Grown-Ups
I’m a big believer in the dreaming, playing, exploring, learning time of life called childhood.
Not every child gets to have a childhood, but every child deserves one. Almost every time — if not every time — a child misses out on childhood, the reason is the same. At least one adult — and sometimes many, many adults — in the child’s life has not embraced the sensible, strong, mature time of life called adulthood. Sometimes it’s a dictator or a governmental regime; too often it’s a parent.
When adults in the life of children refuse to be adults, children always suffer.
Sometimes I hear in the news about parents who let children decide things they are nowhere close to being mature enough to decide for themselves. Sometimes I hear that kind of news from people I know. I grieve that those children don’t have parents who are adult enough to be adults.
Children with parents who will play with them and laugh with them and be silly with them and splash them with water balloons and be splashed with water balloons and make tough decisions and teach them what is true and bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord are blessed.
Adults don’t have to be fuddy-duddies, but they do have to be adults.
When I was a child,
I used to speak like a child,
think like a child, reason like a child;
when I became a man,
I did away with childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11
Oh so true, Charlene! Too many adults want to be their child’s peer and not their parent. Perhaps these parents, too, missed out on a proper childhood, or maybe they identify too closely with Peter Pan. Whatever the reason, children will thank them one day for being a parent to them!