G.K. Chesterton write about this in Orthodoxy, and while I don't think you must subscribe to all he does in that book to raise renaissance children, I think one element is crucial: you must have a sense of the miraculous, a sense of enchantment, a sense of the beauty of creation. And you must be able to convey that to your child. Perhaps it requires seeing the world again through his eyes: the magic of a butterfly, the sheer, fragile iridescence of bubbles from a bubble jar; the heartbreak of little blue robins' eggs fallen from their nest; the strains of certain music that cause your baby's fat arms to pump. These are things that we parents experience almost involuntarily when we welcome our newborns, but they can easily fall by the boards when we're tired and cranky. Perhaps the challenge as a parent is to maintain that childlike sense of observation even as our children outgrow it. For it is true, is it not?, that all of life is a testament to beauty and wonder and joy. If we lose that sense of surprise and delight, then it would be no surprise for our children also to lose it. And this entire task of raising renaissance children who then become renaissance adults is about encouraging them to retain their wonder at the world.

G.K. Chesterton writes about this in Orthodoxy, and while I don’t think you must subscribe to all he does in that book to raise renaissance children, I think one element is crucial: you must have a sense of the miraculous, a sense of enchantment, a sense of the beauty of creation. And you must be able to convey that to your child.   Perhaps it requires seeing the world again through four-year-old eyes: the magic of a butterfly, the sheer, fragile iridescence of bubbles from a bubble jar; the heartbreak of little blue robins’ eggs fallen broken from their nest; the strains of certain music that cause your baby’s fat arms to pump.  These are things that we parents experience almost involuntarily when we welcome our newborns, but they can easily fall by the boards when we’re tired and cranky, dealing with the terrible twos or the even-more-terrible teens.

Like many people who respond to the concept of raising Renaissance children, the seeds for the idea were planted in me at a young age. I grew up in a middle-class home in north central Florida, which contributed to my conviction that providing a rich array of educational enrichment to children doesn’t require great wealth.  These days it doesn’t even require that parents be well educated themselves, nor does it require having a two-parent home.  It is possible for nearly any parent, single or married, to open a child’s eyes and heart to the wonders of the world without private-school education, broad travel, or a large financial investment. It can be significantly more challenging to do so if your working hours are long enough that you rarely see your child, or if the culture with which you are surrounded is hostile to the concept. I do not want to minimize the challenges in your case if you are living in such an environment.  In the last chapter of this book, I’ll discuss some ideas for getting help if you have little or no support and yet you have a deep desire to encourage Renaissance values in your child. I would like to help you to believe that miracles can happen for you.

As for me, other than being born into a safe, stable home, my first miracle took place when I was four. My father, a modestly-paid professor of civil engineering at the University of Connecticut at the time, was awarded a sabbatical leave which took our family to Mexico for six months.  This was in 1959, and travel through Mexico was safe and fascinating.  At that very young age, I absorbed the colors, tastes and sounds of a culture quite foreign to mine, and it opened my eyes to the world beyond my world.  Although travel isn’t necessary to awaken a curiosity in children for other cultures and ideas, travel usually does have that impact on children and young people.  (For that reason, I encourage all parents to take advantage of as many safe opportunities for travel as might be presented to your children through their lives, which we will talk about in a later chapter: school trips, church mission trips, trips through extracurricular activities such as competitive sports or other games, musical performance groups, language groups –it’s remarkable the wide array of travel experiences that are available now.)  Although I was only four, many images and experiences from our time in Mexico stayed with me and left me permanently more open to different places, people and food.

But raising children is hard work. Manual work. You can feel, late in the day, as if your body simply will not carry you to the moment when they are safely in bed.  I remember falling in bed myself, once they were “down,” wearing an exhaustion that defies description. Perhaps the challenge as a parent is to maintain that childlike sense of observation even as we feel like we’re loaded down with fifty sacks of four, and even as our children, moving into the surly teen years, pretend to outgrow it. For it is true, is it not, that all of life is a testament to beauty and wonder and joy?  If we lose that sense of surprise and delight, then it would be no surprise for our children also to lose it. And this entire task of raising renaissance children who then become renaissance adults is about encouraging them to retain their wonder at the world.

Don’t despair if you realize that your sense of surprise and delight with the world has dissipated.  You can get it back, and I’ll write more about that in a later post.