child has careless and indulgent parents, the adult he develops into will labor under the deep disadvantage of a spoiled environmental history.

Perhaps we have not yet weighed (though we are beginning to experience) the social effects on the only child of this lack of natural domestic induction into the experience of fraternity. The danger is increasing that the very term "fraternity" will be left with a purely ideological content, existentially incomprehensible to most of the people who, as children and adolescents, never knew what it means to have a brother or sister [6]. From where will they draw the inspiration or example that can teach them what is involved in treating others fraternally, within the general framework of society?

The family is a school of human-social life in which there is constant opportunity to grow in understanding, tolerance, service, forgiveness. It is a school where one learns that there are reasons for sharing and helping others to share. "The experiences of inequality and interconnection inherent in the relation of parent and child, give rise to the ethics of justice and care, the ideals of human relationship - the vision that self and other will be treated as of equal worth, that despite differences in power, things will be fair; the vision that everyone will be responded to and included, that no one will be left alone or hurt" [7].

Napoleon's mother, Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, also called "Madame Mère", had eight children. On one occasion (after her second son was already Emperor of France) she was asked which of her children was her favorite. Her answer (given with motherly sense, we can presume, because political tact was of little concern to her) was immediate: "Whichever is in greatest need". Few people besides mothers are capable of this scale of preferences. And yet does a society not show radical dehumanization if it contains people in great need (perhaps also through their own fault) who have nowhere to turn where they can feel themselves accepted and loved?

Most communities have limits of tolerance. As a result, the person who violates them may be declared or become a social outcast, forfeiting membership in society and losing their social privileges or rights. The family, constituted with deeper human roots, should be able to take more strain. The human condition of being a spouse, a parent, a child, a brother or sister, is put to its ultimate proof when someone has lost every claim except the one of belonging to a family; and that ultimate claim prevails over every injustice or selfishness. The Prodigal Son of the Gospel is the great illustration of how humanity at its most selfish can still be welcomed where family spirit is strong. Dostoyevsky philosophizes the point in Marmeladov, a drunkard and wastrel who neglects his family and is ill-treated by his wife, yet keeps coming back to them: "I mean, every man must have at least one place where people take pity on him" [8]. Robert Frost echoes the idea: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in ... Something you somehow haven't to deserve" [9].

The family appears as the natural home not only of children but also of the aged. Just as the very young need special care, so do the very old. The increasing weakness attendant on old age is a call on the care-giving capacities of grown-up sons and daughters. Christopher Lasch writes: "The modern problem of old age ... originates less in physical decline than in society's intolerance of old people, its refusal to make use of their accumulated wisdom, and its attempt to relegate them to the margins of social existence" [10]. Lasch puts it impersonally. It is not just "society" but particular families (at least in the West) that are increasingly unwilling to care for their aging parents or grandparents, and exclude them from their natural home. Contemporary psychological studies of the family testify to the individualistic or selfist philosophy of "self-related well-being" that would justify this exclusion, in virtue of the right to be free from excessive "stress"; and even view with dismay current demographic trends which indicate "that the risk of becoming a caregiver at some time over the life course is likely to increase" [11].

Families with "personality"

The family is the first and most natural school of values (and response to values) in which young people should grow and develop. It is of course not the only school. Over recent centuries, parents have tended to forget that they are the first educators, delegating or abandoning their responsibilities more and more to outside educational establishments (at primary, secondary or university level); often without much awareness of the standards operative there. This whole situation has been significantly modified over the last few decades. The outlook of young people nowadays is molded more by the atmosphere of the recreational or sports centers they frequent than by what they hear in the classroom. But the real "school" which dominates the making or unmaking of social and personal values is constituted by the media; it is a school, moreover, that is potently present within the home itself. The progression from films to television to videos and now to the internet, means that social values can no longer be considered an outside factor with regard to family life. Through the media, the social culture makes its way daily into practically all Western homes, profoundly influencing the values (if any) that are being inculcated there.

It is not our concern here to offer any judgment on the predominant values that are picked up in an atmosphere dominated by TV and the Net. Some parents who are not satisfied with them may try to regulate their entry to the home. It will not be an easy task, and could provoke a negative reaction in young people if they feel they are being controlled or subjected to censorship, in comparison with their friends. Other parents may attempt an alternative that is not any easier but, if they can manage it, is far more effective. It has to do with the creation of what can best be termed a strong "family personality".

One way of defining a strong personality in an individual is to say that the person influences (for good or for bad) more than he is influenced. A family with a "weak personality" is going to be influenced, and perhaps dominated, by the values or anti-values surrounding it. Parents are not doing their job unless they are trying to endow their family with a strong and distinctive personality. That means creating a forceful, interesting, and attractive family atmosphere or family life, expressed in active care, friendship, loyalty, and solidarity, and also in activities that both develop talents in the children and, above all, interest them. What sort of activities? It would probably be a mistake to over-specify them. Activities will have to be looked for, tried out, improved, discarded and replaced by others, and carried out either simply by the family members themselves or, more reasonably and ideally, in conjunction with other like-minded families. Amateur theatrics, musical groups, sports mini-competitions, chess championships, debates ... are a few of the activities that come to mind. Inventiveness will discover many others, and family personality will be all the richer for having its inventiveness tested.

Parents can know they have come up with a winner - for the time being - when their house begins to attract other children, who come because "at X's house you always have a good time". This sort of endeavor is helped by having a large family. It is equally helped by having a large number of like-minded friends. But what is most decisive in the end is the initiative and dedication of the parents themselves.

Interpersonal family relations and sexual education

a) brothers-sisters.

