How to Ruin a Child

BP 176

There are many ways to ruin a child. There are many who claim that children are very resilient, that they can readily absorb calamities like depressed parents, abuse, divorce, neglect, and so on.

There is some truth to that claim. But there is another side of the coin.

A young child holding her face

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Children are vulnerable, impressionable, and they need their environment to have at least five qualities, at a minimum: predictability, safety, healthy discipline (as opposed to permissive or authoritarian parenting), affirmation, and at least one parent who sees them and knows them in a way that qualifies as “presence.”

Children also need to not be “parentified”—elevated to be a peer alongside an anxious or fragile parent. They need to not be scapegoated or accused of being the “identified patient” (problem) in the family when the issue is actually lies with the parents. There are many ingredients a child needs to grow into a healthy adult. Some life events, of course, like the death of a parent, often cannot be averted.

In Luke 17:1ff, Jesus says, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.

The word, “little ones (mikrown),” literally means persons who are small in esteem, influence, importance, power. I believe this passage is not limited to children but could include boys and girls who certainly can be small in power and importance. Jesus has weighty words to say to anyone tempts a less powerful person (including parents who tempt their children to sin or, as Ephesians 6:4 mentions, fathers who provoke their children to anger).

So, parents, pray for mercy and patience so that you will not tempt your child to sin by your abuse, neglect, blaming, anger, divorce, moodiness, unpredictability, and even your jealousy toward your child.

One other way in which parents (and other adults) can sin against children is to deny their reality. This abuse of a child ranks right up there with projection of badness onto a child (scapegoating) and often overlaps with it. What does this denial of a child’s reality look like?

One young woman looking back on her childhood said that her mother praised, loved, and smiled at her whenever she affirmed her mother’s opinions, agreed with her version of the truth, and did not talk about any of her mother’s “misdeeds”. Even though her mother was emotionally volatile and quick to become angry with her daughter, the mother denied these behaviors and wanted those around her to deny them as well.

The mother needed to be seen as good. Said another way, she needed to not be seen as bad.

Instead of admitting to her emotional abuse, the mother had several protective responses: to simply deny she had been angry, to blame the child for making her angry, to claim that she could not remember any occasions when she was abusive. Most often, the mother practiced two primary defenses that convinced her daughter to never challenge her mother’s reality, namely, whenever her daughter accused her of doing anything wrong, she would blow up in rage or shrink away, wounded.

A person and a child playing with a pillow

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In the face of her mother’s behaviors, the daughter would either feel terrified by her mother’s explosive anger or feel shame and badness for hurting her poor mother. As a result, she increasingly learned to swallow her emotions and seal them away in her soul and even in her body. She became the accommodating girl who was brainwashed to believe that her mother was always good and right while she, the daughter, was the bad one, the one who misinterpreted reality.

There are many laws in human nature. One of them is this: If parents are too fragile to admit the reality of their sin/badness (anger, verbal abuse, alcohol or drug use, sexual abuse, etc.), they must deny their sin and teach their children to deny it as well. The child must accommodate their version of reality to fit the parent’s version—even if it involves massive denial.

The young woman I alluded to above said that if she ever pointed out her mother’s faults (even cheating on her father with other men), her mother would accuse her of being bad, selfish, stupid, unaware, mean, and misperceiving reality. In short, the mother accused her daughter of being crazy as a means to cover up her sin.

This child grew up believing that she did not perceive the world correctly. She could not trust herself. If anyone challenged her, she questioned herself immediately and was quick to defer to the other person’s reality. Does anyone see the danger in this distrust of one’s perception of reality?

This questioning of one’s reality overlaps with what Cloud and Townsend wrote in Boundaries about a child being taught by a parent that they cannot say “no”: “When parents teach children that setting boundaries or saying no is bad, they are teaching them that others can do with them as they wish. They are sending their children defenseless into a world that contains much evil. Evil in the form of controlling, manipulative, and exploitative people. Evil in the form of temptations.

“This type of boundary conflict is called compliance. Compliant people have fuzzy and indistinct boundaries; they ‘melt’ into the demands and needs of other people. . . The inability to say no to the bad is pervasive. Not only does it keep us from refusing evil in our lives, it often keeps us from recognizing evil . . . Their spiritual and emotional “radar” is broken; they have no ability to guard their hearts (Prov. 4:23).”

A child with her hands together in front of her face

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When parents teach their children to be compliant for the sake of their fragile egos, the child will grow up to be vulnerable as an adult. Similarly, when parents teach their children that their reality must be accommodated to agree with the parents’ version of reality, children will grow up to doubt what they feel, think, and even what they see. They will be quick to surrender their reality so as not to anger or wound the other person.

In summary, there are many ways to ruin a child. One way is for a fragile (sometimes evil) parent to teach the child to question their perception of reality—all for the selfish purpose of the parent defending against their own sin and badness.

Many of these children who have been taught to believe the parental reality grow up and do not trust their own minds. It is as if they have internalized the parent’s voice and now they question themselves as they go through life.

The good news is that there is healing. God could heal this adult child immediately if He so chose. Most often, He asks His child to learn to trust another person (mentor, friend, counselor, pastor) who they can internalize as they did the parent. But this time, the internalized person does not demand that they question their perception of reality but to believe it since God has placed within them a mind and a heart that can perceive reality accurately.

Do we always perceive reality correctly? No, we all view the world through some type of filter or lens and need to monitor our perceptions and submit them to the clarifying power of the Holy Spirit. But for the children whose parents taught them to lie to themselves about what they heard and saw, they need a journey of healing to recover what has been taken from them.

Thankfully for those of us who believe in God, there is good news. We serve a God of truth who says, “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God . . . The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” ~ 1 Corinthians 2:12ff

A person holding a sheep

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And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’ And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” ~ Mark 10:13-16

Jesus is all about welcoming us into truth and reality as well as inviting into His presence the mikrown, the little ones. Enter His reality and He will give you eyes that see well and ears that hear correctly.

“For we walk by faith, not by sight” ~ 2 Corinthians 5:7