Culture

Children: Welcome Gift or Nuisance?

Children are the greatest gifts. Photo credit: KristenN

Correct me if I’m wrong, but does it seem like you get far more dirty looks today when you bring your children with you? Or rude comments? Or impatient random strangers? Admittedly, you also get an added share of smiles, kindness, and “she’s so cute” statements. But I’m left to wonder why our population often seems split on viewing children as precious gifts or annoying nuisances.

Of course, abortion is the most obvious example of the rejection of children in today’s society. I spend a lot of time writing about abortion and the many, many reasons why it’s wrong, inhumane, and simply cruel. But beyond abortion, does our culture truly welcome children once they are born?

I realize I’m posing a sort of odd question. I’m not talking about whether we send money to starving children in Africa, donate blankets or winter coats to homeless children, or get involved with foster care or adoption. I’m simply asking if we have an attitude that welcomes children in our day-to-day lives.

Every child deserves our love. Photo credit: Jessica.Tam

And I’ll get really honest with you. Before I had my daughter, I was a lot less welcoming to children in general. Sure, I was your typical babysitting teenager; I helped out with Sunday School and VBS. But I was never a super “kid” kind of girl. I love babies – babies are incredible! But sometimes kids can really be annoying, or so I thought. I thought a lot more like this until I had my own daughter.

Let me tell you: I truly never thought it was possible to love someone so much and so instantly as I did when they laid my daughter on my chest. (And I love my husband a whole lot.) But a mother’s love for her child is just something else – not more love, just a different, unexplainable love. In addition to the fifty million other things my daughter has taught me, she’s made me question how I view other children in my day-to-day life.

When a two-year-old throws a temper tantrum in the grocery store, I don’t want to roll my eyes and get out of there anymore – at least not usually, haha. Now I know what it’s like to have a tired kid who just can’t express herself. I know how badly kids want you to try to understand them. When a little kid tells me “hi” or waves in the parking lot, I’ve become a lot more conscious about answering him back and making him feel special. My own daughter’s favorite line at the store is, “Thank you so much, buh-bye” to every cashier. I know how I feel when she gets ignored, so I can only imagine how she feels.

I’ve even felt a difference in churches. One church my family attended for a while made it pretty obvious that you should put your kid in Sunday School, and if your kid started to make noise, you had better get her out. Granted, this church also provided incredible kids’ programs and great facilities for parents to stay with their kids in separate rooms. But still, the feeling was there that the service and the other adults were more important than your not-super-quiet toddler. It made me sad.

Thankfully, we’ve been able to find a church that offers great kid programs but doesn’t try to insist that you put your kid in them. I don’t feel worried if I keep my daughter with me in the service. (Even though she once proudly announced, “Daddy go potty. Daddy be back.”) The pastor at our church makes light of unintentional distractions that go on, and the atmosphere at the church is welcoming to everyone who walks through the doors – no matter their age or abilities.

A beautiful gift

One last case in point I’d like to share. I sometimes attend a public board meeting that’s kind of important, but not as big a deal as some of the members seem to think. At the last meeting, a photo needed to be taken of the existing members. A member had brought her toddler, and the girl was remarkably well-behaved for most of the meeting. During the picture, the little girl wanted to stay with her mommy and clung to her legs, sort of crying. One board member – an obviously kind grandma lady – said, “Just pick her up! She can be in our picture!” The mom was happy and lifted her daughter in her arms, but another board member replied very firmly, “No. We’re trying to be professional here.” The mom quietly lowered her daughter, and the little girl cried until the picture was over.

Okay, seriously, I get the point of a formal board picture. I do. But what does it hurt to have a child in the photo? Is it really worth it to make a small child cry just so we have a “professional” photo? Is our professionalism really worth more than the feelings of a child?

Every child is infinitely precious, and we ought to treat them that way.

Don’t worry – I understand that parents need to be respectful of others. If your kid is crying in church, yes, by all means – take him to the cry room or a family room. If you can find a babysitter you trust (think grandparents, haha), it can be a good idea to go to “professional” meetings alone. But I’m reminded that, years ago, it wasn’t such a big deal if parents let their kids tag along. It was the natural order of things. Kids learned to be adults by accompanying their parents everywhere.

