Parents need the wisdom of Jesus
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
Good Parents wish only the best for their children and frequently spend lavishly on them. They send them to the best schools, buy the best clothes and give them oodles of pocket money so they can keep up with their peers in fashion and have the latest gizmos of the youthful world.
What a heartache parents suffer when they gradually realise that their children are becoming more and more alienated from them. The very gifts that parents gave to bind their children to them can easily drive a wedge between them. The play stations are more or less solitary activities that isolate the child from human contact and interaction and dialogue with parents and family. Instead of inspiring examples of selfless love and service they play games filled with violence and revenge, murder and mayhem. Over exposure to these computer games can numb the brain, weaken the creative imagination and stifle independent reflection and choice of good values.
Computers can be a boon or a beast that devours the innocence and purity of youth when it brings to them the dark side of cyberspace filled with pornography and sex predators lurking in chat rooms.
It is not limited to the rich and wealthy either. In developing countries, like the Philippines, children of the poorer struggling classes can use the cell phones of classmates, visit cyber shops to surf the Internet and play computer games for a few cents. Some become addicted and cut classes and drop out of school as a result. The children drift away into a life detached from parents and family.
There is nothing so painful or challenging to a loving parent than the empty nest. Parents experience anxiety, loss, and loneliness when their children grow to be young men and women seeking their own place in the world. A spirit of freedom and independence grips young people, pulling them into the unknown world filled with challenge and mystery.
The urge of the young to explore and discover is a natural and healthy impulse and wise parents must guide encourage this flight from the nest not impede it. When they do and teach their offspring to fly with their own wings, and point them in the right direction they will always be grateful and readily fly home. There is nothing so as parental possessiveness domination and control over their children's lives.
What is most powerful and influential in the life of a child is the advice and example of parents. They are the gods they worship from the cradle, the central person of their lives that provides everything that they need to survive, grow and live a healthy value filled and purposeful life.
That's why parents have to give sustained affirmation from the earliest years. Nothing is more destructive to a child than the cruel withdrawal of love, punishment and rejection. Once given it is never forgotten by the child.
Parents must establish a strong respectful relationship with their children from the earliest ages. Every single parental word of affirmation and encouragement is recorded, absorbed, mentally and emotionally digested and animates the child's personality. That expression of wise love infuses the child with confidence, self worth, and a sense of value that have positive character building power.
The young person glows with a happiness that no high tech gizmo can give. Again and again genuine words of encouragement and praise will have the powerful effect of empowering and bonding child and parent. Such a child will not have low self-esteem or self-loathing and no matter how difficult life becomes the thought of suicide would not be likely
The understanding patience and wisdom required of parents is truly demanding. Few have received formal education on how to be a good parent and so we all need the wisdom, inspiration and guidance to true love found in the words and example of Jesus Christ. [End]
