“The definition of innocence as absolute purity comes from a paradigm of good and bad, which cannot be authenticated. On top of that it assumes a degree to goodness that none of us truly believe. Such innocence is both impossible to accomplish and also becomes a motivation for the kind of thinking that is self-negating, and even self-abusive.
“Rather, if we could see innocence as the kind of authenticity with which we were born, then it would be sacred, for it would motivate us to be authentic and to respect as sacred the authenticity of our children. Then we might begin to parent our children according to their authenticity, rather than according to an impossible-to-define mental construct of goodness. As a collective, we would be able to move out of the good/bad paradigm and into the true/false paradigm, and live from the truth of genuineness.”
