Life is vulnerable and beautiful. At times the beauty of life seen in a child is truly sublime - we are awestruck, humble in its presence, overwhelmed at times by the fragility of new life and our children's potential.

Modern life presents challenges to our having that vision or to remembering to look upon a new born as a great opportunity to excel in all that we have learned as individuals and as a people.

The newborn enters the world tentatively, some are not destined for a full life and they grace our presence and burn their souls upon us like shooting stars. We remain subject to nature and nature is a harsh mistress at times that our medicine and technology may never beat, and indeed that we should ever try to "beat nature" is the wrong vision to behold. We should work with nature as we should work with rather than against our children. But for those whose days begin to accumulate and their souls strengthen for life amongst us, we are graced and behumbled, thrilled and overjoyed by the unfolding potentiality that it is our privilege to assist.

Imagine being a day old and you can communicate to your parents the wisdom of you years now: what would you wish to say to them? What advice would you wish they heed? Think about it - that is how we should reach out to every child, as ourselves incarnated again. What would you wish for in those eyes, what experiences, what lessons, what reassurance or care, what love or guidance?

Would you want to be put in front of the TV to keep you amused ("to death" as Roger Waters noted), or stuffed into a playpen while your parents "get on with things" (without you), or fed food that makes you lethargic or colicky, or ignored in favour of "adult conversation", or put into a school that leaves you bullied or intellectually unchallenged?

Our would you want your life and your values to be validated, acknowledged and respected?

My career as a tutor is motivated by seeking to find that potential in all of my pupils and as a parent to provide the best that my experiences and education can offer my son.

In each pupil there is a surrogate offspring, for each of them will carry forth ideas I impart as a teacher alongside those garnered from their own families and from friends and other teachers and role models.

Sometimes I have the privilege of working with parents and pupils whose positive values empower their children and give them the best in emotional as well as intellectual stabiliity: the children are loved, happy, confident: in effect, they are allowed to become themselves and to flourish. A few days old.

At other times I work with pupils whose family culture subtly undermines their confidence - it may be in the words chosen, the diet permitted, the culture brought into the house; but such children become fragile in unexpected ways - angry or frustrated, self centred and attention seeking (whose attention do they really wish?), or old and experienced beyond their years. Thrust into ill-suiting schools or permitted access to inappropriate resources or influences, they fade and become alien to their families. That doesn't mean to say that they are lost for good, for all involved are capable of adapting and learning anew each day; however, I would imagine that such children grow up to become like their parents, just as their parents were like their own in turn, and thus perpetuate ineffectual methods or emotional frustrations or intellectual hang-ups.

Why continue the frustrations of our ancestors? Theodore Zeldin in his masterpiece An Intimate History of Humanity reminds us that we are all probably descendants of slaves: reflecting upon that, we may see the slavish acceptance in some of our behaviour or in our reactions - in deference given when it is unearned, in giving up our values to another to satisfy them rather than our principles, in lowering our ambitions or aesthetics as they are "too good", in demeaning ourselves and our health as undeserving of anything. How many times have we given in to social pressures, and later realised that such pressures were actually in nobody's interests at all? Or given in to those who would control us subtly or not so subtly without as much as raised eyebrow?

Look into the new born's eyes - there is freedom, potential, a new self emerging: a freeman, a freewoman. No child should be anybody's slave, we willingly countenance, but then we may impose slavishness on our children in so much that we do.

Give our children the confidence to be themselves and not the means to others ends - even our own.

Can you imagine how peaceful the world may be if we all thought for ourselves, stuck to our principles and recognised that others have a right to stick to theirs? What love and what life reside in our the futures we create in children!

Alexander Moseley, December 2008