Your Children Need Your Help
In this generation especially, our children are constantly surrounded by strong immoral influences. Many of their friends will look on anyone who doesn't succumb to these influences as a square.
Today's young people need all the help they can get. Many are crying out for help, but there is no one who will listen or show them the way.
Read this pathetic letter written to us by Bonita W. from Baltimore, Maryland:
"I am a very frightened and confused girl of 19. I find that I just can't communicate with any of my family, and there is really no elder I have faith enough in to talk to. The only real satisfaction I get out of my tension-filled existence is through your radio programs and magazines. This is why I seek your personal assistance with my problems. My family is a major pain to me. There is no real outgoing love and compassion. Each of us is just concerned about himself. My mother says I'm 19 and should be grown enough to handle my own problems, but I'm not. I'm scared of I don't know what; life I guess. I have questions that confront me every day. But my mother seems afraid to stay in the same room with me long enough for me to start asking these questions. I tried confiding in friends, but they know really no more than I, telling me to do 'my own thing,' stop worrying and get all the fun out of life while I can. I've read your publications on how to live, about dating, etc. and they all make good sense. I want very much to do these things, but it's so hard for one person to stand alone. . . . I want friends; I can't stand being alone and defeated, and I want to be told what to do. I want somebody to try to understand me and give me some advice. You are the only one I have enough faith in to turn to. I will try very hard to abide by what you tell me. Only please tell me."
"Only please tell me!"
How many of your children have the same anguished, crying questions in their minds — afraid to voice them for fear of perhaps the same answers as given to Bonita?
What a tragedy that so many parents never learn to communicate with their children!
All because many parents haven't gotten rid of the wrong teachings — or lack of teaching they received from their parents and others.
Don't Be Naive
Don't be so naive as to think that your children are not exposed to just about everything. One mother in California said: "My daughters come home from school and ask me, 'Mother, what does this word and that word mean?' Believe me, they have heard everything!"
And indeed they have — no matter what part of the world they live in.
Never have the problems of our young people been so great. Never have they been exposed to so much so soon! They desperately need all the help parents can give them. The only way to give them this help is by communicating with them.
Answer Your Children's Questions
A little child's problems can be mountainous in his or her little mind. To the parent these are too often considered trivial. The children are laughed at and shoved away. If you don't take the time to painstakingly discuss your children's little questions and problems, it could be something (as has been scientifically proved) to affect them the rest of their physical lives.
Parents have to use their minds to study to stay abreast of the questions that are asked of them. If you don't have the answers, get them. A young person will not be satisfied otherwise.
Communication is absolutely vital to the success of a family. You dare not ignore it!
III. Love Your Family
Six teenage drug users, wearing Halloween masks to protect their anonymity, recently confronted the "straight world" in, an American city to ask for "love and understanding."
These young people sat on a panel to answer questions from about 50 parents at a large church.
"You could try giving a little more love and a little less money," one young man told the assembled adults who were asking how to discourage drug use.
Some of the parents were puzzled at how to show love and understanding to the young drug users in a way that might help them kick the habit. But the youths seemed to think the parental attitude is more important as a preventive measure.
"What I really needed before I started all this was something you can't buy or find in a pill. It's — you know — love," said one.
The vital importance of love in the lives of every human being cannot be overemphasized. But today we are living in a self-centered, loveless world. Everyone is basically out for himself.
Love has to be expressed. Yet today real love is ever so rarely expressed. Many today are unbalanced because genuine love has not been expressed in their lives and the lives of their parents before them.
Many of us could count on our fingers the times our parents have kissed and embraced us. How long has it been since you've embraced, kissed and told each of your children that you love him or her?
When possible, parents should not let their children go to bed — or anywhere of any duration — without embracing and loving.
Be Equal in Your Attention
Often the first and last children are shown more attention and love than the ones in between. New parents usually feel their first baby is so fragile, a great deal of attention had to be devoted to it — and this is only right. But when the second and third children are born, parents realize they are not quite as fragile as they had thought. They too often then go to the other extreme of neglect. The last child, however, once again gets special attention because he or she is the "baby."
Don't let this happen in your family. Make sure you are being equal in the way you express love to your children.
Another problem is that some parents feel that once a child has grown beyond babyhood, love and attention are no longer necessary. This is especially true for children between the oldest and youngest. Parents should realize that there a time when all children at all stages of life aren't in desperate need of attention and love.
A very heartrending point in a boy's life can be when his father decides he is getting too old to be embraced. To the boy's dismay and perplexity, the father introduces the handshake — love (?) expressed at a distance.
In the September 1969 issue of Reader's Digest, appeared an article, "What is a Father?" One of the author's most outstanding memories with his father, who is now deceased, was when he came home from military service and went out to the field where his father was plowing. The father pulled him into his arms and embraced him.
Children who are neglected tend to become sullen, resentful and disobedient. When the reason for this behavior is investigated, it is often found that the child is seeking the attention and love that has been denied him.
Parents should never neglect any of their children. They should always exercise caution in whatever is done with any of them. When gifts or attention are given, great care should be taken to make sure that this is equal with all children.
The Awesome Power of Love
It has been proved scientifically that the most important experience in anyone's life is love.
It has been found that even in the life of a baby, love is such an essential part of its nourishment that unless a baby is loved, the child will not develop as a healthy organism — psychologically, spiritually or even physically. Though the child may be physically well nurtured, without love a child will WASTE AWAY and DIE.
Because this was not understood, during the first two decades of this century the majority of babies under one year of age who entered hospitals and children's institutions never emerged alive.
Gradually it began to be recognized that it was the lack of love experiences, the emotional deprivation, the absence of mothering, that was causing the tragic ill effects in foundling institutions. It was also found that physical stunting and dwarfism can result from the lack of normal love and affection (see "The Awesome Power of Human Love" in Reader's Digest, Feb., 1963).
Dr. Adrian Yonder Veer, in The Unwanted Child, says that maternal rejection may be seen as the "caustic factor in almost every type and every individual case of neurosis or behavior problem in children.
"A child learns to love by being loved. When it is not loved it fails to learn to love.
"Such children grow up to be persons who find it extremely difficult to understand the meaning of love; hence, they enter into all sorts of human relationships in a shallow way."
Love is creative. It greatly enriches the lives of both the receiver and the giver. Are you enriching your life and the lives of those in your family by continually expressing love to them?