Should you let your child’s life happen naturally or guide them toward a goal?

There are two approaches to raising children: honoring the natural flow of life and designing their lives toward goals. Michael Sandall’s The Ethics of Life describes these two approaches in terms of the concepts of care and enhancement, and argues that we should honor the natural course of our children’s lives.

 

People often refer to children as a “gift from God. Gifts are meant to be a celebration and blessing for the giver, and they make the recipient feel happy. The idea that children are a gift from God is that they are a source of great joy to their parents. This is a universal sentiment that most parents can relate to. However, there are two very different ways of raising children. One is to allow their lives to flow as they are, and the other is to control their lives and design them to reach a goal.
Michael Sandall, author of The Ethics of Life, describes the former as seeing the world as it is, and the latter as manipulating the world’s framework. He explains it in terms of two main concepts: treatment and reinforcement. From a therapeutic perspective, treating a child’s illness is not about breaking down their natural strengths, but rather helping them to express their strengths. Of course, there is room for debate about where the boundaries of treatment lie, but the purpose of medicine is to promote health and cure disease. In other words, it’s not about artificially intervening and controlling your child’s life, but rather restoring and maintaining their natural functioning so that their life can flow better as it is.
On the other hand, from an enrichment perspective, parents can go beyond treating a sick child and strengthen them for a better and more successful life, even if they are healthy. They can even go further and fix them genetically. This seems a bit artificial. It’s using technology to control their lives, and in extreme cases, it seems like manipulation. This is the opposite of unconditional love.
Theologian May said that there are two aspects to the way parents love their children. There are two aspects of how parents love their children: accepting love and transforming love. Accepting love is being satisfied with the child’s existence, while transforming love is developing the child to a better environment. Ideally, these two aspects complement each other and are in balance. However, when the balance is out of whack and skewed toward transformative love, it can lead to overly enforcing your child. Eventually, this bias has led to parents designing their children’s genes.
Even in the United States, a country that is often associated with living an independent and free life, parents are now designing their children’s lives and controlling them for so-called success. Like South Korea, parents are now overprotective, pushing for early education and elite courses for the sake of a better life for their children. They even call the school to monitor their children even after they go to college. Sandall sees parallels between this parenting style and genetic enhancement, and says that genetic enhancement is no different from eugenics.
Eugenics is the study of various conditions and factors for the purpose of genetically improving the human race, and was first founded by F. Golton in England in 1883, with the goal of increasing the number of people with good or sound genes and preventing the increase of people with poor genetic predispositions. Of course, in some ways, improving a child’s life through education and training may seem like a very different thing from genetically manipulating a child’s life from the start. But it’s just a matter of timing, whether it’s before or after the child is born, and in the end, it’s the same thing: failing to accept the child as he is and intervening more than necessary in his life. In the case of parents who try to turn their children into sports stars, Tiger Woods’ father gave his son golf clubs when he was still in the playroom. Other examples include parents nervously watching their children around soccer fields and baseball fields, and children who have been injured in sports at a young age. Is this the right thing to do, and is it acceptable if the intentions are good? The answer is that it is not. It is not acceptable to design genes, even if it is for the purpose of making a child’s life better. This is because it fundamentally undermines the dignity of every human life.
The French Declaration of Human Rights, which was issued during the French Revolution in the 18th century, states that “all human beings are born and live with free and equal rights. The Constitution of Korea also guarantees the right to liberty, which is the right of individuals to be free from interference or infringement by state power in their free sphere. This is derived from the principle that all citizens have dignity and value as human beings and have the right to pursue happiness. Why does the law guarantee human freedom? It is because individual life and freedom are very important to human beings. Not only can the state not infringe on this, but even parents can be said to ignore their children’s human rights if they go too far.
In addition to the question of how much freedom is guaranteed by the right to freedom or the scope of freedom that humans can enjoy, there is also the question of what is the limit of designing genes without violating this freedom. My answer to this is that, in principle, it is best not to intervene at all, but to allow intervention for therapeutic purposes only when normal life is impossible. The point is to minimize or eliminate human intervention in the creation of life.
Genetic design, no matter how well-intentioned, is artificial and a rejection of natural life. It takes a lot of energy, effort, and money to have children and raise them, but it’s a mistake to think that parents have the right to determine the direction of their children’s lives, even through genetic design. Children are not a stock company, and just because you’ve invested heavily in it and have a large stake in it doesn’t mean you can let it go where it will. They are human beings with a right to freedom, and this freedom is best enjoyed by accepting them for who they are.
We now know that happiness is not proportional to economic wealth and education. In fact, it’s more like an inverse relationship, with happiness being higher in less developed countries than in developed countries. In addition to being economically disadvantaged compared to the developed world, underdeveloped countries have much lower levels of education and well-being. Their main concern is to survive, so parents can’t afford to go to great lengths to make their children successful, as is the case in Korea and the United States. And yet they are happier than we are. But the funny thing is, as I said before, we all know this, but it seems like we only know it in our heads. When asked what is the purpose of human life, most people would say that it is to pursue happiness. If you’re a normal parent, you want not only your own happiness but also the happiness of your children. But even though they know that happiness is not the same as social success, they still want to instill in their children the genes they need to thrive in a hyper-competitive society. Unknowingly, they think they’re doing it for their children’s happiness. It’s a contradiction and something is terribly wrong. Before these parents start thinking about what good genes to instill in their children to help them succeed, they should think deeply about how their children will be happy in life.
When I climb a mountain and see water flowing down a stream, I think it’s beautiful. In fact, a man-made fountain or stream might be more beautiful, both aesthetically and mathematically. But there’s a real beauty to a mountain stream that comes from its naturalness and peacefulness that nothing artificial can match. It was created by nature, and no one interfered with its flow. The same is true for your child’s life. Helping them become happy human beings who can pursue their own happiness is not about designing and controlling their lives. It’s about loving them for who they are and letting them flow naturally.