Chapter 1 - Preparing For Children: Life Questions

A: Background

6. WHAT OF INDIVIDUAL CHOICE? THE QUESTION OF PERSONAL AUTONOMY

When viewed in the modern context, this perspective is not entirely unproblematic. One of the features that most characterizes us as people brought up in a modern western setting is the belief in the importance of personal autonomy. We are children of a society that has been moving steadily away from the idea of external commandment, towards the idea of the need for the individual to make their own decisions for themselves. It is possible to suggest that much of the ridicule which the Jewish mother figure has suffered at the hands of western Jewish writers and popular culture as a whole, over the last few generations, is indeed the result of a clash between these two values of Jewish family and personal autonomy.