Friday, April 13, 2018

Maturation

One of the responsibilities of the parent is to help and guide their children to grow and mature.  Obviously, the physical aspect of maturation is unavoidable. Children do grow, under normal circumstances, into adulthood. But what about the mental, the emotional and the psychological?  These things do not simply happen, environment and genetics are both influential in these maturation processes.
One aspect, particularly interesting to me, is the psychological part in connection with entertainment.  The things (at a very foundational level) that we, as parents/adults, find interesting and entertaining, will be passed on to our children.  If we love sports, most likely our children will as well. If we love the outdoors/hiking/camping/exercise, most likely that will influence and direct our children into the same interests.  While the influence we have upon our children in this regard is not necessarily a one-to-one, the basic categorical influence is, I believe, unavoidable. So if we as adults like watching movies, of any particular genre, while it is probably unavoidable that our children will enjoy watching movies as well, what is not necessarily true is the genre they choose as their preference.  This is where deliberate training comes into play.
So what happens when our interests and entertainments are childish?  Are we not then hindering/handicapping our children? So the important thing to see here is not so much our attention to what we direct our children into, but our deliberate training in how to think about their preferences.  Whatever our interests, our children will follow, but we must be attentive to the fact that their own sinful inclinations may take those interests into areas and genres that we never would have considered.
We must lead our children, not by trying to control them or keep them blind to reality, but by raising them up to think clearly about what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.  Maturation is about freedom and handling it with wisdom. If we try to control our children, with rules and regulations, they will only rebel. If we train them to understand reality, they can think rightly about their own thoughts and actions and through our prayers and the sacraments of the church, live rightly.

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