How Well Do You Know Your Kids?
How well do you know your children and the kids you work with at school, Sunday School, Awana, etc. Most of us would answer, “very well.” I ask that question because children communicate in ways we can miss. We know infants among us communicate in their own ways. They lack the ability to tell us in words they need food, or their diaper changed, but an observant parent picks up on that need quite well.
Even as children age, they often lack the ability or vocabulary to communicate their thoughts, but they do communicate. I know a little guy who a couple years ago became infatuated with eyeglasses. He loved to wear eyeglass frames without lenses and cutout eyeglass frames with construction paper, color them, and wear them. I don’t remember him ever saying, “I think eyeglasses are cool.” But that is exactly what he was communicating in his playtime.
Many years ago, a national father-figure by the name of Art Linkletter, had a television show titled, Kids Say the Darndest Things. It was a quite popular show because kids do say the darndest things. They communicate with words and actions. They see more, hear more, and observe more than we think they do.
When our son was young, he began having dreams and nightmares that awakened him in fits of terror. We would go to his room, hold him, and console him. When we asked him what was wrong, all he could say was, “I had a bad dream.” He didn’t know the cause and we did not know the cause. Through a process of elimination, we determined it was a certain cartoon he was watching that had a lot of ghosts, goblins, and villains chasing people. While he was sleeping, in his mind, he was reliving those cartoon scenes. We curtailed his watching of this television show, and the terrible nightmares went away.
When I was in seminary, a fellow classmate was married, and they have three children. One of those children is deaf. One day he heard his other two children running through the house screaming. As my friend sought to determine the nature of the ruckus, the deaf son was chasing his siblings around the house with a butcher knife in hand. Immediately that activity ceased, but the greater concern was – where did he get this idea? My friend started watching cartoons with his children with the sound muted (the way his deaf son watched television). He shared with me it is amazing the violence we miss in cartoons because of the music being played.
Our kids communicate to us with words, but also through their playtime, their artwork, and in other nonverbal ways. If we can properly interpret what they are saying, they are telling us a lot. The Bible tells us these precious little ones are “a heritage from the Lord.” May God richly bless you with wisdom as you raise them and communicate with them.
