We’re born free, but we live our lives in chains. We all like the idea of being free, but we don’t understand it, so we end up forfeiting our freedom needlessly.
Freedom and Ability
The freedom we’re talking about, of course, is the freedom to choose. Choice has two component parts that complement each other:
Freedom
and
Ability
To complete the concept, Ability also has two component parts, both of which use the actual word “ability” in the two forms—“able” and “ible”—that turn the preceding word root into an adjective. To be clearer, ability involves “responsibility” (the ability to respond) and “accountability” (the ability to be counted or held accountable).
With this additional information, let’s restate what is written above: Choice has two component parts that complement each other:
Freedom
and
Responsibility and Accountability
To complement a thing means to complete it or to bring it to perfection.
Freedom and ability complement each other, which means that without ability, there is no complete freedom, and without freedom there is no full ability.
Why a Child's Ability to Choose Becomes Limited
Our children are free to make any choice they like, but unless we give them the ABILITY to choose—which involves teaching them responsibility and accountability—their choices become limited to the point where they’re not really free.
Proving this is easy: Look at the behavior of children who are entitled, whining, angry, or addicted. In any of those conditions—where responsibility and accountability are banished—the children don’t really make choices. They’re simply responding to their pain. They’re trapped by their pain and the lack of any ability to choose wisely.
When children are in sufficient pain, they are reduced to reacting. It is only with love that we eliminate their pain and give them the ability to really make conscious choices in difficult circumstances.
Allow me to re-use an old metaphor:
Imagine that you are walking in the woods, and you come to a fork in the road. The path to the right leads directly out of the woods and safely to your home. The path to the left leads to forests, dense jungles, impassable rivers, waterfalls, wild beasts, and potential death.
You might immediately assume that you would take the path to the right, but what if you couldn’t SEE the path to the right? What if, long before your arrival at the fork, the path to the right had been blocked by a brick wall, which was then completely covered with trees and ivy to the point that the path was completely hidden?
You can’t make a choice you can’t see, so in this case do you really have a choice? No. Theoretically, you do have the RIGHT or freedom to take the path to the right, but you don’t have the responsibility or accountability because you can’t be held responsible for what you don’t know.
Loving and Teaching Gives Children the Freedom to Choose
Our children are born only with the freedom to choose—the first “half” of choice. Our role is to give them the knowledge—to teach them—in order to complete their power to choose. Our teaching gives them knowledge, and our love gives them the added power they need to properly exercise their freedom to choose. Love gives them power because it eliminates the pain and fear that make clear choices impossible.
Again and again, we love them and teach them, and as we do, their choices multiply, as does their ability to see them clearly and make the wise ones.
