Children Need Parental Love In a Broken World
By Katharine Meese Putman, PsyD,
Assistant Professor of Psychology,
Fuller’s Department of
Clinical Psychology
God’s design is for each child to
be born, vulnerable and dependent, to loving parents within the covenant of
marriage. God’s desire is for each child
to grow in this secure, caring environment.
In a fallen world, people and relationships can be damaged. When parents struggle to fulfill their
intended role, others must provide dedicated care for them and their children.
God intends for
all children to be raised by at least one loving, committed adult.
Impact of Original Sin on
Relationships
The first
sin of humankind began with a breach in Adam and Eve’s relationship with
God. Adam and Eve mistrusted God’s
guidance for them and listened to the serpent instead. This mistrust in their hearts created the
path for the first sin, and continues to be a major consequence of original
sin. The consequences were that Adam and
Eve no longer reflected God’s image, as they were created. They started hiding from God, and their
mistrust and blame were directed toward each other. We were created in God’s image to be in
harmonious relationships, to reflect God’s image of the Trinity in that we are
in unbroken, harmonious relationship and yet retain our unique selves. The consequences of sin are that this
mistrust and marred image break our intimate relationships and ultimately
damage our ability to be in community.
When
children are born into a home with two loving parents who know God, they are
ahead in the journey of spiritual, psychological, and emotional
development. From a theological point of
view, the goal of child development is for the child to become a unique being
who is in relationship with both God and other human beings. When children have parents who model God’s
love and care for them and are attentive to their needs, they have help in the
restoration of God’s image in them. Children are more likely to trust God,
themselves, and others, and are more likely to be in community, which is where
God’s image is expressed most profoundly. Since children are born entirely dependent on
their parents and their communities, they are the most vulnerable to the
consequences of sin’s destruction of relationships.
Impact of Sin on Children’s Relationships
Sadly, the
impact of sin in children’s lives often leads to more mistrust, which
cyclically makes it more difficult for them to be in relationships. Children who are exposed to the consequences
of sin in their family relationships and in their communities are vulnerable to
multiple difficulties. The more risks
children face, the more developmental difficulties they are likely to have. In certain environments, such as many global
urban environments, children face poverty, malnutrition, unsuitable housing,
inferior medical care, inadequate schools, family disruption, family and
community violence, child
labor, and sexual exploitation. The consequences of sin in our communities,
such as poverty, additionally make it more difficult for parents to perform the
duties of parents. The risk of living in
these kinds of environments is that parents are often overwhelmed, distressed,
and fearful. In these situations, it can
be difficult for primary caregivers to establish a secure relationship and bond
with young children. Additionally, poor
mothers, who are often single mothers and are isolated by lack of support or
fear of community violence, are more likely to be abusive than non-poor
mothers. The isolation of caregivers in these
situations is often compounded by the absence of community support to both
encourage parents and step in to help with children.
Impact of Sin on Children’s Development
Further, the impact of sin on
children’s development often makes it more difficult for them to be in positive
relationships, which are the very thing that can help them. The absence of a secure, warm, stable,
parent-infant attachment during a child’s early life makes it difficult for
children to form intimate, lasting relationships later in life,
including a relationship with God. In
addition to impairment in relationships to primary caregivers, children living
in chronic stress, violence, and abuse, can have difficulty concentrating and
sleeping, form aggressive or sexualized play, begin to act in an uncaring way
from experiencing pain and loss, and have severe restriction in their play and
intellectual development for fear of experiencing a traumatic event again. Additionally, these children are more at risk
for psychological disorders, such as depression and post-traumatic stress
disorder, and can have impaired intellectual and moral development. These developmental difficulties make it much
more difficult for children to form stable, positive relationships if there is
no response from a loving community.
Children Need Parental Love
Parental love is nurturing, caring,
stable, and attentive to children’s needs.
Children need to have parental love that models Christ’s love for
them. They need a community to
encourage, support, and provide information to their parents, if their parents
are too overwhelmed or depressed to care for them adequately. Equipping parents to be better parents is
providing parental love for children.
Additionally, children need adults to step in and model Christ’s love to
them directly, either as individual mentors or as a loving church
community. These kinds of interventions
can reverse the effects of sin and broken relationships and help to restore
God’s image in children and in their relationships with God and others.
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