Children Need God, Too

Growth in the Child’s Sphere

God created the family as a school of love to naturally influence people to be other-centered and pull them away from their self-centerdness.

Each person is required to give up more and more the love of just self and give more to others in order to experience fulfillment.

The family school of love works step by step naturally to pull people out of self-centeredness into other-centeredness. This process begins in the child's realm.

A child learns to obey and control impulses, including the aggressive ones, out of love for their parents and a strong desire for their approval.

The child learns to take care of things, clean up, prevent messes, do their homework, and respect others and property.

As Fraiberg writes, “There are obligations in love even for little children. Love is a given, but it also

earned. At every step of the way in development, a child is obliged to give up territories of his self-love in order to earn parental love and approval.”

To relate well with his or her parents, children need to relate well and kindly to siblings and playmates.

A child learns that his good relationship with his parents depends in part how well he or she treats his or her brothers or sisters, classmates, and friends.

As they grow, the 'horizontal' relationship to their parents takes on a life and significance of its own, even though they are never fully separated in a relationship from them.

Adolescent Children

As children try to define their identities and emotional boundaries as they grow to adolescence, the relationship to please their parents may become stormy and difficult.

Influences outside the family hold sway as adolescence forge relationships to the larger society and world.

As their family's moorings loosen, children may become emotionally tossed around, and experience great highs and lows.

It is important for parents to continue to nourish and assert this main bond of parent/child and the values it represents and recognize the growing importance of their peers and their child's independent identities.

Parents should do this to the sacrifice of their child's peer's influence and some of their child's decision-making power. In order for them to continue to growing in the child's realm of heart this is necessary.

“Our son was succeeding academically and socially in public school,” recounts Mona, a mother of three. “It was the social success that worried us! He’s sweet and smart and a good athlete, and girls called him, asked him for dates, and to go steady with them.

“Our son knew our standard on early dating, and he tried hard to withstand the peer pressure, but it was definitely confusing for him during this vulnerable time of his life.

“When we told him we were enrolling him in a religious school where students’ families and the faculty shared our values, he was upset at first. But soon he underwent a transformation.

“He became more and more responsible and, in this supportive environment, his faith grew and grew. I thank God, for many reasons, that we as parents made that tough decision.”

One pastor, Dave, is in favor of parents taking a strong stand when their children may not be going in the right direction. “Taking a kid out of school and finding him a new one, grounding him or doing whatever else you need to do to pull him up short—that might look like shutting him down,” he says.

“But in fact, it’s giving him the possibility of a whole new life. In almost every case I’ve seen where the parents took a strong stand, it worked.”

Dave also commented that children will sense their parents deep love for them with such actions and respond with gratitude.

This is an illustration of the two points of the child's realm of heart shown during adolescence: First, it demonstrates that the relationship with parents is the primary one superseding. 

Also, directing relationships with peers and this vertical relationship with parents and their parents' values are crucially important to their growth.

Second, it shows that adolescence is a time when the young people mind questions everything and needs to be directed toward God.

When we look at adolescence from a spiritual point of view, there is more than the child forming a separate identity from one's parents in psychological terms. It involves expanding the sphere of children's love to include the ultimate Parent, God.

The fulfillment of the child’s realm of heart is to relate to God with filial piety.

This truly means to respond to God with love, faith and obedience like that of a loving, trusting, responsible child.

“We never know the love of the parent 'till we become parents ourselves.”

Henry Ward Beecher made this observation which highlights how filial love of a child evolves through growing and facing the responsibilities that come with being an adult.

A new understanding and sympathy for parent's roles come as sons and daughters become a spouse, a parent, the breadwinner, a middle-aged caretaker of others and a responsible community member.

As sons and daughters rise to the more advanced realms of heart, spousal and parental realms, they grow to appreciate those who had these responsibilities before which they now face.

When children expand to a higher level of heart, they will appreciate through understand and service to their parents.

The long accumulation of a child’s debt to his or her parents begins to be repaid with gratitude.

There may be the time when the child grows up and becomes his or her own parents caretaker.

Some parents become a child again and lean heavily on their sons and daughter's strength. At these times, they assume the parental role toward his or her own parents. 

 Changing their diapers, paying old debts, settling the family estate and becoming the patriarch or matriarch of the family while urging their parents to take a rest.

When parents become elderly, the child's world/realm of heart comes full circle.

As one woman said: 

"As a young Catholic I was inspired by the saints. I had always wanted to do things like work with Mother Teresa in India, but most of my life has not been so glamorous. After college I became a teacher in an elementary school. 

"And then my mother had a stroke and I had to drop out of teaching and help her for two years; bathe her, care for her bedsores, cook, pay the bills, run the house. At times I wanted to complete these responsibilities and get back to my spiritual life. Then one morning it dawned on me—I  was doing the work of Mother Teresa, and I was doing it in my own home.

A child's love which is mature may involve taking up tasks to fulfill their parent's unrealized dreams.

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowsky, who created the portraits on Mt. Rushmore, accepted a commission in 1947 offered by Lakota chief Standing Bear to carve a massive tribute to the great Native American chief Crazy Horse out of a mountain in South Dakota.

Knowing how much the project meant to the Native Americans who had had their sacred Black Hills violated by the Mt. Rushmore project, he determined not only to do a bust, but to do a full figure of a man on horseback.

This bust was going to be ten times larger than his Mt. Rushmore project. He dedicated decades to the project, but left it unfinished after he died in 1982.

His children comforted him before his death and committed to bring his dream project to completion.

This is an example of children's love by becoming a person who makes his or her parents proud.

Confucius said, “True filial piety consists in successfully carrying out the unfinished work of our forefathers and transmitting their achievements to posterity.”

This was echoed by Thomas Macaulay, Western poet, when he wrote:

“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?”

The person the child becomes as an adult is a gift laid at the altar of his or her parents’ love.

A child's mature heart is reflected in his or her relationship with God.

“There is a common saying, 'What you are is a gift from God. What you become is your gift to Him.”

When we return appreciation and devotion to God for all He has done for us throughout our life and history this reflects His nature. 

 It also makes His dreams, concerns and tasks our own which are hallmarks of filial piety and a true child's heart toward our ultimate Parent.

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This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook, "Educating for True Love" written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon's philosophy on family and love.