Children are not adults. There is an obligation to provide the best moral example to those who are learning from us.
The best moral example for a parent is to demonstrate how to love the sinner. We are not morally obligated to cover up people’s sins to prevent people from being scandalized by it. It causes greater scandal when you discover what was covered-up for the sake of controlling your future behavior.
We are not to bear false witness to our children. If this were about him inviting his mother and her boyfriend to spend the night at HIS home on holidays with a shared bedroom, THAT’D be a scandal. But we are talking him and his children being invited to spend the night at her home and him being concerned that he has a duty to cover up her sin.
Certainly, if you’re committing your own sin of adultery, recognizing the scandal your sin creates and keeping your children protected from it by keeping it from their knowledge is a sort of step in the right direction, but it’s an incomplete step, just like contraception is an incomplete step in trying to mitigate the harms of sexual sin.
The largest sin to avoid is vanity, especially spiritual vanity. Caring more about the appearance of virtue than virtue is vanity.
By ostrocizing his mother, HE would be scandalizing his mother and his children. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t survive the scandal and still resist sin, but we are NOT modeling Christian behavior. Your behavior should not change because children are present. Your behavior should simply be upright and moral.
Certainly, there are things we cannot adequately explain to our children, but that’s why modeling behavior is important. Children learn more from modeling than from our explanations. We can explain the balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin later. But regardless, like all virtue, the road is narrow. Favoring falling to one side over another is not virtue. As such, we need to recognize that we cannot prevent all falls. We can only help children to recognize that it’s a balancing act and that we’ll probably fall one way or another. We need to recognize, too, what falls we’re culpable for and what ones we’re not.
