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Dalton
Roberts |
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There is no right way to raise a child because there are no two children alike. We must adapt our approach to the child’s unique way of being. I know this because I was once a child and it was my individual differences that made it hard on my parents and teachers. Only in recent years have I realized why I had so many school problems. I was interested in creativity and much of education requires conformity. That’s what you call a fundamental conflict. Give a creative child no outlets for his creativity and he will direct his creativity into creative trouble making. It is a protest action though he may be totally unconscious of it at the time. In the year I made poor grades and was “permanent expelled” from the county school system, I read most of the books in a Harvard Classics set that stood in a bookcase in our study hall. It was an educational achievement in my life but one that afforded me no credit at all in my schoolwork. If you feel you do not understand your teenager, welcome to the club. My parents were the salt of the earth but all they knew was I stayed in trouble at school. I cannot fault them for not seeing that much of my problem was stifled creativity because it is only in recent years that I have seen it. It takes years for most of us to gain the emotional detachment to gain insight into our early-life problems. Another reason I know there is no right way to raise a child is that I had two children. First-hand I observed how different they were in temperament, energy, attitudes and even in sleep patterns. One child’s problem is another child’s asset. What is hard to see is that a child’s problem may also hide the presence of an asset like my strong bent toward creativity. The one question I would urge parents to ask about any child is, “What are this child’s unique needs?” To compare them to other children in the family is not productive. They are not other children. They are who they are and those basic observable patterns are likely to be there the rest of their lives. Why? Because that is who they are. Look back at your childhood and you can see that who you are today is basically who you were back then. Freud taught that basic life reaction patterns are pretty much in place by age five or six. Nichodemus told Jesus a man cannot return to the womb and be born again. Still, he was urged to seek a new birth. Look back at your life and you will see you have been born again and again and again. At each crossroad there is a change for stagnation and a chance for the birth of something better. In raising our children we can take comfort in the fact that the Creator, according to the story in our bible, had trouble raising his own children. He told them to not eat forbidden fruit and they made a beeline to that very tree. It’s the old story of telling children not to stick beans up their nose and before your car is out of the driveway, they are hunting the beans. We are not without flaws but let us remember that those children who ate the forbidden fruit and poked beans up their nose, also have put a man on the moon, found cures for incurable diseases, wrote millions of songs and billions of books and achieved things that seemed impossible. Your child who may be having a hard time finding his/her way today will over the course of life do more good things than you can imagine. All God could do for His problem children was to make Himself available at their request and that’s really about all we can do for ours. Fortunately, it is usually enou
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