Teaching Children the Fruit of Longsuffering

A new generation of parents has arrived, people who love their children more visibly, more anxiously, and more attentively than perhaps any generation before them. They read the books, they watch for the warning signs, and they would lay down almost anything for the good of the child in front of them. Yet many of these same parents struggle to tell the difference between play and scholé , or between protecting a child from cruelty and protecting a child from difficulty. These are not the same acts of love. One forms a soul while the other, however tenderly intended, can quietly deform it.