Innocence, Not Naïveté

Monica Portogallo describes how she's letting go of wanting to shelter her children from the world in favor of guiding them to choose what's good and right.

It seems to me that many parents have at least one thing they are more concerned about than the average parent. Maybe they want their child to have good manners, work hard in academics, succeed in athletics, or any number of other concerns. For me, it was wanting to preserve my child’s innocence. I saw too many young people grow up too fast, and I wanted my son to be blissfully unaware of the evils and complications of the “real world” for as long as possible.

I soon realized, though, that what I really wanted was to control my anxiety by limiting my son’s opportunities for growth. I was like a misguided parent in a fairy tale: I wanted to lock my son up in a tower to keep him safe; I wanted to burn every spinning wheel so my son couldn’t prick his finger. There is a reason these parents’ strategies don’t work. Children need to be exposed to the dangers and evils of the world in a safe, supported manner so they know how to deal with them when they inevitably face them on their own.

Over time, I learned to walk the line of being vigilant without isolating. We limited our son’s exposure to the internet and media, but we answered his tough questions in an honest, age-appropriate way when they came up. We told him about the “birds and the bees” when he asked how his brother got in my tummy so that he didn’t hear about it from some other kid, the way I did. He actually wasn’t all that interested when we told him. He just said, “Oh, okay. How are the baby’s organs formed?”

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In July, my now 9-year-old came home from day camp and told me, “My new friends at camp like to talk about body parts and what you do with them.”

Trying to keep my face and tone neutral, I responded, “Oh, really? What do you think about that?”

“I don’t like it. I told them to stop. And when they didn’t, I told them I was team captain, and they couldn’t be on my team if they didn’t stop, so they did.”

I responded with a casual, “Oh, I’m glad you told them to stop when they were saying inappropriate things.” Inside, though, I was bursting with (the good kind of) pride.

I’ve thought about this conversation a lot since then. I realize now what I had thought I had wanted wasn’t what I wanted at all. What I had originally wanted was just naïveté, and what I really wanted, and got, was true innocence. I didn’t want a child who did the right thing because he didn’t know there was any other option; I wanted a child who knew right from wrong and chose right freely.

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I didn’t want a child who did the right thing because he didn’t know there was any other option; I wanted a child who knew right from wrong and chose right freely. #CatholicMom

I know this is not the end of my journey. I am certainly not going to throw caution to the wind when it comes to what my children are exposed to, because there’s a lot of stuff out there that they don’t need to think about just yet, or maybe ever. I’m also not going to expect my children to choose right every single time, because they are fallen human beings, just like me.

I am going to pray for the grace to guide them without smothering them, and when they stumble, to forgive them the way my Heavenly Father forgives me when I chose wrong over right.

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