I recall evangelicals loving everything James Dobson taught in the 1980s and 90s. I liked him well enough, read a couple of his books, listened to the show occasionally. He had a few things I disagreed with, but mostly I started to find him a bit tiresome as he became more political.
But a particular lesson stuck with and was applied almost ferociously when the boys arrived from Romania, and later when Kyle came to us at age twelve after some significant abandonment. Children do not fall apart because bad things happen to them. They fail to thrive because not enough good things happen to them. Loving your parents is not an even matchup with "turning out alright," but there's a lot of overlap there. We see it in adults describing their own parents - in the black community more often Mom - as someone they love and "always had my back" even though the hard evidence indicates they didn't really. Parents who made many bad decisions that affected the children, decisions that make you wonder what the definition of "love" actually is in that person's head. Yet somehow they put enough good things in that the bad things were less important.
It is a side of the trauma question, of fortifying a child (or an adult) beforehand and also bringing them out later WRT trauma. Bad things will happen to your child whatever you hope for them, and some of the bad things may even spring from you. There may be some difference between a Good Parent, who does little wrong, and a Great Parent who puts many good things into you. Best to be both, certainly. Yet if you want to focus on one, it would be on being a Great Parent.
There is a redemptive quality to it, that no matter what harm we have done another, our next act can be one of healing. It does not change or excuse what we have done, but we can at least contribute one next good thing to their happiness and development.
This is important in all loves, and it may even be what God expects in our love for Him.
2 comments:
I've always reflected that my faith in God was unshakeable perhaps chiefly because my father provided a very good model for what a loving Father would be. It never seemed doubtful, not even unlikely, that such a being existed and could be counted upon: I observed something similar every day in my youth.
George MacDonald wrote eloquently on that subject many times.
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