-Frank-,
Ah! Out of curiosity, what language?
Slovene.
This negative, monstrous attitude towards children is what makes them be so bad.
Absolutely not. It is acknowledging the badness that makes for good, realistic raisability.
For one, they are children, not adults. They do not understand everything you tell them.
For two, negative conditioning is very strong. If you constantly tell a child that he is bad, he will become so, regardless of how he started off.
Ask yourself: Is your nephew growing up in a perfect environment? Does he have perfect parents, perfect friends, perfect people all around him? No.
Has he never been lied to,
No. Not as far as I know, and if he has, very seldom.
A few white lies are more than enough.
Chidren are very good at detecting emotional falseness. We adults like to pretend before eachother, and are polite when indeed we may not like the other person at all. A child may not understand all the words spoken, but he can read the emotional subtext extremely well, and thus, he recognizes lying and pretending -- and learns it.
And, yet, he is still deceptive in many areas. He is already learning manipulation.
A child cannot cook for himself, dress himself, take care of himself. He has to manipulate the environment to do it for him.
If babies wouldn't cry when they are hungry -- they'd die of starvation!
has he never seen someone get away with a lie or theft? No. He sees sin, at least to some degree, daily, and he, daily, sees how people get away with it here -- and this is how he learns it.
Nope.
I cannot believe this. Are you saying the child's parents are sinnless?
No one had to teach him how to sin. We do not have cable TV. He watches very much Christian programs, his mother is always careful about the company they keep, if anyone does something bad that he shouldn't do, it is explained to him that it is bad ("They are being mean").
They moralize with a 4-year old?!
It is almost imppossible to talk someone out of what they have seen or heard, no amount of explaining will annull the experience and the effect of it.
Explaining things to young children is pointless, and it only confuses them. The rule is to not moralize with children. They should be told that something is wrong, but they don't understand our explanations; they do not have the minds of adults to understand us, and "simplifying" does not do. They are able to repeat what they have learned, but they do not understand it the way we think they should understand it.
He is in the best environment that he could be in, and he is selfish, claims everything as his own (something original. I don't know where he could've gotten that from (not being sarcastic))...
This is normal for his age; it is a kind of egocentrism that should disappear by the time he is 6. Maybe it would be good for you to consult a child psychologist who can also refer you to pertinent books.
I even remember a time when my mother paid my sister (the mother of the child) a compliment and he yelled "No!" and denied her the compliment (not even knowing what he was saying, apart from the fact that she was being told that she was good at something). This is another original thing.
He voiced his opinion. Children don't just make things up.
* * *
jnhofzinser,
I will believe that when I see a perfect child, raised by perfect parents, in a perfect environment -- and this child will still sin. Then I will believe that sin is inherent.
Of perhaps when you have children of your own?
What is inherent is lack of knowledge, experience and strength. To make a sin out of this, to call these lacks something bad and something the person has willed, is a dangerouos nonsense. Yet it is done, daily.
The only difficulty with your criteria for belief is that it will never happen: since I am not perfect, neither will my children be, and that imperfection will be passed on to my grandchildren, etc. Somewhat like the Christian doctrine of "original sin".
But the thing is if you tell a young child that he is a sinner, and that sin is something bad, the child will start thinking himself bad, and that he can never do anything right anyway, because he is a sinner. He will feel condemned -- but in ways adults don't expect him to be condemned; he will end up doubting that God, or anyone, could ever love him, since he is so bad. And it will gnaw on him, preventing him from developing a healthy self-image.
Children do not share our adult, rationalized understanding of sin!
But not quite: as posted elsewhere, "original sin" in Christianity is also a picture of "the sin that everybody commits": it is the desire "to be like God, knowing good and evil." In effect, we want to "do God's job"; we want to "be the judge". On the one hand, we want "good and evil" to be as subjective as possible, and on the other hand, we want to impose our ideas of "good and evil" on others.
But this sets in later, once one comes to strength and is able to fend for himself or is not completely dependent on others (at least in some ways).
Look around, and you will see people doing this all the time. This is how we are "wired", and it is evident in all children at a young age.
Children only try to fend for themselves, as good as they can. Is a baby selfish, when it cries because it is hungry?
) and has children, she might change her mind about this... the children that are not obviously "wired" to sin (in spite of a parent's deepest desire to think otherwise) are the exception rather than the rule.
Jumped the gun. Read the rest of the paragraph.
