All the works and doings of God are wonderful, but none more awful than His great work of election and reprobation; when we consider how many good parents have had bad children, and again how many bad parents have had pious children, it should make us adore the sovereignty of God, who will not be tied to time nor place, nor yet to persons, but takes and chooses, when and where and whom He pleases. . . "
But, that said, I have become more aware than ever of the inestimable importance of early training in the home. For four months now we have had two little girls in our home, they were 4 and 5 when they arrived, they are now 5 and 6 years old. They have lived a chaotic life - both parents in and out of jail, both struggling with deep rooted substance abuse problems, both having grown up in families that were as dysfunctional as the one they created together. The girls have had no "home" to speak of in the true sense of the word, only a series of places that provided shelter from the elements, but no shelter for their spirits.
When they arrived in our home they had incredibly short attention spans; S would ask to color and in the time it took to get out the crayons and coloring books she would have lost interest in coloring. Neither could sit through a children's video. I wondered if they had been tested for learning disabilities; clearly, I thought, they had them.
They strung words together to say things or ask for things, but often the words were not even in the correct order. They seldom bothered to search for the right word when they were uncertain of it, but just trailed off or resorted to, "you know that thing."
They had never sat through a family dinner; they understood nothing of common courtesy in a household: they would wake up early in the morning in the room they shared with two of our children and and laugh and talk loudly until the whole house was awake. Their notions of bathroom etiquette were similarly dismal.
They knew no nursery rhymes, had never heard of "eenie meenie minie moe," had never had a birthday party nor ever hung a Christmas stocking. Their language was salty, to put it kindly. My children learned a lot of words they had never heard before - much to my chagrin.
After four months here they are vastly different (though still very needy) children. They nearly always remember please and thank you. They wait to eat until prayer has been said and everyone is served. They always beg to be the one to pray. They can often play for a half hour or more on their own and can usually amuse themselves. They ask before they use things that belong to someone else. They can get up early without waking everyone else. They can finish a puzzle and at least one of them can listen to several books in a sitting.
When they first arrived in early February, S's kindergarten teacher had already decided she would need to repeat the grade because she seemed hopelessly behind the other children. She is getting ready to pass to first grade in a few weeks. She loves to help around the house and is the first to comfort someone who is hurt or unhappy. For the first time yesterday I heard her correct her own grammar when she began, "She don't, I mean she doesn't. . . " In sunday school today she asked to be "the last one to choose" in order to let others go first!
They have learned a lot in the last four months, but so have I. I honestly never understood how much of children's training is non-verbal, even implicit. I was stymied at first over how many unacceptable behaviours these little urchins exhibited - and completely baffled that so many things had to be TAUGHT them. I never remember teaching my children to not always expect to be first, to modulate their tone of voice in a public place, to refrain from whispering about people in front of them, to not just grab whatever they wanted, to sit down at the dinner table, to not monopolize the conversation, to speak respectfully to adults, to come when called, to not interrupt the person who is reading, and so on. I could not figure out why my children seemd so charming all of a sudden, and these children seemd so recalicitrant, rude, unicivilized, unkind. I found it easy to dislike them.
I realized that in a loving, well-disciplined home children just "catch" these things and, for the most part, become pleasant and easy to have around. Because these girls had never seen adults or older siblings model good behavior, because the had never been consistently rewarded for good behavior but punished harshly or capriciously for misdeeds, they had never learned clear rules or expectations, had indeed never learned right from wrong, politeness from rudeness, acceptable behavior from inacceptable, kindness from cruelty. I realized I had to figure out how to teach behaviors I had always taken for granted in children. It was almost like teaching English As A Second Language - they were clueless about what good behavior even looked like; common courtesy was a language they had never learned whereas it was my children's native tongue.
So I have worked hard at teaching, reinforcing, kindly pointing out errors and rewarding good behaviors. But the greatest thing I have done for them, I think, is allow them to concentrate on the work of children - observing and imitating, by giving them a safe place to be. In our home they have been relieved of the constant anxiety of wondering what terrible thing will befall them next, of trying to take care of the adults in their lives.
In this same context, I have been thinking about public schools - reports I've heard on NPR about failing schools trying yet one more way to fix things, but school is not the problem, nor can it be the answer. Home has a thousand times the influence of school. It's funny, that while school can be a potent influence for evil, it appears severely limited in its influence for good. It is the rare case where a child with a poor home life can be turned around by school, and that, I would venture, is usually not the influence of the program or the classes, but of a particular adult who takes an interest in the child's life or who inspires the child to rise above his circumstances.
I remember one day trying to explain to S why it was important that she tell me the truth. I explained that the consequence of lying was that she would not be trusted in the future, and why it was good to have "the big people in your life" (I could not say parents because they are not in the picture) trust you. Grown-ups, I explained, need to be able to trust their children.
It's much more important for children to be able to trust the big people in their lives to do what grown-ups are supposed to do. If they can't, the consequences are dire.
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