I’m not advocating for a reversal back to the 19th century; after all, we also had child labor and other such horrors. But what I’m advocating for is an outlook reversal. Let’s stop looking at children – even ill-behaved ones – as nuisances. Let’s start seeing every child we come in contact with as a gift, a blessing, and as a special little person who deserves our love. Let our actions, words, and attitudes say, “You’re a gift!”

   
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  • http://twitter.com/MarauderTheSN Marauder

    Kids themselves are not nuisances, but in recent years I’ve noticed a lot more kids with ineffective parents. (Just talking in general – not implying you’re in this category!) I’ve also noticed more parents who let whatever their kid wants run the show.

    For example, I get why the little girl was upset that she wasn’t in the picture, but one of the things kids need to learn about life is that not everything is about them and their feelings. Her mom could have said to her, “Just a minute, honey, this picture is for the grown-ups.” When it comes to church, services differ, but some services are more quiet and people go there to pray and contemplate quietly.

    As soon as little kids enter a place not designed for them, everything becomes about them, and people other than their parents might want to get something accomplished without getting derailed because so-and-so’s kid lost the red crayon or is whining to go home or is generally being a distraction. I love little kids, but there are venues that are for them and venues that are not.

    • Kristiburtonbrown

      TOTALLY agree about your point on ineffective parenting. That could be another whole article haha =).

      I probably didn’t make the scenario with the little girl clear enough, but she was just a little thing – too young to understand that the picture was just for grown-ups. She just wanted her mom. That’s all it was. So, I’d agree with you if the girl had been older. Older kids need to respect that they don’t get to be a part of everything. But I still think people are not welcoming enough to babies and toddlers who don’t understand yet – and can’t understand yet – how life works sometimes.

      True, also, about some venues not being for kids. But church is certainly for kids. And public meeting should also be open to kids – technically they’re open to any citizen, which does include kids =)

      It’s always a balance, but I believe people in general need to treat kids more like the gifts they are instead of being annoyed that a kid isn’t acting perfectly or is whining a little too much. Honestly, as adults we whine plenty lol!

      • http://twitter.com/MarauderTheSN Marauder

        I don’t know, I think even toddlers can start to learn that sometimes their parents need to take a second to do something unrelated to them. They might not get why, but they can learn that it’s okay if Mom and Dad pay attention to something else for a minute and that they’re still going to start paying attention to them again.

        One of my cousins has a son whose parents and grandparents have made him the focus of their attention to the extent that the kid, age four, now resents anything and anyone that takes the attention away from him, including his little brother. He expects adults to stop their conversations immediately because he wants more candy or wants his squirt toy filled up again or is bored and wants to go outside. He has absolutely no respect for other people’s stuff, which is why he used my grandma’s loveseat as a slide and left sticky gunk on one of her crystal vases. His parents tell him no sometimes, but he can tell they never mean it because they always let him get away with whatever he’s doing. His uncle was raised pretty much the same way and now, as an adult in his early thirties, has all these anger management problems because he never learned as a kid that he couldn’t get everything he wanted.

        Kids don’t always understand everything they learn when they’re really little, like why they shouldn’t stick their fingers in electric sockets, but they can still learn not to do it.

        • Kristiburtonbrown

          Lol, yeah that’s a pretty extreme situation. I just think there’s a balance between teaching kids to respect other people – which is super important – and realizing that it’s a process to teach them. Kids don’t instantly or always act 100% right. We need to give them grace and understand that, especially when they’re too young to fully express themselves, we should err on the side of love instead of demanding compliance.

          I realize there’s different thoughts on parenting, and I’d never claim that I’ve “arrived.” =) As long as we’re teaching our kids to be respectful and that the world is not all about them, but still communicating our love even when they’re extra needy, I think we’re teaching the right values.

          And, you are certainly correct about your electric sockets example! Lol, I know my mom had to insist on that one with me when I was super little. Apparently, I had a fascination with sockets. But I still think dangerous things are a little different from a kid who doesn’t understand yet why they can’t be with their mom or dad. I’d rather err on the side of understanding and love when we’re talking about babies and toddlers who can’t fully communicate in non-dangerous situations =) Just my two cents.

  • ProTruth2

    But still, the feeling was there that the service and the other adults were more important than your not-super-quiet toddler. It made me sad.

    Yes, I know what you mean. The priest in my family’s former parish thought that Mass was some kind of sacred ceremony in which the word of God was more important than the pronouncements of someone’s special little toddler. Can you imagine? No wonder so many people leave the Catholic church.

