Above all else

Last week, I wrote about "normalising good", that is, setting the dial such that being a blessing to others is normalised; not reserved for Super-Saints, but done by Regular-Joes.  But we can do even more than normalise good. We can  regularise it - by which I mean, do good with a certain frequency. The best way to ensure frequency is to heed the call and meet needs as soon as we hear of it. This sounds simple, but is easier said than done. C.S. Lewis very astutely observed this in his satirical book, the Screwtape Letters, in which he imagines a senior demon teaching a junior demon: "There is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. Provided that those neighbours he meets eve...

One of the things I like to share about parenting is what I call "normalising good".  One of the best examples I have of this is a video I have of one of my kids at a stationery store. If your kids are anything like mine, there's a good chance that they really like nice stationery, like the ones they have at Smiggle! So in the video, my daughter is a few years old, maybe 5 or 6. She wanders up to a gloriously pink pencilcase in the store and picks it up.  She clearly loves it, and her eyes widen as she looks over all the sparkly bits. She then looks straight at me in the camera, calmly says, "cannot buy right?", and without skipping a beat, wanders right off screen :D Now, it's not like she doesn't like the pencilcase. She obviously does. It's not like she gets praise for not throwing a tantrum. She doesn't. It's not like, as a secret reward, I get her the pencilcase later. I don't. Repeated again and again, this behaviour is normalised. ...