The Formative Years​—When Your Best Is Needed the Most

CHILDREN are said to be “an inheritance from Jehovah.” They are said to be “like slips of olive trees all around your table.” (Psalm 127:3; 128:3) Parents are instructed to “go on bringing them up in the discipline and mental-​regulating of Jehovah.”​—Ephesians 6:4.

If you are going to shape olive trees for fine fruit bearing, the time to do it is while they are ‘like slips around your table.’ As the young twig is shaped, so grows the tree. If you are going to train your children to be conformed to God’s ways, the best time to do it is from their infancy. “Train up a boy according to the way for him; even when he grows old he will not turn aside from it.” (Proverbs 22:6; 2 Timothy 3:15) In infancy the brain is soaking up information at high speed, faster than it ever will again. It’s your opportune time to do your best for your children.

Masaru Ibuka, founder of the Sony Corporation, wrote a book entitled Kindergarten Is Too Late! On its cover appeared these words: “Your child’s potential for learning is greatest during the first two or three years of life. So, don’t wait . . . Kindergarten Is Too Late!”

In a foreword Glenn Doman, director of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, says the following: “Mr. Ibuka’s marvelous and gentle book makes no earth-​shaking pronouncements of any sort. He simply proposes that tiny children have within them the capacity to learn virtually anything while they are tiny. He proposes that what they learn without any conscious effort at two, three, or four years of age can be learned only with great effort, or may not be learned at all, in later life. He proposes that what adults learn painfully children learn joyfully. He proposes that what adults learn at a snail’s pace, tiny children learn almost speedily. He proposes that adults sometimes avoid learning, while tiny children would rather learn than eat.”

The reason Ibuka gives for saying that kindergarten is too late is that by then the child’s best years for learning have passed. But there is another reason. In these days the moral breakdown has reached kindergarten, and before the child gets there, parents need to inculcate into the child a strong moral code to protect him from contamination.

This need is shown by the report by parents of a six-​year-​old boy who had just entered kindergarten. “During the first week in kindergarten, our son was sexually accosted by another boy in the 15 minutes he rides the school bus. This went on for several days. It was not merely child’s play or playing doctor but was abnormal, explicit behavior.

“Many of the children in our son’s class attend R-rated movies with their parents. Perhaps the parents consider it safer to take them than leave them in the questionable care of a baby-​sitter. Some of the children watch R- and X-rated movies either through the cable or on movies their parents keep at home.

“The value of inculcating moral principles into our son during his formative years, from infancy onward, was impressed on us by a shocking occurrence in our own home. Along with some adult guests, a four-​year-​old girl was present. She and our son, who had been carefully instructed that sex was only for married adults, were in his playroom. She wanted to play date and explained that he should lie down. When he innocently did so, she lay on top of him. He became frightened and exclaimed: ‘That’s only for married people!’ As he broke loose and ran out of the playroom, she cried out: ‘Don’t tell anyone!’”​—Compare Genesis 39:12.

Following are some of the things that are happening both in the inner cities and in the suburbs​—things your young children should be insulated against from infancy onward.

Two seven-​year-​old boys were charged with the rape of a six-​year-​old girl in a public school restroom. Three boys, ages six, seven, and nine, sexually assaulted a six-​year-​old girl. An eight-​year-​old boy sodomized a kindergartner. An 11-​year-​old boy was charged with the rape of a 2-year-​old girl. Some therapists contend that often such offenders were victims of sexual abuse when very young.

This was confirmed in the case of one young boy. When he was an infant, his 20-​year-​old aunt practiced oral sex on him. From 18 months of age to 30 months, he underwent this sexual abuse. Two or three years later he was molesting young girls. When he started school, he continued this activity and was expelled in the first grade and again in the second grade.

The Need for Early Training

Parental failure to give proper training during the formative years paves the way for delinquency, which may open the way to far more serious crimes: vandalism, burglary, and murder. Following are a few samples of such things.

Three six-​year-​olds ransacked a playmate’s home, vandalizing practically every room in it. A nine-​year-​old vandal was charged with criminal damage, plus burglaries, threatening another child with a knife, and setting a girl’s hair on fire. Two 11-​year-​old boys shoved a nine-​millimeter pistol into a 10-​year-​old’s mouth and stole his watch. A ten-​year-​old boy shot and killed a seven-​year-​old girl over a video game. Another ten-​year-​old shot his playmate and hid the body under the house. A five-​year-​old pushed a toddler to his death from a fifth-​floor stairwell. A 13-​year-​old joined two youths in kidnapping a 7-year-​old to extract money from his family, but even before calling the family to demand the ransom, they buried the boy alive.

