My father was a primary school educator for thirty-nine years. He and my mother reared a family of three children, all of whom are walking faithfully with the Lord. He did all this while serving as a lay pastor for some dozen years. Let’s just say he knows a lot about people, and about little people in particular. When he speaks, I listen.
Recently he and I were discussing why communication breaks down between parents and their “teenage” children (I don’t believe in the whole notion of “teens,” incidentally, but that’s another story). He gave me a huge window of insight when he told me that, in his experience, around the age of eight children stop looking for meaningful engagement (“connection,” as it is sometimes called) with their parents and start looking to their peers instead. But a main reason, he said, why children stop trying to engage with their parents around this age is that the parents have made it clear they’re not really interested. Often, the children have been not just neglected or ignored; they know their parents find them downright irritating. The reason for the social and attitudinal transition, then, lies in general with the parents, not the children (who simply take their relational needs to those who will respond, i.e., their peers).
Running this through the grid of my own experience, it’s important to know what my father has in mind when he speaks of meaningful engagement. I know a lot of Christian parents try very hard to be involved in the lives of their young children. They are not passive – the kind of dads who sit in front of the television all evening, the kind of moms who visibly want to escape from their children at every opportunity. But it needs to be observed that one can do a lot of things with and for one’s children (take them to soccer games, attend school plays and PTA meetings, even read books and play games) and still not necessarily engage them meaningfully. One can, as a Christian parent, even have consistent family worship, catechize, and talk to one’s children, and still not engage them meaningfully. The last preposition is important: talking to a child is not the same thing as talking with a child in a way that opens up his or her inner thought-world, the heart out of which issue the springs of his or her life. And it is this latter kind of communication my father has in mind, and which he and my mother practiced brilliantly in rearing me.
Building a bridge to another human heart takes effort, whether that human is young or old. One must ask questions without intimidating. One must take more time than one reasonably has. One must learn to think the way another person thinks, which is often about as much fun as learning to speak a foreign language. One must encounter alien fears, alien joys, alien sorrows, alien ways of processing information. This is acutely difficult with children, especially young children who know next to nothing about communicating (do tantrums count?). It takes effort to figure out why a child is angry or sad. It takes effort to figure out how to help a child connect what she knows with something she doesn’t yet know. It takes effort to value what a little boy values. It is painstaking to intuit what is making a child’s eyes gleam with pleasure, or flash with frustration. How is one to see and feel what a child sees and feels when the child can’t articulate it? But then, are these problems so very different from those we encounter with other adults? Is it ever easy to cross the grand canyon between ourselves and another soul?
But the proof of a pudding, as they say, is in the eating. When a child has grown up with parents who expend the effort to “connect”; when a child has never known a day when it is not the most natural thing in the world to talk eye-to-eye with mom and dad; when a child learns from day one that mom and dad care deeply about what’s going on inside him, even when (especially when) he is being a real brat; this is the capital from which a family draws in challenging years when self-consciousness emerges with a vengeance, and the world is filled with recalcitrant questions and drives. I passed through some very troubled water as a “teen,” but it was too late – my heart was already knit to my parents. Even when I slammed the door as hard as I could in their faces, I couldn’t escape the fact that I wanted them to beat it down. I wanted to talk to them about what was going on inside, because that was how it had been for years.
I might add that parents who have the hearts of their children, and energetically maintain this privilege, need not fear usurpation by peers. Influences will come, but there is a basis to work with a child in responding to those influences, as one sees in the opening chapters of Proverbs. There is no formula here, and cases are different, but as a general rule the child who enjoys meaningful engagement with his or her parents from the earliest years will not be eager to give this up. It will even be possible to draw peers into this engagement; it will be possible for parents to care for their children’s peers whose home lives are a wreck. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
