Are Our Children God's Children to Us?

ERNST-GÜNTER LANGE

Are they really? Don't we perhaps believe they are actually a kind of possession that has been personally entrusted to us and for whose nourishment, clothing, upbringing, education, and many other things we, the parents, are primarily responsible? If we believe this is so, we should seriously examine our thinking, for it is crucial to the quality of our relationships with our children.

Positive and beautiful as mutual affection between parents and children is, when people live together it sometimes happens that their relationship, if based too much on personality, can lead to tensions and disagreements. Many who have raised children will agree that sooner or later they faced such situations of conflict in one form or another.

Such tensions between the generations are, however, in no way a phenomenon of our day alone. Numerous passages in the Bible deal with critical relationships between children and parents. But that this problem still continues to occupy us, and often in intensified forms, shows how obstinately it persisted over the centuries. What should be the attitude of the Christian Scientist today in questions of disagreement between parents and children? Should we see them as problems that we can help solve?

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