Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Wild + Free conference in Nashville, TN. It was such a sweet gathering of women whose passion for their children and homes is contagious.
After the conference, Tim and I, along with the pixies, headed out for a Beauty Chat at a home in Franklin. It was a lovely evening filled with rich conversation and ended with a fire overlooking the beautiful TN countryside.
After touring the country this summer on The Beauty Chasers book tour, and now continuing these gatherings in the Fall, it never ceases to amaze me how we get asked the same question in some form at every chat: How do you teach your children to love beauty?
It’s a question of paramount importance. Beauty matters. Instructing our children in its ways is one of our chief jobs as parents.
Will beauty make a difference in their lives when they leave the safety net of home and venture out on their own? How does their knowledge of wonder translate in the real world? Will it?
These are the questions we ask. These are the thoughts that keep us up at night.
In his new book, The Beauty Chasers, my husband devotes an entire chapter to the importance of teaching our children to love beauty. I read it the other morning on the front porch, reminded again of this delicate yet vital role I have in mothering my daughters.
Tim writes,
“Our cultural education matters. A young person’s aesthetic taste becomes fixed in late adolescence. Cultural education, the discernment of the beautiful, good, and true, is essential, especially for the youngest minds. And yet much of their cultural education today comes from gaming, social media, and YouTube.”
It is no trivial thing to realize that my daughters aesthetic taste becomes fixed in late adolescence. I am accountable for how I nourish their appetite in what is good, true, and beautiful. I am responsible for where their cultural education comes from.
C.S. Lewis discussed this educational philosophy in his masterpiece, The Abolition of Man. He takes his cues from St. Augustine who, “defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.”
If that sounds complicated, it’s really not. It’s the idea that we must train our children to learn to love what they should love.
Lewis aptly sums it up this way:
“Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.”
What do we want our children to like? What do we want them to dislike? Can they discern between what is beautiful and what is not?
We regularly have conversations with the pixies about beauty. This takes shape in many different forms. It could be the simple act of setting a beautiful table for dinner, pointing out the sunset as we drive home from a volleyball game, or discussing the joy felt as they complete a difficult yet important project.
Tim continues in The Beauty Chasers,
“It is our duty as a society to teach and promote ordinate affections—proper loves for the young.”
He reminds that it begins with us:
“Cultural education is for the adult, too. For though most adults no longer attend formal classes, our cultural education continues, fashioned by what we consume via our televisions and digital devices and social media . . . When we cultivate ordinate affections, they bring wholeness and health to our lives. We flourish when our affections are ordinate. Inordinate affections are out-of-balance and create chaos in our lives.”
When we have a right ordering of our own affections, that will translate into our children’s lives. But too often our affections are out of order and chaos ensues.
Life crowds in with its demands, and we forget what truly matters. We neglect to cultivate beauty in our own lives. Time becomes the enemy as it often steals from us what is most important.
What we spend our time on shows what we worship, what truly matters to us. And what we worship reveals our truest self. If my time is consumed by social media then my daughters will notice that, and it will shape them.
There’s a lot to unpack in this concept of teaching our children to love beauty. I hope to walk with you on this journey in the days and months ahead, seeking together a way to show our children beauty matters.
Our world is desperate for beauty. The pain, discord, and hate that too often characterizes our culture needs our children to step up and offer a different voice: the sound of beauty.
Yes!!!!