Our Children’s Desire to Imitate
Many years ago, our friend Lillie Fay and I were teaching the 4- and 5-year-old class at church in Oxford, Mississippi. One of our activities was to act out serving the Lord’s Supper in a church assembly. When our son John pretended to serve the Lord’s Supper, he stood respectfully holding his hands behind his back just as the men in our church were in the habit of doing every Sunday.
John had been paying attention. That’s what children do. They pay attention to what we adults do. That’s why they love to play with our phones and try on our shoes.
Julie Le Brun Looking in a Mirror, 1787,
by her mother, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019
I’m not sure why I was drawn to this painting to illustrate these thoughts, but I was happy to learn that the idea of it connecting to imitation isn’t limited to me. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a successful French portraitist who painted many members of European royalty, including Marie-Antoinette and her children. According to an online article¹ I found, Le Brun wanted her daughter to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a painter, too. The article focuses on the concept that this was the artist’s idea behind the painting and discusses ideas from the late 1700s about children becoming a reflection of their parents.
Our children’s desire to imitate is why we must be careful what their little eyes see and what their little ears hear.
Imitation is a wonderful way to learn as long as our children have the right examples before their eyes and ears.
But we all, with unveiled face,
beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord,
are being transformed
into the same image from glory to glory,
just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18
Therefore, be imitators of God,
as beloved children; and walk in love,
just as Christ also loved you
and gave Himself up for us,
an offering and a sacrifice to God
as a fragrant aroma.
Ephesians 5:1-2
¹International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Science article, entitled “‘Guide me so that I can imitate you’: Revisiting the Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Julie Le Brun Looking in the Mirror” by Lithuanian researcher Joana Vitkutė