Poor Examples... Poor Children

I had a talk with myself today, and the little boy from my childhood told me something very significant. He told me that the greatest difficulty that children face is the hypocrisy they see in adults.

I mean imagine...

You're a child, trying to please everyone. Trying your best to do what's right. You imitate what you see, thinking that adults always do the right thing. But when you do what they do, they say "NO!" and scold you for doing wrong.

You see an adult lie; you think it's okay to lie. They scold you for lying and tell you never to lie again, because it's wrong. Then they go and lie again.

You see an adult drink alcohol; you think it's okay to drink alcohol. You go to pick up their can, and they slap your hand and say "NO!", saying its wrong to drink. But every time you open the refrigerator, you see a six pack that magically disappears day-by-day. We call it 'magic' because there's no way an adult would go against his own word and drink, right?

Children are taught to love one another and be kind, but children witness the fights between their parents--- the cursing, the violence, the tears, the badmouthing of relatives.

Children are taught not to kill, but they can't reconcile that with the shotgun sitting in the back of the closet... heck, sometimes sitting next to or on top of the dresser in plain view.

So as a child grows, while he may "know" right from wrong, he only knows that they exist; he doesn't understand that he is bound to abide by them. Poor child... He's only doing what's natural, because this is what he was really taught: that standards exist in word only, and that it's natural for them to be broken.

Yeah... when I talked to that kid inside me, it kinda touched me. I see now, even more clearly... See, this is the reason why I never forced my standards on my teenaged pupils in Sunday School; I know their parents. Hypocrisy in parents negates authority in the household. Authority in the household validates authority outside the household. It can't work [effectively] in reverse.

It's not so complicated to understand why young adults do so much wrong nowadays without a second thought. You parents get bewildered and say, "I thought I taught them better than that!" Eh, you did; the problem is, you didn't demonstrate that you believed your own hype. To them, an adult is someone who talks alot of yang and doesn't follow through on it. Above anything else, that's what they learned from you. And thusly, they became what you always were in front of them. A hypocrite.

And yes, a child reaches an age where he learns to think for himself/herself and make his or her own decisions. But--- you genius you--- unless someone intercedes in that child's life and gives that child something better to aspire to, what do you think they're going to pattern themselves after? That's right... the hypocrites. See, you assume too much of people: only in the mind of God are right and wrong clear and concrete; in the mind of man, right and wrong are relative. And a misguided child indefinitely becomes an unknowing victim of his own miseducation.

Starting on the wrong foot is much more than we give it credit for; we never mention that life is a race, and that a bad start warps the duration of that race. Such is the harm done to a child through the hypocrisy of parents.