Being A Parent To Your Child: Being A Child To Your Parent
In many Christian communities the need to parent children is often passed off to the paraphrase of one of the Ten Commandments. It is the one that begins “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”. The assumption that goes with the commonly held interpretation of that commandment is that children will automatically behave because there is a commandment to do so, and we expect that the church, our church, has taught that commandment to them. The Commandment, like all of the Ten Commandments, has a piece of truth and wisdom for our time. There are two things that get in the way of children showing honor.
The first issue that often gets confused is the paraphrase of “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”; it is the statement that says, “ I am the parent, that’s why”. I will agree that there are times and places when that sentence may be appropriate to the problem at hand. But so often the edict which comes down from the parent to a child comes as an isolated command which has no context, no set of relationships out of which either the parent of the child can make sense of it. What I mean is that being a parent to a child and being a child to a parent involves a two-way relationship. The covenant relationship between our Creator God and those of us who are the children of God is a covenant or agreement in a relationship sometimes described in terms of a parent and child. You will be my people and I will be your God. My love for you will bind us together. Our children grow and mature and develop intellect, talent, skill and their own unique personality. This is the way Creation is intended. Children grow and mature with a developing opinion and view of the world. Their experience of what is at hand will be different from their parents’ experience simply because they are a different person. No two persons have the exact same view or experience.
Honor comes to the parent, and conversely to the child, where love and respect exist in that covenant relationship. The sense of honor may be expressed differently but it comes about because the child is convinced of the parent’s love for him/her. The parent knows that the child behaves in the many ways they do, takes chances, and even sometimes pushes the envelope, because they know that they are safe with the parents, they can try things out, and the parents will behave in a way that while loving the child may not always agree with the child or the child’s point of view. This last sentence brings us to our second concern.
Honoring each other bears in mind that the parent child relationship is one that in some ways is unequal. Parents are older; they have more developed brains and intellect. As adults they have more expressions of emotion. They have more experience. While adults never stop growing and developing children is actively doing this all the time. They are learning about how to think. They are learning how to form opinions and thoughts. They are learning how to feel okay about points of view which may be different from parents, teachers, religious leaders. They are learning how to express emotions. They have limited life experience because of the fewer number of years that they have been alive. Parents do themselves and their children an injustice, a hardship, when they expect their children to behave like adults. Sometimes a parent will enunciate an opinion in some fashion which assumes a level of intelligence or experience which a child cannot and will not at that point in his/her life have. Often children are expected to behave or think in ways that are really adult ways. The parent has erroneously assumed that one word from them and the child will do what they say. Conversations, thoughts, discipline, must be age appropriate. Parents have to be students of growth and development to know what a child is capable of undertaking, comprehending, and what level of response they can and will give to a parent.
The parent who shapes his/her interventions to the age and experience of the child already is showing that he/she is taking the time necessary to understand the child, and having the care and love to respect the child’s abilities and not yet learned skills. When a parent shows a child these things he is not only honoring the child but also teaching the child how to honor the parent.
This article first appeared in the Farmington Observer.
Dr. Paul Melrose
