KEY POINTS:
I take my children to church, which is ironic because when I was a teenager I did everything I could to get out of going. It was something my family did rather than something I believed in. At our church, the services were conducted in Samoan, and seemed wholly irrelevant, not to mention meaningless, to me.
It seemed to me, too, that God always took a back seat to the fundraising and the politics, and that some of His so-called representatives were actually playing for the other side.
I stayed away for 30 years, disenchanted with the trappings but still clinging to the precepts I'd picked up from all those years of Bible reading. Even if I didn't have it, I knew what real faith ought to look and act like from watching my parents and a few like them.
And, oddly, I wanted my children to have the same foundation. I signed them up for the Bible classes at primary school even as I worried about the excesses of some fundamentalist churches.
When my mother died and I started going to church to keep my father company, my children came, too, at their own choosing, for my sake as well as their grandfather's.
It has made a difference for all of us. I am raising, I like to think, virtuous kids, inoculated from the worst influences of consumerism and popular culture.
But I despair when I read of the apparently "good", churchgoing kids joining gangs and allegedly involved in violent crimes like the robbery and killing of Manurewa liquor store owner Navtej Singh.
A woman who took a job in Dunedin several years ago tells me how grateful she is that she and her family moved out of Auckland when they did, especially when she compares her children's progress with that of their Auckland cousins, some of whom are now in gangs. These were boys her now high-achieving son grew up with, "who were angels back then, who you would never think would join the gangs".
When she last visited Auckland she was horrified when her cousin's son, 15, arrived home drunk in the early hours of the morning. She can't understand how his parents, "hardcore Christians" in good jobs, allowed him to join a gang.
She wonders, "Would I have been able to stand up to these other influences in my kids' lives? Would I, too, have accepted them joining the gangs and having babies out of wedlock, dropping out of high school, like my cousins have, as 'normal'?"
In her 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do, the American psychologist Judith Harris argued that genes, peers and neighbourhood exerted a more powerful influence on children's behaviour than parental nurture.
Harris cited a number of studies which suggested that a child had a better chance of keeping out of trouble if he lived in a troubled family in a good neighbourhood than if he lived in a good family in a troubled neighbourhood.
For example, in a study that found that African-American boys, many from poor, single-parent, high-risk families, committed far more delinquent acts than white kids, researchers discovered that when they looked at the neighbourhoods the boys lived in, the effect of coming from a high-risk family disappeared. Black kids who didn't live in the most deprived neighbourhoods, even if they were from poor, single-parent families, were no more delinquent than their white, mostly middle-class peers.
Harris's controversial proposition, as one of her defenders noted, wasn't that parents didn't matter; it was that everything mattered.
There's no mystery to raising good kids, I opined last week to a Manurewa mother of six. It requires constant vigilance from loving parents who are around when it matters, good schools, good friends, plenty of opportunities to take up artistic and sporting endeavours, which means good facilities and coaches, and the kind of neighbourhood where respect and community spirit are evident.
Most children in Manurewa would be lucky to get even a fraction of that.
In any case, that's a prescription for keeping out of trouble, not for raising virtuous children, which I assume is what people mean when they call for a return to some kind of moral teaching for our children.
But why stop with children? They're only reflecting the values they see around them.
Plato talked about the best of us being the wise and the virtuous, guided by the idea of the common good for the benefit of the whole community.
But we more enlightened beings place a higher value on individual success, as measured by the accumulation of wealth; we have nurtured greed, cynicism and the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake.
We have been so intent on throwing off the shackles of religion that we have thrown out spirituality with the bath water, and with it the idea of morality, of the virtuous citizenry that a civilised society needs.
What did we offer our children in its place? If we aren't spiritual beings, but consumers whose "souls" can be satisfied with bigger and better things, should we be surprised to find ourselves here?
