Train up a child…
“Children Are People, Too”
When our youngest child, Charles, was in kindergarten, his teacher posted on the door of his classroom, “Children are people, too”. At first I wondered what she was talking about. Of course, children are people, too. Then I started thinking about times when I had talked with other adults and left my children standing quietly without joining in the conversation. I began to notice other adults and how so often they would talk and forget about the children listening to everything they would say. Sometimes, parents would talk about their children while the children were standing right in front of them. It was almost as though they thought the children were deaf and did not hear their comments. I remembered a time when my husband and I had done this very thing.
When Charles was still small enough to sit on the armrest between my husband and me, (car seats for children were not required then), my husband and I were driving somewhere and having a conversation about a person we were concerned about. Charles was sitting quietly between us. Our other children were in school. We were driving along, expressing one opinion after another, when Charles suddenly spoke up and said, “Don’t forget, Mom, God hears everything you say!” I was stunned. My husband and I were not only reminded of what we had been teaching him, but we were also reminded that children hear everything we say in their presence.
When I was very young, my mom would make dresses of printed chicken-feed sacks for my sisters and me. She would starch and iron them and dress us up with ribbons in our hair. Every Saturday afternoon, she would dress us up, load up her crate of eggs, and we would go to Monett, MO to sell them. Part of this ritual was a trip to the J.C. Penney store. On one such occasion, one of my mom’s acquaintances came up to her and started talking. The lady looked down at my sisters and me and said, “Ethel, you have such pretty girls. I don’t know how you do it. They always look so nice! Every one of them is so pretty!” My four sisters and I stood there in our starched and ironed feed sack dresses feeling so very proud. As the lady said her goodbyes and started to leave, she looked down at me and said, “Now, Ethel, is this one yours, too? She doesn’t look like the rest of them!”
True, my hair was blonde, theirs was dark brown. Their hair was curly, mine was very straight. I felt so ugly! I grew up feeling like the ugly duckling!
When children are around, let’s include them in our conversations. They learn to converse as we treat them with respect and talk to them as equals. At church, shake hands with the children as though they are just as important as adults, because they are. Let’s be careful about the comments we make in the presence of children. Let’s remember, “Children are people, too.”