Then, at the end of the line, there is the horror of teenage gangs, armed with guns, prowling the streets, waging gun battles, with bullets flying, killing not only one another but innocent children and adults caught in the cross fire. They are terrorizing many neighborhoods in big cities​—in Los Angeles county alone, “there are 100,000-​plus members of over 800 identifiable gangs.” (Seventeen, August 1991) Many are from broken homes. The gang becomes their family. Many end up in jail. Many end up dead. These excerpts from three letters written from jail are typical.

First: ‘I’m in camp for attempted robbery. It was four of us. Then the cops came. Two of my homeboys [gang family] ran one way, me and my other homie ran another way, but not faster than the German shepherds that caught us. When I get out, I hope someday I’ll be somebody special. Going to school and getting good grades was always too hard for me. But, buddy, you ain’t never seen nothin harder than doin time in jail!’

Second: ‘When I first came from Mexico, I was only eight years old. When I turned 12, I was in a gang. When I turned 15, I was really into it. I used to do a lot of drive-​bys [shooting people from a car]. I had my gun by my side always. When I was 16 years old, I got shot and nearly passed away. And I thank the Lord that he didn’t want me yet because I wasn’t ready to go with him. Right now I have bullet holes in my legs. So my advice is not to go gang bang!!! or you will be all alone and crippled in jail like me!’

Third: ‘I’ve been a known gangbanger since I was 11. I’ve been stabbed four times, shot three times, and locked up and beaten up so many times that it’s hard to keep count. The only thing left for me is to die, but I’ve been ready for that every day since I turned 13, and I’m 16 now. I’m doing eight months now and in a couple of years I’ll be dead, but you can avoid the whole thing by not starting gangbanging.’

Seize the Opportune Time

Now, all of this is not to say that failure to train children during the formative years will necessarily result in these terrible crimes. But the failure to do so can lead to disruptive conduct, which can escalate into delinquency, and if it runs on unchecked, delinquency could erupt into criminal conduct, jail, and death.

And the checking of any such trends in your children is far more easily done in the preteens rather than waiting until they are in their teens. In fact, prekindergarten is the time to start, when you have them more or less to yourself during the formative years, before outside influences compete for their attention. If you have not been close to them in their infancy, they may not let you get close to them in their teens. You may discover that their peers have replaced you. So the counsel to parents is, Do not neglect your children during these formative years when doing your best for them will yield its finest fruitage, to your blessing and theirs.​—Compare Matthew 7:16-20.

The Formative Years​—What You Sow Now You Will Reap Later

BABY brains are sponges soaking up their surroundings. In two years their possessors learn a complex language just by hearing it. If the child hears two, he learns both. Not only language but also musical and artistic abilities, muscular coordination, moral values and conscience, faith and love and the urge to worship​—all spring from capacities and potentials preprogrammed into baby brains. They only await input from the environment for their development. Also, there is a correct timetable for this input to come for the best results, and that advantageous time is during the formative years.

The process begins at birth. It is called bonding. Mother gazes lovingly into baby’s eyes, talks soothingly to him, hugs and cuddles him. Maternal instincts are stirred as baby looks intently at her and feels secure. If at this beginning nursing occurs, so much the better for both. The baby’s sucking stimulates milk production. The touch of his skin causes a release of hormones that reduces her postdelivery bleeding. Mother’s milk contains antibodies that protect baby from infections. Bonding occurs. It’s the beginning of a love affair. But only the beginning.

The twosome soon becomes a threesome when father is brought into the picture, as he surely must. “Every child needs . . . a father,” Dr. T. Berry Brazelton says, “and every father can make a difference. . . . The mothers tended to be gentle and low-​keyed with their babies. Fathers, on the other hand, were more playful, tickling and poking their babies more than the mothers did.” The babies respond to this manhandling with excited cries and screams of delight, having boisterous fun and clamoring for more. It’s a continuation of the bonding initiated at birth, ‘a love connection between parents and child that most naturally is made or missed in the first eighteen months of a baby’s life,’ says Dr. Magid, coauthor of the book High Risk: Children Without a Conscience. If missed, he says, such children may grow up to become unattached and have no capacity for love.

