The Art of Imperfect Parenting

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Jim and Susan Vogt know a lot about raising kids. The Covington, Kentucky, couple have four of their own and offer tips to other parents through a program called Parenting for Peace and Justice. And yet, paging through Susan’s new book, Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference (Loyola Press), I can’t help wondering whether as parents they’re just as clueless as the rest of us.

The Vogt household is a paragon of progressive parenting strategies: family meetings, strict limits on TV and junk food, patient modeling of environmental and social consciousness, regular field trips to soup kitchens and other community service opportunities. “To a great extent, raising children who will contribute to society in positive ways involves helping them to find themselves and to like what they find,” Susan writes.

But to read her kids’ responses to some of the stuff Mom and Dad put them through, you’d think not much of it has stuck. One evening, for instance, they showed up at the kitchen table with a “Family Pledge of Nonviolence” and asked each of their children to read and sign it. “It seemed like just another one of the hokey things our family did, like the prayer chain during Advent, or the family meetings that always seemed to run around in circles before we finally came back to the starting point,” writes Dacian, who was 17 at the time. He refused to sign, because the pledge didn’t reflect his reality. “If your friends are going to a movie that has violent content, standing up and denouncing them for their evil ways isn’t going to get you anything.”

Then there was the volunteer work in the local soup kitchen, which daughter Heidi called “a chore” and her brother Brian said didn’t leave much of an impression.

None of the Vogt kids enjoyed going to church on Sundays (Jim and Susan are heavily involved in the local Catholic parish), nor did they comply eagerly with the limits on TV viewing or the regular exhortations to recycle or take the bus or talk about important issues around the dinner table. They were, in other words, like most kids—searching for an identity, pressing against parental boundaries, finding their own way. And as Susan Vogt freely admits, not even the most conscientious parent can shape a child’s future completely.

“We can’t make our kids care,” she writes. “We can’t pour into them a social conscience. But we can put before them prompts and possibilities that will increase their odds. Our efforts won’t be perfect, and they won’t always work, but we will have tried, and that’s all we can do. The rest is up to them.”

Books like Vogt’s are filled with prescriptions for raising kids who will make their parents proud, like modeling compassion and empathy, teaching self-respect, and setting boundaries. And as challenging as it is to aspire to these values and offer them to your kids, I think it’s way more challenging to know when to drop them from your parenting repertoire.

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