    Is our professionalism really worth more than the feelings of a child?

    Yours might not be, but perhaps theirs is.

    • Kristiburtonbrown

      Haha, I agree that lady obviously thought her “professionalism” was more important that the little girl’s mom thought. But I guess that’s my question – why, especially in a fairly informal setting should our “professionalism” be more important than a child?

      Second, I’d have to disagree with you that that’s why people leave the Catholic – or any – church. I’m not Catholic; I’m evangelical, but still, people don’t leave their faith because a pastor or priest expressed his desire that their child stay quiet. As I said about myself, we just found a church that made us feel more comfortable. A “policy” on kids has nothing to do with faith – that’s just what some person set in place, and you’ll go to the next church and find a different policy =) The same with any other organization, meeting, group, etc. That’s not particular to churches…

      Finally, I of course agree that parents should make sure their kids respect the Word of God in church. But clearly, babies and toddlers cannot always be silent, and I think a few noises here and there shouldn’t be offensive.

      • http://twitter.com/MarauderTheSN Marauder

        About the public board – I’m not sure what type of board it is, but my mom used to be on a public board and she spent a whole lot of time and energy on it. It was somewhere between a part-time and full-time job for her. There were people who were disobeying local ordinances and basically screwing up the peace and quiet of the neighborhood, which my mom took seriously because she’s lived in that house since she was ten. Sometimes things that don’t look that serious or important from the outside have an importance that’s not immediately obvious to other people.

      • ProTruth2

        Haha, I agree that lady obviously thought her “professionalism” was more important that the little girl’s mom thought. But I guess that’s my question – why, especially in a fairly informal setting should our “professionalism” be more important than a child?

        Apparently I should have used sarcasm tags in my last post. So to clarify things:

        Calling someone else’s professionalism “‘our‘ professionalism” does not, in fact, make it yours to assign value to. Things that don’t belong to you aren’t yours, even if you try to mask your egregious sense of entitlement as empathy, or even if you sincerely believe that your egregious sense of entitlement is actually empathy.

        I can’t answer the question about why “‘our’ professionalism should be more important than a child” because the question is cartoonishly hyperbolic. No one was choosing between ‘a child’ and ‘professionalism.’ They were expecting the child to wait for the duration of a photograph, which, unless it was being taken by Louis Daguerre, is about sixty seconds. And even though it made you very sad to see the little girl cry, the truth is that pretty much every parent has, at least once, let their child go sixty seconds without being picked up because the parent is preparing dinner, or answering the phone, or carrying a laundry basket. That doesn’t mean that answering the phone is ‘more important than a child.’ It means that even a child that is too young to understand why it is not being picked up can, and in fact should, learn to endure sixty seconds without getting picked up.

        This may come as surprise to you, Kristi, but every parent believes that their child is the most super special thing in the history of forever. Having children probably causes everybody to reevaluate a lot of things in life, including how they treat other parents and children. Most people, however, manage not to confuse their moment of personal growth with a sign that the rest of the world needs to change its priorities.

  • Issme

    I hear where you’re coming from. Before becoming a mum, I didn’t dislike children, but I didn’t always understand the meltdowns. Now that I completely do, I try to purposefully smile at a stressed out mom, or even vocalize that I understand. I like when people have the same courtesy. I feel that even when I’m grocery shopping without my husband, and trying to manage being late in this pregnancy and my toddler at the same time, people are SO impatient. Rude, some make comments, some are sighing, and some may not be as bad or even mean to come across that way, but it sure feels worse when you’re doing the best you can to get your groceries through the check-out, keep your toddler distracted and calm, and try to ignore your aching feet.

    Our society seems to be moving more and more away from children and cherishing the next generation, and more into, “What? You’re pregnant AGAIN? We need to get you on some birth control!” (Even though it had been over a year since I was last pregnant, this was planned, and we wanted our children to be two years apart!).

    Sometimes it feels like there’s no rejoicing for a new child – but somehow I’m a strong woman if I kill the child in my womb.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1737770702 Katherine Stimpson

    “The pastor at our church makes light of the distractions that happen.” One time, my little sister said, pretty loudly, “Mom, what does sojourner mean?” (We were in Dueteronomy at the time.) At the next meeting, our pastor made a point of saying that he didn’t mind kids asking their parents questions. My mom wwas very embarrased, but we were glad he understood.