Child Care
Child Care
If we want to speak about the stages of age in pastoral care, the first stage we speak about is early childhood.
Here we ask: when does child care begin?
The answer is: before he is born, while he is a fetus in his mother’s womb.
This is so that we may avoid, as much as possible, transmitting to him anything that may harm him.
How many books have been published about caring for the fetus and the pregnant mother. We advise parents to be concerned with reading some of them.
Care for the fetus includes caring for him medically and psychologically as well.
Here we advise the mother during her pregnancy to avoid any nervous or psychological tension, so that her blood is not disturbed by it and she transmits to her child what may trouble him. She should also avoid any disturbance or violent shocks to her body during the period of pregnancy. Before pregnancy, she was responsible only for herself; but now that she has become pregnant, she has also become responsible for her fetus, and for how he will be born in a sound condition.
From the health aspect, she is responsible for him as a fetus and as a child.
He is nourished from her while he is a fetus, and it is required that she provide him with sufficient nourishment so that he may be born sound, complete, and healthy. The body needs calcium for building bones, protein for building tissues, and iron for building blood. Therefore, the pregnant woman needs specific nutrition, especially in the last months of her pregnancy. The laws of the Church grant dispensations to pregnant and nursing women (in wisdom and not in laxity).
All this falls within the responsibility of both the father and the mother together.
Therefore, the husband must treat his pregnant wife with good treatment during her pregnancy, as well as during the period of childbirth and while she is breastfeeding the child.
It is, of course, assumed that the treatment should be good throughout life, but especially during the periods of pregnancy and breastfeeding, out of care for her and for their newly born child.
They must also present him for baptism without delay.
When we baptize a child and hand him to his mother, we say to her: here is your son, pure and clean; he has come out of baptism in righteousness, symbolized by the white garments he wears. Preserve this righteousness that we receive in the new birth (Titus 3:5) (Galatians 3:27).
The upbringing required for the child is to train him practically in the religious life, together with teaching him the principles of religion.
In the past, we used to face this question: is religion transmission or teaching?
The answer is: it is both together. We transmit to him the religious life through tradition, good example, and practice. If we make the sign of the cross, he will make the sign of the cross. If we prostrate, he will prostrate. If we become accustomed to prayer before eating, he will also become accustomed to it. If we chant, he will learn chanting as well. And likewise in the rest of matters.
Likewise, we must present to him religious concepts by transmission.
He accepts everything in belief, because he has not yet reached the age of dialogue. And the more the religious truths are established in his mind during his childhood, the more stability they will have that accompanies him continually.
Also, the child’s memory is a deposit in our hands.
We must fill it with what benefits him, before society later takes hold of it and stuffs it with information outside the scope of our choice.
It is a virgin memory, capable of bearing a great deal of information, like a new tape for a recorder or a video on which nothing has yet been recorded. Added to this is the child’s desire to know, and his many questions for which he wants answers, and the answer becomes fixed in his mind.
So do not belittle children’s memory, and do not neglect it.
Do not think that it can only bear trivialities. It can bear many things. Today, through computers, much higher levels of information are presented to the child than those that were presented to us when we were children.
In the past, the first program we used to present for service was a program for children of kindergarten age. But it seems that now it is necessary to put a program for the child’s memory in the stage of early childhood, the pre-school stage, and the program is presented to the family to help it, and also to nursery schools.
There is no doubt that nursery schools need an educational curriculum.
This is in addition to play, health care, and recreational means. Even play itself has a curriculum that is in harmony with the child’s psychology and mentality at that stage of age.
The child also needs that we bind him to us by love.
Love in the home, within the circle of parents, family, and relatives; and love in the church, from the priest father and the servants; and love in every other field.
Children who do not receive their sufficiency of love in their early years may be exposed to deviation, or they may search for any love outside the scope of the family and the church.
The child is ready to obey the one he loves, and to resist the one he hates.
Even when he grows up and goes to school, he benefits from the lesson given by a teacher he loves, and he dislikes the lesson of the harsh teacher or the one whose personality does not help him to love him.
But love does not mean harmful pampering.
Because some mothers, in pampering their children, flatter them in many mistakes, and may even encourage them to gain their love.
Yet in pampering, they fall into many mistakes, including:
- Perhaps she does not care about his mistakes, saying: “He’s a child; he doesn’t know!” Under this phrase, she leaves him to err without guidance and without any direction, and he continues like this until he becomes accustomed to error without embarrassment.
We do not mean by guidance a long explanation in details, for perhaps his mentality cannot bear length. Rather, at a certain age it is enough for him to know what is permissible for him to do and what is not permissible. If he asks about the reason, he can be answered with a brief phrase.
- Perhaps the mother encourages him in error by laughing and showing her delight in what he does.
She may recount what he did to others, and they laugh as well. The child then feels that what he did has aroused the family’s interest or admiration, so he repeats it, and perhaps teaches it to others, and thinks that the mistake which aroused laughter is a virtuous act.
- Pampering in dealing with the child may reach the point of defending him in his mistakes, if some criticize him or if the father wants to discipline him.
We can guide him without tiring him and without being harsh with him. But it is not right that in protecting him or defending him we say that he did not make any mistake at all. Because by denying his mistake, we ourselves fall into an educational mistake. In defending him, we can say: “He will not do this mistake again,” or “He did not know that these results would happen.”
- The opposing position taken by the parents confuses the child.
The father says that he made a mistake and deserves punishment, while the mother says that he did not make a mistake. Here the child does not know what the sound judgment on his actions is. The scales and judgments become confused before him, and he may come out with a sad conclusion: either that his father is harsh and unjust, or that his mother errs in judgment, or that she knows the truth but lies to save him.
Here the matter moves from judging his action to judging his parents. The sound situation is that he realizes that the wrong action he committed is a mistake by everyone’s judgment, but what is required is forgiving him and not punishing him, and sufficing with guiding him.
- Perhaps the reason for the wrong defense of the child is that he is an only child.
Indeed, very often the only child enjoys very wide pampering from his parents, which may include overlooking his mistakes, not angering him no matter what he does, and being keen on his feelings in a way in which discipline completely disappears. It may even eliminate merely making him feel that he made a mistake, so as not to hurt his sensitive feelings. All this harms him. It is not love, but wrong pampering.
- My advice to parents is not to stop procreation by their own choice, content with one child.
Every child wants a brother for him, to accompany him, talk to him, play with him, joke with him, tell him things, and may even quarrel with him and reconcile with him. Quarreling is a transient color of dealing with a friend, and soon the atmosphere becomes clear again.
- It is difficult for the child to feel that he is an only individual, compelled to search for friendship outside the scope of the family.
He tries to find a child of his age to befriend, even among the neighbors’ children, or among those who sometimes visit the house, or a friend to play with in the club, school, or street. In all this, he feels emotional deficiency from his early years. We do not know the type of those he seeks to befriend from outside the family, nor the extent of their influence on him.
- For all this, we advise parents that their son or daughter should have at least one brother or sister, as long as this is possible.
Siblinghood is a healthy atmosphere from the social aspect, better than strange environments, as long as it is shaded by a stable family life with sound upbringing. In the family atmosphere, children begin to practice social life and the principles of affection, friendship, and cooperation, and the child does not feel a void that he needs to fill from outside.
I do not want to lengthen much in the topic of child care.
- I have placed for you a book about “How We Deal with Children.”
You can refer to it, and we move on to another topic.
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