- The fact that the brother-sister relationship is the only inter-sexual association virtually never upset by unregulated instinct, turns the family into in an irreplaceable school of sexual education. It should be in the family first of all that girls and boys, helped by their parents, learn to discern, understand and appraise how the masculine way and the feminine way of being human are different, and how much respect they merit.

The point can be verified when a boy who has never had sisters sets out on his first attempt to relate more particularly with a girl. He is likely to experience a series of awkward inadequacies which, without special good will on both sides, will be difficult to compensate for.

As we said earlier, it is not by imitating the opposite sex but by learning from it that a person grows in the sexual identity which is so important for maturity in life. This learning process is more easily carried out in the family setting, between siblings, than anywhere else.

As sisters and brothers come to understand, learn from, and depend on each other (to the accompaniment no doubt of quarrels and reconciliations), they are preparing themselves for marriage and for the family that each will probably establish in the future.

b) parents-children. And more concretely:

- father-daughter; at the start perhaps a less close relationship than that between mother and daughter. With time, as a daughter grows, her father will tend to look to her and not only to his wife for tenderness. Fundamentally this is a tribute to his fatherly masculinity and to her daughterly femininity.

- mother-son. It is normal for a son to have a special reverence for his mother; and, as he grows, also to assume a protecting attitude towards her. Is this an insult to her weakness or a tribute to her femininity? It is in any case a sign of masculine development in the son [12].

Paternity/maternity is where husband and wife share most and are most united. Motherhood, which is so threatened today, can recover its dignity only if the dignity - and responsibility - of fatherhood is also restored. Only man can be a father, only woman can be a mother. There is a lack of realization today of the privileged uniqueness of each of these complementary anthropological facts.

A family lacking in either father or mother is an anomaly. It happens accidentally at times, for instance because of the death of one of the parents. Wanting to build a one-parent family is folly, and a grave injustice besides. A form of modern irresponsibility is that of the unmarried woman who wants to have a child - as a means to "fulfill" or "enrich" herself. Perhaps she does not realize it, but what she wants to acquire is a handicapped child, deprived from the beginning of the presence of a father.

In some way such a woman recalls the granddaughter in Susanna Tamaro's Va' dove ti porta il cuore, who goes to buy a dog and, by preference, purchases a handicapped one. But in that instance the girl was moved by her heart; and Buck, the dog, already existed in its handicapped state. In the case we are considering, it is the woman who imposes the handicap - on a child (and not on a dog). If she is acting from the heart, it is a selfish and superficial heart that emerges. "But I will be both father and mother to him; he will find enough in my love". Will he? Perhaps what is present here is not just considerable irresponsibility, but a considerable amount of conceit as well.

Children need not one parent, but two; not just a mother's love, but a father's as well; not one who will do the work of two, but two who will together do the work of two. Children need that, and are entitled to it. A major motivation to keep a marriage together, when it is threatened with discord between husband and wife, is their realization that the love they together can give to their children is unique, and that the children have a fundamental human right to their parents' effort to maintain and pass on that love.

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At the start of this chapter we said that the human person is born of love, and is meant to learn to love, in a family setting. And yet, there is a growing number of persons today who have reason to feel that they were not born of love; and who perhaps have never experienced anything that could be called a family. Nevertheless, they too have a family and a family life, if only they and we could see it: a matter that depends on where our anthropological perspectives end. This consideration leads us to the next chapters where we speculate on what there may be, in and for man, "beyond" anthropology.

Notes
[1] It can happen too that, though a person is the object of a genuine love, he or she does not want to receive it, or wants not to receive it.
[2] Karl Stern: The Pillar of Fire, New York, 1951, Ch. 30.
[3] Some experts hold that adolescent self-pity can be a main root of homosexual tendencies; cf. Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg, On the Origins and Treatment of Homosexuality, p. 196.
[4] K. Wojtyla: "The Family as a Community of Persons": Person & Community, op. cit. p. 316.
[5] McDermott, Robillard, Char, et al.: "Reexamining the Concept of Adolescence" (American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 140 (1983), p. 1321). This study notes how Carol Gilligan "compared the 'connected person', who emphasizes physical and emotional care for others and a marked concern for the survival of relationships, with the 'separate person' who considers relationships in terms of reciprocity between separate individuals and who operates by a system of rules that has been worked out without consideration of the other person's feelings. Gilligan studied girls and found that they view themselves predominantly as 'connected' ..." (ib.).
[6] cf. A. Sicari: "The family: A place of fraternity": Communio 20 (1993), p. 303.
[7] C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, op. cit., pp. 62-63.
[8] Crime and Punishment, Part 1, II.
[9] "The Death of the Hired Man".
[10] The Culture of Narcissism ..., p. 207.
[11] cf. Nadie F. Marks: "Does it Hurt to Care?" Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 60 (1998), p. 951 [emphasis added].
[12] These brief points could be expanded in many directions. Consider, for instance, the following perceptive passage: "What a boy gets from experiencing the dependable love of a father is a deep personal experience of masculinity that is pro-social, pro-woman, pro-child, and not at odds with love. Without this personal experience of maleness, a boy (who like all human beings is deeply driven to seek some meaning for masculinity) is vulnerable to a variety of peer and market-driven alternative definitions of masculinity, often grounded in real gender differences in aggression, physical strength, and sexual proclivities ... Similarly, a girl raised without a father does not come to adolescence with the same deep experience of what male love feels like when it is truly protective, not driven primarily by a desire for sexual gratification" (Maggie Gallagher: "(How) Does Marriage Protect Child Well-Being?" in The Meaning of Marriage, Spence, 2006, pp. 210-211).