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Good Morning, ‘I only want what’s best for my children.’ It’s a common enough sentiment. Most parents have thought it if not said it. Sometimes we bolster the phrase with sacrificial grist: ‘I want my children to have what I never had.’ This might mean a decent education, a secure home, a holiday in the South of France; whatever it is, our children will have it because we didn’t. And we will do everything to make sure they have it. Whatever it costs. Wanting the best for our children seems, on the surface, a perfectly natural and noble aspiration. It’s something we hear in the news all the time. And it carries a righteous weight. When Jesus asked ‘what parent would give their child a stone when they had asked for bread?’ he seemed to be underscoring the fact. What parent wouldn’t want their child to have a decent school to go to, clothes that fit, a healthy diet, a home to live in? But whilst it’s normal to want these things he also points out that even the corrupt know how to give their children good gifts. It’s easy to prefer your own. But what if what’s best for our children is bad for our neighbour’s children? Where’s the moral good in that? I might prefer to ignore this awkward thought, but it manages to insinuate itself in a variety of prosaic ways: particularly in the matter of schooling which, with it’s scrapping for places, seems to focus self-preferential tendencies more than almost any other area of parental life. But it goes beyond education. It extends to housing, to jobs, to community. And it forces us to ask another question: when we want the best for our children what do we mean by ‘the best?’ When asked for guidance about the best way to live this life, Jesus compressed the commandments into an easily learned line about loving God and then our neighbours as ourselves. If the first part is a stretch for someone without faith the latter is at least an ideal people can imagine if not always accomplish. Did he really call us to love our neighbours’ kids as much as our own? It might seem completely subversive, but it would be interesting to see what that might do for society. It’s ironic that children – these naturally free, funny, generous rufflers of our best laid plans – have the capacity to turn us into such over-protective reactionaries. If anything they seem, certainly at first, free of this striving insistence on having the best of everything; it’s we, the adults, who lay that burden on them. It’s as if we start knowing some simple truths only to forget them later. As it says in Matthew: ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.’ When it comes to wanting the best for our kids let’s not limit that aspiration to our own kin.