The Shepherd, November 2008
THE RELIGIOUS UPBRINGING OF CHILDREN
By Archpriest S. Shchukin
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN UP-BRINGING FOUNDED UPON?
If we observe a child’s soul, from the very earliest days evil will be manifest, but at the same time we will find in him the germs of good feelings: tenderness, pity, guilelessness. But those good beginnings in a person do not just develop by themselves, but they require constant care and support. From the very beginning, the parents, as we have already said, must by every means possible awake in the child an understanding of the difference between what is permitted and what is not permitted. Little by little as the child grows, rather than limiting their reprimands and their light punishments to a one-off, they must continually strengthen in his soul the disposition or feeling, which will itself tackle his bad inclinations and will sustain the good ones. Fortunately there is within man a remarkable faculty which we call the conscience. The aim for the parents is to train the child to pay heed to his conscience and enable it, so that his conscience might become discerning and sensitive to the understanding of good and evil.
Naturally we understand that to direct a child to an understanding of the conscience is something purely abstract, unattainable and in practice useless, unless it is bound up with other moral ideas. A person, especially a child, seeks what is definite especially in moral questions, things which will determine his behaviour. It is for this reason that it is absolutely necessary to fall back upon a purely religious understanding, the concept of God and our responsibility before Him. It is from the concept of God and our disposition towards Him - i.e., love, devotion, gratitude, - that the foundation of our morality is moulded: religious faith. Without this foundation any kind of education will be shaky and unsuccessful.
Often some will object to us that the concept of God, of good and evil and all the rest, is too complicated for an infant - these ideas have to be implanted later. Experience, however, demonstrates that even a three or four-year-old is capable of completely grasping these notions if they are presented to him in graphic ways: in seeing, for instance, the icons above his cradle, the sign of the Cross, hearing the simplest of prayers in the morning and evening, etc. The infant’s pure soul immediately links its first religious understandings with the voice of his conscience, and thus starts to build a simple, and thoroughly sound, religiosity. On this foundation, later on, he can build his moral understanding in conjunction with a heathy religious world-view.
For those who doubt the strength of the religiosity of small children, let us consider the following: faith in God is not something invented by people, but something which is born together with the person himself. It is something particular to everyone, and not only to the “ignorant” or backward peoples. The atheists strive to demonstrate that faith in God is an artificially imposed idea. But we observe that the younger generations in the atheistic USSR [Remember Fr Shchukin was writing when the Soviet Union was still existing- ed.] continue to seek for faith in God. On the other hand, faith in God is something accessible to all people, regardless of their age or their academic abilities. The simplest, uneducated man may believe in Him and worship Him, as may the greatest academic. Every believer can grasp and live out his faith according to the measure of his abilities, and again according to that measure, whether it be for a single person or a whole peoples, it grows and develops. His concept of God will develop and will deepen. The fact that all religious people, however much they may differ in their personal development, always understand each other, is explained by this.
These characteristics of the Christian religion - her closeness to the soul of the person and her accessibility to all - are things which allow even very young children to accept them, and on them they can build their education. And one can only wonder how easily and how deeply children accept faith in God and how beneficially this influence is in their progress. Faith in God not only gives one a sound foundation for one’s struggle with bad inclinations in the child, but for him it also resolves the most difficult questions, which other ways do not explain: concerning good and evil, about the creation of the world, about life and death, and so on. Most importantly of all, faith in God is the key to all that is positive in the child’s soul - benevolence, love, compassion, shame, repentance, and a desire to be better….
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