Cloning Ourselves vs Celebrating Our Childrens Innocence
Setting life in motion, we all too often create an ‘assumptive environment’ where we play out the fate of somebody else’s destiny to an erroneous conclusion, disguising their fate as our dream.
By Robert Bautner
For most people raising children is fun, rewarding, and a lot of work. We know in the back of our heads that each of our children have a unique personality. This personality is a function of their innocence. They have a unique identity and divine destiny, but that doesn’t stop us from attempting to form our children in our own image. It is as if we expect our children to be clones of ourselves. We want to surround ourselves with mini-mes.
A child’s personality is often overlooked because we lack information. After all, raising a child in our own image comes naturally.
If our children appreciate our parenting, raising them is a whole lot easier than raising them if they are rebellious. But rebellious behavior, or at least our interpretation of rebellious behavior, occurs when our children don’t fit our mold. This means we are in cloning mode in that we are attempting to clone ourselves through our children. Yet children have their own innocent personalities, and they express them when they are uninterrupted by our suffocating power over them.
They must be actively encouraged to express their unique innocence. If they are not encouraged, they must be allowed to convert to be who they are when they come of age. At some point in their lives they will go from your cloning process to conversion to who they are. Sometimes this only comes through dire experiences.
Too often we don’t realize that we have suffocated our children’s innocent personalities until they are teenagers or adults. And then we tend to blame them for being different and for straying from our teachings.
Our motivations are based in our deep love for our children, but our methods are based on the idea that our way of being in the world is best, and our children should be just like us. After all, if they are our clones, we believe that our home lives and our work with them will be more harmonious and much more predictable. We expect that it will soften the workload. And we believe that it will be a lot easier to raise them, even when we know children are anything but predictable or easy to raise.
The truth is far from this idyllic vision of family life. The truth is that to be surrounded by mini-mes would be exhausting, irritating, and redundant.
True harmony within a family is the coming together of different personalities, different modes of building, that creates real harmony through the free expression of each person’s innocence.
Where do we go wrong as parents? At what point do we make that critical mistake of attempting to force our children into the mold of our own innocence?
At what point do we fail to validate their innocent nature and divine destiny?
The biggest mistake we make is that we don’t often recognize the innocent personality types of our little crumb crunchers. This leads to us raising our children in our own image, creating resentment in the long run. The residual effect is that a relational chasm develops, and we don’t know how to bridge the gap. it leaves a daunting feeling of loss in the pit of our stomachs.
As our children become adults they either conform to our expectations, thus shattering their own innocence, or they stray from our vision, thus shattering our dreams for them. In either case, a riff develops. This in turn can leave a seemingly insurmountable, even ominous divide in our relationship, and it becomes necessary to repair the deep scars to restore unity between us.
All too often, we wonder, ‘where did I go wrong?’ We might say to ourselves, ‘blood is thicker than water’ to validate our position and our behavior toward our children. In reality ‘identity is thicker than blood.’
Yet there is hope. Even if our opportunity to raise our children is past, because they have reached adulthood and are no longer under our wing. Indeed, raising adult children who have persevered despite our cloning attempts is awe-inspiring.
When we see that our children have embraced their own personalities, we have the choice to embrace their innocence, their true personalities and identity as God created them, as they pursue their divine destiny.
Simultaneously, they have the choice to offer us forgiveness for any short-sightedness we may have acted from when they were children. All of this is only possible under the guidance of innocence.
This is a healing process. And within this process, there is a critical point at which a conversation must take place to repair the damage done to the relationship.
A good place to start with your child, no matter what age they are, is ‘which house would you build?’ Do they like the straw house best? Or the brick house? Or the stick house? This question starts you on the path toward understanding their personality type.
More importantly, if we have multiple children, it must lead us to ask ourselves: ‘whose houses did I blow down?’
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