Parents, God, and Babies

  Several years ago, I came across the name of Basil Yeaxlee as an educator and scholar who had an early interest in the idea of 'lifelong learning' and had, in fact, written a book on the topic. I also found that he had written on the connections between education and faith, focusing on the Christian faith. Now, I'm finally getting around to the book that I picked up by him called, Religion and the Growing Mind (1939). 

 

 A fifth of the way through the book, I have appreciated some of his insights on the nature of religion as well as about understanding others. But, it is a comment from the section on an infant's growth which I want to share here. More accurately, Yeaxlee's thoughts on the role of parents strikes me as crucial.

"... by his experience of such [Godlike] qualities in his parents as real, and as answering his vital needs, the tiny child is prepared for a true understanding of the existence and nature of God when later his mental development enables him to grasp these intellectually, as well as to respond to them emotionally - though even his earliest states are not for him devoid of an element of meaning. Furthermore, it becomes evident that in these most elemental and natural early relationships the parents are not merely making or marring the child's character, as Dr. Emanuel Miller so clearly demonstrates. They are actually interpreting or misinterpreting God to the child in the only medium possible, though often the parents have not the faintest notion that religion enters into the matter at all, whether they account themselves religious or not."

~ Pg 43-44 (1945 ed. Great Britain: Nisbet.) Emphasis added. 

  Think of it, parents are actually interpreting or misinterpreting God to the child in the only way they can to a child. May each of us as parents of young child interpret a true view of the LORD who became human to our children who cannot know him yet in other ways.

Addendum from pages 80 and 87 about older children...

"The truth about God may be obscured or distorted in the experience of a child if his parents are in themselves and in their relationships with him weak, unwise, inconsistent, sentimentally indulgent, harsh, overbearing, selfish, careless or indifferent, whatever beliefs about God, they may profess or try to teach the child. On the other hand, despite all their limitations or failings, if they are in any sense true parents they will inevitably mediate to him (and not simply illustrate) the fact that God is, and the meaning of the power and love of God the Father everlasting."

"It is only when that experience [of 'Father'] is largely contrary to what Jesus taught us to understand by 'Father' that the child may be made to stumble. Even then, as actual instances have proved, the child of an unworthy father clings to those few elements of good that persist in the most brutalised, callous, or indifferent parent, and in his fantasy world he will create a picture of fatherhood which is inspired by those elements of good, even if reinforced by what he sees and envies in the lives of happier children. It will be a picture of a father who commands reverence and evokes love - the kind of Father whom Jesus made known to men, and who is no fantasy." 

(This chapter was about the power and benefit of fantasy in the child's mental growth.)