Magyar Egyház, 1978 (57. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1978-09-01 / 9-10. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 7 MAGYAR OUR FATHER WHO ART ON EARTH A child’s early impressions of his father become the seedbed from which will grow his first mental images of God. Before you dismiss this idea as being too far out, think about it. After all, his father is the biggest, most powerful person in the whole world of the infant’s mind. And, as soon as the child can talk, he is taught to call this big powerful person in his life “Da Da.” By the time he goes to school, he will know that he is to give his Dad’s name when his teacher asks who his father is. By this time, any exposure to the religious world will have taught the child to see God as the Father of us all. It is only natural for the child to assume that his Father in heaven is like his father on earth, but just bigger and more powerful. If the child’s experiences with his father on earth have left him feeling love and disciplined, then it is simple for the child to understand his heavenly Father loves him. He will also be able to accept his heavenly Father’s discipline because he will see it as evidence of God's love and concern for the kind of person he is becoming. For this reason, God places the primary responsibility for parenthood on the shoulders of fathers. Nowhere in the Old or New Testaments will you find God saying, “Mothers bring your children up.” However, several admonitions are given to fathers about how to raise their children. Paul says it this way: "And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Our society is beginning to discover the wisdom of this Biblical admonition. Until the 1960’s, American educators and behavioral scientists focused their attention almost exclusively on the mother-child relationship in attempts to understand the relationships between early influences in a child’s life and his later behavior. CHURCH Then, studies of the alarming rise of juvenile delinquency in the sixties began to reveal that in an overwhelming majority of cases fathers were either absent or detached from families involved. This led social scientists to suspect that the father-child relationship was more critical to personality and character development than previously believed. Studies done in the sixties and seventies are summarized and discussed in Lamb’s book, The Role of the Father in Child Development. They indicate that a child’s intellectual ability, social adjustment, sex role identity, and character are among the many aspects of personality affected by the father-child relationship. Probably no other person on earth has as great an opportunity to influence a child’s ideas about God as does his father. “Our father who art on earth” frequently shapes our attitudes toward “our Father who art in heaven.” When is the father’s biggest impact made on a child’s religious ideas? During the preschool years. Usually, a child’s God-concept is formed between the ages of five and seven. Experiences in the family up until that time are an extremely important influence in the formation of the child’s concept of God. How can a father maximize his opportunities for developing wholesome ideas about God in the minds of his children? Involve yourself with your children Some men have a built-in reluctance to becoming involved with their small children. They may feel that it is not manly to bathe babies, change diapers, and play with infants. In fact, our culture has strongly implied that the care of infants and small children is a woman’s task. However, Dad, if you want to influence your child when he is an adolescent, you must begin while lie is yet an infant. Experience has shown that teenagers tend to resent a father’s efforts to strongly influence them during their adolescence if the father has largely ignored them when they were infants and small children.
