6. Morals
and Values
Laughing at Bad
I was leading a community of Jesus followers in the
North of England, when I noticed that there was a particular parent who every
time their child did something bad, they laughed at the child and noted how
funny their disobedience, wrong action, and sometime destructive action was.
Taking this particular parent on one side, I said
please do not continue to do what you are doing to your child. This is putting
wrong things into his head. He is
beginning to think wrong. He thinks he do can do wrong things and not get into
trouble. In fact everyone thinks it’s funny. However, as he grows up, the rest
of society will not think it’s funny. The
police will not think it is funny, and I will be sad, as I council you when he
is in prison. I was laughed at for being
silly. “He is just a child!” I was told.
I stayed in the North East of the UK long enough for
my predictions to come true. I remember, late one evening, my wife and I
sitting in our house, there was a knock on the door. There standing on the
doorstep was the parent I had tried to talk sense about what thought patterns
she was allowing in to her young Childs head.
The parent was in tears. I
invited her in and to sit down and tell me what was wrong. Through the tears it turned out that the
child I had talked about, now a teenager had been arrested and was in prison
and could I please help, the whole family was in disarray. I resisted the temptations to say “Well - I
told you so”, and went to the house and talked though with the family how to
best help the imprisoned young person.
It matters right from day one what you have put into
your head. It matters what you, as you get older, allow into your thoughts. It
matters, as you mature, what you allow to stay there. It will affect your life. What goes in to
those thoughts will come out in life actions.
I would put a rider in here, in that I think, as
children grow up, we must be careful to distinguish between disobedience and
accident. My wife and I fostered for
many years some 30 plus children. Children often break things. Often, my
children would be puzzled when they had broken something. Often, when you asked,
“Who broke this?” it turned out that it was Mr Nobody. However, when there were children who were
brave enough to say! It was me”, I would then ask how it happened. Often it
would be, “I think I was going a bit too fast past the table and I slipped and
knocked the vase of the edge, and it broke”.
“So, did you do that on purpose?” I would ask. “No!” was the usual
answer. “It was an accident.” My reply
would THEN be “OK! Well, try to be more careful next time. We liked that vase.
However, as it was not done on purpose, that’s fine, end of story.”
Often children would ask me, “Why don’t you get mad?”
I would explain, “If I had said to you, “Do not throw the ball in the house”,
and you then did so, and broke something, that would make me mad. That is
disobedience. Accidents on the other
hand are just that – accidents. And whilst we don’t want accidents, the
response from me should be different to that of disobedience, even though the
outcomes are the same, i.e. something is broken.”
It took some time for that particular idea to sink in,
but usually we got there. To finish
today, maybe I should quote Dr Donald Howard on the subject of children. He
said, “We need to remember that children do more right things than they do
wrong things. However we complain more
about the wrong than we give praise for the right action.” Maybe we should start to think about praising
people, as well as Children for the good that is done. Let’s try it.
Adrian Hawkes
For UCB
Edited by Kirsty de Paor
W. 708