Mother and Father Share Bonding

Hence, how crucial for both mother and father to collaborate on strengthening this love connection, this bonding and attachment between parents and child during the formative years prior to kindergarten! Let there be hugs and kisses galore from both parents. Yes, dads too! Men’s Health, June 1992, says: “Hugs and physical affection with parents strongly predict successful friendships, marriages and careers in a child’s future, says a 36-​year study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Seventy percent of the kids with affectionate parents did well for themselves socially, compared with only 30 percent of the kids with cold-​fish parents; and Dad’s hugs were found to be as important as Mom’s.”

Also, hold him while rocking in a rocking chair. Read to him as he feels secure on your lap. Talk with him and listen to him, instruct him in what’s right and wrong, and be sure to be good models, practicing these principles yourselves. And all the while remember the child’s age. Keep it simple, keep it interesting, make it fun.

Your child has a natural curiosity, a desire to explore, to learn all about his surroundings. To satisfy this hunger to know, the child plies you with a running stream of questions. What makes the wind? Why is the sky blue? Why does it get red when the sun sets? Answer them. It’s not always easy. These questions are an invitation for you to influence your child’s mind, to have input, perhaps to instill an appreciation for God and his creation. Is it a ladybug crawling on a leaf that fascinates him? Or the design of a tiny flower? Or watching a spider spin a web? Or just digging in the dirt? And don’t overlook teaching with little stories, as Jesus did with his parables. It makes learning enjoyable.

In many cases both parents need to work to make ends meet. Can they make a special effort to spend evening and weekend hours with their children? Is it possible for the mother to work half days to have more time with her children? There are many single parents today, and they must work to support themselves and their children. Can they be diligent to give as many evening hours and weekends as possible to their children? In many cases it is necessary for mothers to be away from their children. Even when the reasons for being away are valid, the small child does not understand that and may feel abandoned. Then special effort must be made to buy out time for your child.

Now, just what is this “quality time” we hear about? Busy parents may spend 15 or 20 minutes every other day with their child, maybe an hour on the weekend, and call it quality time. Is this adequate for the child’s need? Or is its purpose to salve a parental conscience? Or to ease the mind of a mother who works for self-​fulfillment while leaving her child unfulfilled? But you say, ‘Honestly, I’m so busy I just don’t have that kind of time.’ That is too bad and very sad for both you and your child because there are no shortcuts. Find the time during the formative years, or be prepared to reap a generation gap in the teen years.

It is not only the possible damage done to the child left in day care, but also the parents’ loss when they miss out on enjoying the child as he grows up. The child does not always understand the whys and wherefores for being left alone; he may feel neglected, rejected, abandoned, unloved. By his teen years, he may have formed attachments with peers to replace the parents too busy for him. The child may even start living a double life, one to placate his parents and another to please himself. Words, explanations, apologies​—none of this closes the gap. Parental talk about love now does not come through as genuine to the child that was neglected during the years when he needed his parents the most. Talk of love now sounds false; the words ring hollow. Like faith, professed love without works is dead.​—James 2:26.

Reaping Even Now What We Have Sown

In this me-​first generation, selfishness is on the rise, and it is apparent particularly in the abandonment of our children. We have them, and then we put them in day-​care centers. Some day-​care centers may be good for children, but many are not, particularly not for young children. Some even come under investigation for sexual child abuse. One researcher said: “In the future, without any question, we’ll have problems that make today look like a tea party.” Today’s “tea party” is already horrendous, as statistics presented by Dr. David Elkind in 1992 show:

“There has been a 50-​percent increase in obesity in children and youth over the past two decades. We lose some ten thousand teenagers a year in substance-​related accidents, not including injured and maimed. One in four teenagers drinks to excess every two weeks, and we have two million alcoholic teenagers.

“Teenage girls in America get pregnant at the rate of one million per year, twice the rate of the next Western country, England. Suicide has tripled among teenagers in the last 20 years, and between five and six thousand teenagers take their own lives each year. It is estimated that one out of four teenage girls manifests at least one symptom of an eating disorder, most commonly severe dieting. The 14- to 19-​year-​old age group has the second-​highest homicide rate of any age group.”

Add to these frightening statistics the killing of over 50 million babies while they are still in the womb, and today’s “tea party” defies description. With the collapse of families in view, Dr. Elkind said: “Rapid social change is a catastrophe for children and youth, who require stability and security for healthy growth and development.” One writer on me-​first selfishness cried out in protest: “But nobody’s willing to say to couples, Look, you’ve got to stay married. If you’ve got kids, stay married!”

