Mom's Moral Minute by Cynthia Beck

America has gone through a peculiar evolution with respect to teaching moral values to itself and its children in the last generation. Those who came of age in the 1970s were the products of a philosophy that assumed that morals were "caught" rather than "taught"--i.e., that kids pick up more from observation than from simple moral lessons spoken to them. But then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s we seemed to be open to explicit moral lessons. Remember the best sellers from those years? Robert Fulghum, a Unitarian Minister from WA, started the craze in 1986 with his Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindegarten (and six other books in rapid succession); Bill Cosby followed quickly with his homey and humorous advice on fatherhood in Fatherhood (1987) and then William Bennett produced the massive Book of Virtues (1993), which combed the world's literature for examples of responsibility, courage, freedom, perseverance and faith. All were convinced that lessons for life could be taught, that they could be expressed in fairly simple words (share; take a nap; etc.), and that they could be illustrated both from daily experiences of living as well as from sacred texts from the past.

But then the mid-late 1990s hit. In those years America's great quest was to become rich. You might say that this was the goal of every generation of Americans, but the bug seemingly bit us harder in the 1990s. I think it was the combined forces of the invention of the Internet (even if we can't credit Al Gore with it), email and rapid communication as well as an awareness by baby-boomers that we were getting older and needed a substantial retirement nest egg. So, what did we do? We rewrote the tax laws, allowing larger non-taxible capital gains on home sales, we created the .com boom, we began (quite in contrast to the advice of Jesus) to build bigger "barns," bigger homes, bigger everything. America's quest for material affirmation of success in the late 1990s seemed to override almost every other consideration.

And so, moral books fell out of fashion. Robert Fulghum's star fell as rapidly as it rose, even though he still maintains a limited speaking engagement calendar today (he has morphed into writing novels and painting). Bill Cosby's "star" as an advice-giver for fathers faded when the Cosby Show went off the air in 1992. And, William Bennett, well, he is really a sad case. Suffice it to say that he has stuck his foot in his mouth so many times in the last few years (on young Blacks; on gambling) that the only virtue of his doing this is that it gives him less time to stuff food in his mouth.

Thus, by the time the new millennium "hit," the "moral advice book" was all but buried in our culture. Yet, we felt a nagging unease in its absence. It was not as if we didn't have a sense of how we wanted to live our lives, but we were bothered by the fear that classic lessons of right and wrong might not be being taught to our children. The schools were afraid to use the word "God," parents were understandably confused about how to proceed, even churches didn't have good "moral education" curricula.

Enter Cynthia Beck

So it was with genuine delight that I met Cynthia Beck a few weeks ago while in CA and picked up a copy of her recently-released, two-volume, workbook-size book(lets) entitled Mom's Moral Minute, vols 1 and 2. So that you won't be "spooked" by the word "volume," each of the books is magazine-sized and about 70 pages in length. The premise of these wonderful little books is that "mom" has minutes during the day, 1440 to be exact, in which to impart specific lessons for good living to her children. I am sure that Cynthia wouldn't mind fathers using the book, too, but she is more attentive here to the reality of mothers and children. She said that she thought up the idea of the book (and several of its themes) when she was carting around her son, Luke, to his various activities and wished at times she had a handy resource to talk to him about lessons for life. She learned one of the first lessons of life herself as she mulled the problem: that if you can't find what you are looking for "out there," then it may be an invitation to you to create it. And so she did. Over the last few years, while facing some of her own physical ailments, she penned this valuable little guide for parents and teachers.

Let me conclude this essay by laying out how the book is organized. The next essay will probe some of her specific advice in four of her "minutes." If we look at the two volumes as really one continuous book, we have ten sections, divided into 60 chapters (two pages each), each of which can easily be read by a parent or a child in a few minutes per day. Each chapter considers a separate virtue (such as ability, accountability, accomplishment, behavior, effort, responsibility, just to name six). Thus, she has given us two solid months of stories and interpretations supplemented by the delightful art work of Holly Mabutas, which should satisfy even the most avid mom. The ten sections are the following: lessons on (1) courage; (2) love; (3) responsibility; (4) truth; (5) wisdom; (6) compassion; (7) happiness; (8) peace; (9) respect; (10) strength. Each section has between four and seven lessons to illustrate the larger concept. Of course there is overlap between lessons, since virtues cannot be hermetically sealed in their own tubes, but that is also a strength of the book. To be told about happiness under the section of "wisdom," as well as having an entire section devoted to it allows this important idea to "sink in." Indeed, by providing us the same virtue in several places, Cynthia Beck has unwittingly entered into a classic philosophical debate on ethics--whether virtue is, in fact, just "one" or whether there are discrete virtues that need separate consideration.

More particularly, each lesson consists of six parts: (1) a virtue, with brief definition; (2) a story to illustrate the virtue or idea; (3) a reflection on the idea; (4) an attempt to link it to religious faith; (5) questions for discussion; and (6) a quotation to drive home the point. Then, as mentioned above, on the facing page is an illustration by Holly Mabutas, usually with children and animals, that allows us to "visualize" the story that Cynthia tells.

The next essay gives examples of a few lessons.

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