Increasing the Light of the World

Every once in a while you come across a refreshing bit of news about family life that stands out in sharp relief to the litany of bad news about families that typically comes our way through the media. Today's New York Times contains just this in the form of an article by Robert Pear detailing research finding that the amount of time parents spend rearing children has increased over the last 40 years. Pear writes:

At first . . . “it seems reasonable to expect that parental investment in child-rearing would have declined” since 1965, when 60 percent of all children lived in families with a breadwinner father and a stay-at-home mother. Only about 30 percent of children now live in such families. With more mothers in paid jobs, many policy makers have assumed that parents must have less time to interact with their children.

But, the researchers say, the conventional wisdom is not borne out by the data they collected from families asked to account for their time. The researchers found, to their surprise, that married and single parents spent more time teaching, playing with and caring for their children than parents did 40 years ago.

For married mothers, the time spent on child care activities increased to an average of 12.9 hours a week in 2000, from 10.6 hours in 1965. For married fathers, the time spent on child care more than doubled, to 6.5 hours a week, from 2.6 hours. Single mothers reported spending 11.8 hours a week on child care, up from 7.5 hours in 1965.

Key to this shift, the article indicates, has been the decline in hours working mothers have had to dedicate to housework, and a more than doubling of the hours fathers spend on housework.

This is not to say that all things are rosy or that gender inequalities do not persist in this arena, but it is a heartening sign of the increasing awareness of the important role of parents in child rearing and the increasing assumption of responsibility in this area by men.

The Bahá'í Writings provide the following spiritual guidance on this topic:

. . . in this new cycle, education and training are recorded in the Book of God as obligatory and not voluntary. That is, it is enjoined upon the father and mother, as a duty, to strive with all effort to train the daughter and the son, to nurse them from the breast of knowledge and to rear them in the bosom of sciences and arts.

In terms of the question of why this emphasis on education and training, 'Abdu'l-Bahá writes:

Every child is potentially the light of the world -- and at the same time its darkness; wherefore must the question of education be accounted as of primary importance. From his infancy, the child must be nursed at the breast of God's love, and nurtured in the embrace of His knowledge, that he may radiate light, grow in spirituality, be filled with wisdom and learning, and take on the characteristics of the angelic host.