It takes time to love a child. Years ago Robert Keeshan, broadcaster to children as Captain Kangaroo, warned of the consequences of withholding your time from your children. He said:

“A small child waits, thumb in mouth, doll in hand, with some impatience, the arrival home of a parent. She wishes to relate some small sandbox experience. She is excited to share the thrill she has known that day. The time comes, the parent arrives. Beaten down by the stresses of the workplace the parent so often says to the child, ‘Not now, honey. I’m busy, go watch television.’ The most often spoken words in many American households, ‘I’m busy, go watch television.’ If not now, when? ‘Later.’ But later rarely comes . . .

“Years go by and the child grows. We give her toys and clothes. We give her designer clothes and a stereo but we do not give her what she wants most, our time. She’s fourteen, her eyes are glassy, she’s into something. ‘Honey, what’s happening? Talk to me, talk to me.’ Too late. Too late. Love has passed us by. . . .

“When we say to a child, ‘Not now, later.’ When we say, ‘Go watch TV.’ When we say, ‘Don’t ask so many questions.’ When we fail to give our young people the one thing they require of us, our time. When we fail to love a child. We are not uncaring. We are simply too busy to love a child.”

Quantity Time Needed

The ideal is not simply to dole out “quality time” in measured installments; it must include also “quantity time.” The Bible, which contains far more wisdom than all the books ever written on psychology, states at Deuteronomy 6:6, 7: “And these words that I am commanding you today must prove to be on your heart; and you must inculcate them in your son and speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you get up.” You must inculcate into your children’s hearts the true values from God’s Word that are in your heart. If you live them, your child will copy you.

Remember the proverb quoted in the second paragraph of the previous article? Here it is again: “Train up a boy according to the way for him; even when he grows old he will not turn aside from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) It holds true only if the values training has been internalized, that is, put inside of him, made a part of his thinking, his innermost feelings, what he is deep inside. This happens only if these values have not only been taught him by his parents but also been practiced by his parents.

He has absorbed them as a way of life. It has become his personal standard that is a part of himself. To go against them now would not be going against what his parents taught him but what he himself has become. He would be untrue to himself. He would be denying himself. (2 Timothy 2:13) There is a deep-​down unwillingness to do this to himself. Hence, he is far less likely to ‘turn aside from this way’ that has been instilled into him. So let your children absorb fine conduct from you. Teach kindness by showing kindness, manners by practicing them, gentleness by being gentle, honesty and truthfulness by exemplifying them.

Jehovah’s Arrangement

The family unit was Jehovah’s arrangement for man from the beginning. (Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18-24) After six thousand years of human history, it is still recognized as the best for both adults and children, as confirmed by the book Secrets of Strong Families in these words:

“Perhaps something deep within us realizes the family is the foundation of civilization. Perhaps we instinctively know that when we come to the bottom line in life it’s not money, career, fame, a fine house, land, or material possessions that are important​—it is the people in our lives who love and care for us. People in our lives who are committed to us and on whom we can count for support and help are what really matter. Nowhere is the potential for the love, support, caring, and commitment for which we all yearn greater than in the family.”

Hence, it is important to be diligent and sow fine training now during formative years so that what you reap in the future will be, for both you and your children, a happy family life.​—Compare Proverbs 3:1-7.

[Box on page 10]

Which Parent Will I Be?

“I got two A’s,” the small boy cried, his voice filled with glee. His father bluntly asked, “Why didn’t you get more?” “Mom, I’ve got the dishes done,” the girl called from the door. Her mother calmly said, “Did you take out the garbage?” “I’ve mowed the grass,” the tall boy said, “and put away the mower.” With a shrug his father asked him, “Did you trim the hedge as well?”

The children in the house next door seem happy and contented. The same thing happened over there, and this is how it went:

“I got two A’s,” the small boy cried, his voice filled with glee. His father proudly said, “That’s great; I’m glad you did so well.” “Mom, I’ve got the dishes done,” the girl called from the door. Her mother smiled and softly said, “I love you more each day.” “I’ve mowed the grass,” the tall boy said, “and put away the mower.” His father happily answered, “You’ve made me proud of you.”

Children deserve a little praise for the tasks they do each day. If they’re to lead a happy life, much depends on you.

[Pictures on page 7]

Father joins mother in the bonding process

[Picture on page 8]

As imagination flourishes, a boy running with arms flung wide is a soaring airplane, a large carton becomes a home for playing house, a broomstick becomes a fiery steed, a chair is the driver’s seat of a race car