Nature and Nurture

As a follow-up to my previous post titled "Know Your Wood," I thought I'd share a real-life example...

Every day on my commute to Hewlett-Packard, I drive down Middlefield Road past a row of redwood trees. Whoever planted them probably had good intentions, but bad landscaping skills; they planted them directly under power lines. So what did the city do? Top the trees of course. As a native Californian, I'm especially fond of redwoods. But these have none of the redwood's usual grandeur. They just look, well, odd.

It's as if someone didn't know how a redwood is supposed to grow and is determined to shape it into a shade tree. But this is a losing battle. Redwoods are meant to grow straight and true, and when the leader is chopped off, other growth will take over and continue the tree's push to the sky.

When I was in graduate school studying secondary education, the prevailing wisdom was that we start life as blank slates. How we turn out depends on how we're shaped by the forces around us: parents, teachers, friends, experiences, etc. Those who've raised children knows that this is only half of the story. A lot of who we are - our basic temperament, for example - seems to be there at birth. In the great "nature" vs. "nurture" debate, it's not either/or, it's both/and.

Raising kids is a lot like growing trees. There are different varieties of trees, each with its own innate characteristics. We and the environment can shape them, often to a great extent. But to try to train a redwood into a weeping willow – or vice versa – will not only fail, it just might destroy the tree in the process. As an academic from a long line of academics, this was a tough lesson for me to learn with my own daughters. I learned it a little late in the game, but thank God I learned it.

I’m reminded of the Biblical admonition to "train a child in the way he/she should go, and when he/she is old he/she will not turn from it." (Proverbs 22:6) The operative phrase here is "the way he/she should go" not "the way you want him/her to go." We need to understand how God has uniquely designed and gifted our children, and then encourage and shape their growth accordingly.