BP18
It came out of nowhere for her.
Isabelle was five years old when her mother abruptly abandoned the family for her ‘lover’. She left behind a husband and three young children. What added insult to injury for Isabelle was that her mother divorced, remarried, and moved into a house three miles down the road from her previous home.
Isabelle suddenly had four new step siblings who received the lion’s share of her mother’s attention and money.
The little girl who lost her mother soon learned what envy was. It felt green and bitter inside her stomach and made her face hot. (As she grew older, she thought of envy as a type of emotional gangrene.) Whenever she saw her mother, which wasn’t often, she loved her and she hated her. Eventually, she forced herself to always love her mother because hating her was too upsetting to her insides.
Isabelle’s father medicated his grief and depression with work. When he finally did come home at night, he drank a lot of ‘daddy pop’ as her father called it. The pop made him sleepy and he would always fall asleep on the couch.
So it was that the little girl lost both her mother and her father, just in different ways.
To make matters even worse, Isabelle’s older brother, Matt, drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool a few years after his mother left. The neighbor had been watching the kids in the pool but claimed that she went in the house just long enough to retrieve her phone.
After Matt’s death, Isabelle’s father began to drink even more.
The structure of Isabelle’s natural personality changed after her mother left and her father checked out. She had to swallow her feelings because nobody was there to comfort her. But more than that, she made a vow never to trust adults because families died and kids drowned on their watch.
Since there were no strong adults available to discipline her, Isabelle soon encountered a significant fork in the road of life: either become very irresponsible or very responsible. She chose the latter and grew up way too fast.
By the time she was ten, she was emotionally closer to the age of eighteen in terms of responsibility. In other ways, she was much younger than her chronological age.
She became a control freak because adults and not even God could be trusted to get things right–to keep kids and family safe. She had to monitor everything since the predictable and comforting constants that were supposed to be holding her universe together were absent.
She absolutely hated surprises—even unexpected presents—because she had learned to associate surprises with terrible suffering.
To prevent surprises, she structured every part of her existence. By the age of twelve, she was making money as a babysitter so she would never have to depend on her parents to buy clothes or, one day, a car. She created a budget that she calculated to the penny.
Nothing was ever going to catch her by surprise. Nobody was ever going to hurt her again.
Speaking of constants, let me change the focus from little Isabelle to the universe for a few moments. Bear with me and I will show you where I’m going with this discussion.
We live in a finely tuned universe that supports life on earth in an amazing fashion. Norm Geisler and Frank Turek discuss these constants as part of the Anthropic Principle in their book entitled, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.
Just as children need constants in their lives to support life and growth, so the planet we live on needs constants to allow life–122 (currently known) constants to be exact!
A few of these constants are things like oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels, atmospheric transparency, moon-earth gravitational interaction, speed of light, rotation of the earth, 23-degree axil tilt of the earth, centrifugal force, water vapor levels, expansion of the universe rate and the position of Jupiter relative to earth.
To expand a bit on a few of these finely tuned factors, the oxygen level on earth holds stable at 21%. If that level was adjusted just a bit higher to 25%, fires would erupt spontaneously on our planet. If it was set to 15%, we would all suffocate.
The planet Jupiter is ideally positioned to serve as a human shield, as it were. Its gravitational field protects the earth from asteroids and other objects that could penetrate our atmosphere and do significant damage to the planetary surface and to us! Geisler and Turek refer to Jupiter as a “cosmic vacuum cleaner” for earth.
Speaking of gravity, if earth’s gravitational level was altered the slightest bit (even 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent), our sun would not exist, and neither would we.
What makes the possibility of life on earth even more astounding is that these 122 constants are like knobs on a machine that must be adjusted to an exact position or they will adversely impact the other constants. If the gravity knob were turned two degrees to the left, for example, ten other settings might be impacted that would make survival on this planet impossible. Life on earth indeed is finely tuned!
Concerning the anthropic principle, Geisler and Turek quote cosmologist Ed Harrison who says, “Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God . . . The fine-tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design.”
My point in this post is that just as 122 constants are needed in the universe to make life on earth possible, so children require many constants to support their fine tuning for physical, spiritual and psychological life. If the knobs on their hearts are not adjusted properly, children will not thrive in their own little universe.
How often have we heard the mantra bandied about that children are resilient? I’ve often heard this comment spoken to minimize the impact of a major change in a child’s life—usually a very stressful one like Isabelle encountered.
Children may be resilient, but Designer Therapy for Life believes that these little personalities need certain constants to have a fighting chance to develop a healthy self in a world that is set against life and growth.
To say it another way, children are born with many knobs (just like the universe) in their souls that need to be adjusted to optimum settings.
All children share universal constants but may also have constants specific to each individual child. A constant that all children require is an atmosphere that supports life (just like the earth).
This atmosphere needs to be equipped minimally with the following ingredients: safety, predictability, celebration, healthy discipline and a steady Presence that sees them, knows them, listens to them, comforts them and even anticipates their needs.
(Of course, many children lack these healthy constants. Tragically, they end up focusing all their energy on surviving instead of thriving.)
A metaphorical way to say it is that children need dad and mom to be Jupiter: protective. They need a parent to give them a steady supply of oxygen: love. They require sunlight: Presence, attention. They also need their world to be as predictable as the clockwork tides that are regulated by the moon.
If any of these ingredients are lacking or absent, the child will be harmed. Can you imagine the stress of going through life with little or no protection, love, stability or steady Presence?
But beyond the basic ingredients in the atmosphere of their home, children also have other constants in their personalities that need to be fine-tuned and that may vary a bit from child to child.
