Protecting Children

On Oct 28, 2007 , GE asked a question about how to protect children. This was asked as a comment to a previous post. I gave my opinion in a response comment. Someone later suggested that I make my response a separate post, so I'm duplicating it here.

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I can't constantly be protecting my kids - its just not possible. Therefore, I have to teach them to protect themselves. Physical protection is the easiest to learn, so we start there. Other ways to teach kids to protect themselves are to teach them that what goes into their minds effects them whether they realize it or not. This is very important to understand. Everything they read, watch, listen to, and the people they interact with all effect them. Therefore we must monitor what goes in. Likewise, they are effecting other people. Second we must give them a firm foundation in the truth. To parents who don't believe that absolute truth exist, this task will be impossible because they will quickly realize they have no "real truth" to teach. To those who believe that there are absolutes (social absolutes, moral, civic, relational, etc) this task is easier.

Once kids know what the truths are (also known as teaching right and wrong) they can quickly spot when something falls outside this area.

Now, kids like frameworks and they actually look for life to fit within the framework their parents (teachers) describe. As soon as the kids are old enough to see things not "fitting in" they will start to ask a lot of "why" questions. This is where a great opportunity comes to discuss the situation with the child and to help them decide how (and if) that situation fits into the truth framework they've been taught all those years earlier.

In addition, kids need to have self confidence and the confidence to fail. These are learned skills. Some of it comes from watching their parents have self confidence as well as watching how their parents react when they "fail" in some way. Do the parents own up to the mistake or blame others (or blame a situation)? Kids need to encounter situations where they can fail safely so they can turn to their parents for help and guidance. They also need to have situations where they can press themselves beyond their limits and learn that they can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

With this "training" (mental and physical), as the kids get older and experience more and more of the world and with mom and dad around them less and less, they will have the means to identify situations that will harm them and the means protect themselves from those situations. The means of protecting my be to leave the situation, avoid a potential problem... it varies, but being able to identify a bad situation is essential to getting out of it safely or avoiding it all together.

Is it a perfect system - no. Also, there is one wildcard that I didn't mention. The ability to choose. All people have the ability to know what is "right" and still choose "wrong". However, I have it on good authority that people who are trained early will generally follow that training as they get older.