Isabelle, for example, needed someone strong to allow trust to flourish in her heart. If mom and dad had stayed together and steadily grown in their marriage, Isabelle wouldn’t have had to adjust the structure of her personality to survive.
Okay, maybe there’s some truth that what doesn’t kill you makes you better. But what doesn’t kill you may also necessitate that you adopt coping skills that extinguish the true self and promote the development of a false self that has been hobbled together for survival.
Safety, predictability, and consistent Presence would have allowed Isabelle to remain a child instead of growing up far too fast. Later in life, mental illness in the form of anxiety, depression, and personality disorders will manifest in Isabelle’s life due to missing the Presence of a strong parent and a more predictable environment.
Remember one universal truth about children: Minor challenges in the environment do not require the child to restructure his or her self. Rather, they more than likely will move the child toward growth and trust. Major stressors, on the contrary, demand that the child adapts the self to survive the deficits and/or threats in the environment.
Does the responsibility of raising a child sound daunting? Clearly. Children are complex creatures–after all, they were created in the image of the awesome God but then broken by sin, pride and rebellion.
Does the prospect of bringing children into the world and raising them to optimum growth appear to be an impossible calling? It is.
The heart of one child may require as many constants as our universe to grow up healthy. Consider the constant of providing sufficient stimulation while preventing overstimulation.
Bear in mind other constants like the impact of birth order, inherent temperament, physical conditions the child may have, the need for touch v. space, dovetailing of the parent’s personality with that of the child, ongoing moral development, and the parents clinging to or separating from the child out of their own needs instead of allowing the child to move close or far based on his or her growth toward healthy separation/individuation.
We won’t discuss it in this blog, but there’s another constant that has become apparent to me after being granted access to hundreds of hearts over the decades. Namely, Satan plants a primary lie (along with many secondary lies) in each child’s mind that speaks devious things to them about who they are and how they are innately unlovable. These lies darkly impact the child’s development and transparency.
Is this blog post about blaming parents? No. So many parents are amazing people!
The purpose of this post is simply to speak one primary truth: newborns, infants, toddlers children, kids, preteens, and teenagers all come into this world with finely tuned needs since they, like the universe, are designed and so need certain constants in order to sustain life.
Ideally (scarily), children need perfect conditions to grow optimally. Obviously, parents aren’t going to be perfect enough to create those perfect conditions. No parent will be able to adjust all 122 knobs to the exact setting because the parent has deficits, mental illness, blind spots caused by sin, and possibly even an empty shelf in the pantry for the very food that the child hungers for most.
Only the Heavenly Parent is perfect in this fallen world. What a practical reason to trust in God as your ultimate parenting Guide.
However, parents with children need to realize that their little person will require their full attention. They need to focus less on the child’s innate resilience and more on studying each child so they can, to the best of their ability, give their child the supplies, discipline and Presence they require.
Since parents can’t be perfect, they at least need to be good enough. This term has nothing to do with slacking off. No, it means that every parent, to the extent of their ability, must be the best they can be for each child in their care.
As a parent, young children will view you as God. They will see God through your behavior and your attitude toward them. I’ve seen many children deconstruct their faith in adulthood because they subconsciously transferred their experience with a shaming, absent, angry, selfish parent onto the heavenly Father and ended up rejecting Him along with the human parent.
Yes, it is true that every daughter and son will choose their own way when they grow up. In the meantime, give them every reason to see God in you and to remember that when life takes them down into the darkest valley, the constancy of your love will whisper in their hearts. They will hear the words, Come home, sweetheart. Return to me, buddy.
You will need to sacrifice for your daughter or your son (or for your niece, nephew, friend’s child, neighbor’s child, younger sibling, student, grandchild). I’m not advocating a kid-centric world in the sense of spoiling children with material things and permissive parenting. Rather, I’m saying that children require steady, close Presence.
Listen, make eye contact, play, pray, sing, observe closely, love, discipline for their good instead of punishing out of your need to vent anger, know them well enough that you will hear even what they’re not saying, hold them physically and emotionally.
Honor not just reality but their perceptions as well. For example, if your child wakes you up at 2:00 in the morning and tells you there’s a monster under her bed, go and look for the monster. Then tuck her into bed, rub her back and sing to her.
By all means, put away your cell phone. Make eye contact with your child instead of a screen. Realize that the only thing you can bring to heaven with you is people—including your sons and daughters–whether they’re two years old or fifty-two. If it turns out that you must sacrifice something like golf or a television show or building the big deck or coaching yet another youth team or . . . do it.
Even if all you do in exchange is to stay up late, lie in your front yard with your child and look at the stars.
Maybe the worst thing you can do is get lulled into the lie that a child is ordinary. That’s a lie you can believe about the finely tuned universe, too.
The days are long (but the years are short) so the amazing miracle of a child can slowly become a burden, a nuisance, or someone to give less and less time to as the demands of this world capture your attention.
The enemy of our souls wants you to become habituated with even the astounding things in this world.
In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis addresses this idea. At one point in his book, a senior demon comments to a junior demon who has been assigned to minimize a human’s experience of God, “Keep pressing on him the ordinariness of things.”
Be aware of being hypnotized into the belief that a child is ordinary.
Gaze into your son’s eyes and see the creation that God has made. Look into that little girl’s soul and see eternity in her heart. Hopefully, your son and daughter will one day be jars of clay who house the God of the universe within them. Then they will shine brighter than the sun.
A child, like the universe we live in, is fine tuned.
By design.
Beautifully, for life.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them ~ Psalm 139:15,16
See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my father who is in heaven ~ Jesus