Chapter 2 Your Child’s Development: Shaping Influences
My 11-year-old son was raising pigs and he was frustrated. The pigs overturned their water containers with their snouts, making it impossible to keep fresh water before them. We decided to make a concrete watering trough that would be too heavy to upset. We built a form of wood and began pouring concrete into the form. As we worked, I began telling my boys how their young lives were like this project. The structures of our home were like the form. Their lives were the poured concrete. One day when the form was removed, they would be strong and useful. The disciplines of childhood would harden into concrete, adult lives. I waxed eloquent. They listened politely and appropriately. When I paused for a breath, they ran off to play, clearly unimpressed with the likeness between their young lives and swine troughs. The boys were not ready that day for such heady thinking. I couldn’t blame them. It is no easy matter to think through the influences that shape your children’s lives. They are being shaped and molded by life’s circumstances. All the aspects of family living have a profound impact on the persons your children become.
Shaping Influences
In this chapter, I will present a chart to help you understand the shaping influences of childhood. While the term “shaping influences” may be a new one, what it signifies is as old as humanity. Shaping influences are those events and circumstances in a child’s developmental years that prove to be catalysts for making him the person he is. But the shaping is not automatic; the ways he responds to these events and circumstances determine the effect they have upon him. There is clear biblical warrant for acknowledging the lifelong implications of early childhood experience. The major passages dealing with family (Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians 6, and Colossians 3) presuppose these implications.
The Scriptures demand your attention to shaping influences. The person your child becomes is a product of two things. The first is his life experience. The second is how he interacts with that experience.
Structure of Family Life
Is the family a traditional nuclear family? How many parents is the child exposed to? Is it a family of two generations or three? Are both parents alive and functioning in the home? How are the parenting roles structured? Are there other children or is family life organized around only one child? What is the birth order of the children? What are the relationships between the children? How close or distant are they in terms of age, ability, interest or personality? How does the child’s personality blend with the other members of the family?
Sally and her husband came for counseling. They were newly married and facing difficult adjustments. One of the hardest hurdles for Sally to surmount was that her husband did not organize his life around her. She’d been an only child. While her parents didn’t spoil her by lavishing things on her, they did make her wants and needs a priority. She now felt unloved because her husband did not structure life around her wishes. Her family life as a child had profoundly shaped her needs and her expectations of her husband.
Family Values
What is important to the parents? What is worth a fuss and what passes without notice? Are people more important than things? Do parents get more stressed over a hole in the school pants or a fight between schoolmates? What philosophies and ideas has the child heard? Are children to be seen and not heard in this home? What are the spoken and unspoken rules of family life? Where does God fit into family life? Is life organized around knowing and loving God or is the family in a different orbit than that?
“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ” (Colossians 2:8). The question you must ask is this: Are the values of your home based on human tradition and the basic principles of this world or on Christ? I recently asked a young lad of ten what would get him into the most trouble, breaking a valuable vase or disobeying his parents’ clear directive. Without a moment of hesitation, he said it would be far worse to break a cherished vase. This lad has learned the values of the home. He perceives an unspoken value that says prized vases are of greater concern to his parents than disobedient boys. These values are based on hollow and deceptive philosophies.
There are other aspects of family values. What are the boundaries within the family? Where are the secrets kept and when are they told? Are relationships with neighbors instinctively open or closed? How high are the walls around the family? Where can those walls be penetrated?
Some families would never tell their relatives their problems but would freely disclose everything to a neighbor. Others would call a brother for help, but never a neighbor who is nearby (unlike the counsel in Proverbs 27:10). Some children grow up never knowing how much money Dad earns, while others know the checkbook balance on any given day. Some parents keep secrets from their children. Some children share secrets but not with their parents. Sometimes Mother and the children have secrets from Dad. Sometimes Dad and the children have secrets from Mom. Every family has established family boundaries. They may not be spoken or thought through, but they exist. Family Roles Within the family structure there are roles that each family member plays. Some fathers are involved in every aspect of family life. Others are busy and distanced from family activities. Subtle things like who pays the bills or who makes family appointments say much about family roles. Children have roles within the family, too. I know one home in which the children are required to put their father’s socks and shoes on him because he is obese and finds it uncomfortable. By the cruel and harsh way he requires this service, he makes powerful shaping statements about their place in family life.
Family Conflict Resolution
Anyone who does marriage counseling can testify to the power of family influence in the resolution of problems. Does the family know how to talk about its problems? Do family members resolve things or do they simply walk away? Are problems solved by biblical principle or by power? Do the members of the family use non-verbal signals, like a dozen roses, to resolve conflicts?
Proverbs 12:15–16 says: “The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice. A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult.” A child is trained to be a fool or a prudent, wise man by the shaping influences of the home. Sammy would get mad and run from the kindergarten class whenever he did not like what was going on. The teacher called his parents in for a conference. Sammy’s dad got frustrated with the conference and abruptly left the room. The teacher gained a better understanding of why Sammy behaved this way.
Family Response to Failure
A related shaping issue is how the parents deal with their children’s failures. Childhood is filled with awkward attempts and failed efforts. Immature children learning to master the skills of living in a sophisticated world inevitably make mistakes. The important issue for our purposes is how those failures are treated. Are these children made to feel foolish? Are they mocked for their failures? Does the family find amusement at the expense of family members? Some parents show a marvelous ability to see failed attempts as praiseworthy efforts. They always encourage. They are adept at neutralizing the effects of a fiasco. Whether the child has known credible commendation or carping criticism or the mix of those things will be a powerful shaping influence in his life. Family History Another issue is each family’s own history. Family members are born and others die. There are marriages and divorces. Families experience social stability or instability. There is enough money or not enough. Some enjoy good health while others must structure their lives around sickness or disease. Some have deep roots in the neighborhood, while others are uprooted continually.
I recently spent time helping a woman sort through the events of her childhood. Our conversation went like this:
Q: How many times did you move during childhood?
A: A lot of times.
Q: Five or ten?
A: Oh, no, more than that!
Q: Not more than twenty? [Here she stopped for a few minutes thinking and calculating.]
A: Many more than twenty.
She later told me that she and her sister had counted forty-six moves before age eighteen. To be sure, that family history profoundly shaped this woman’s values and perspectives. This brief list is only suggestive of circumstances that have impact on our lives. The effect of these things on us is undeniable.
Mistakes in Understanding Shaping Influences
Two mistakes are made in interacting with the shaping influences of life. The first is seeing shaping influences deterministically. It is the error of assuming that the child is a helpless victim of the circumstances in which he was raised. The second mistake is denial. It is the mistake of saying the child is unaffected by his early childhood experience. Passages such as Proverbs 29:21 illustrate the importance of childhood experience. Here we see that the servant pampered from youth is affected in a manner that brings grief in the end. Neither denial nor determinism is correct. You need to understand these shaping influences biblically. Such understanding will aid you in your task as parents. You make a grave mistake if you conclude that childrearing is nothing more than providing the best possible shaping influences for your children. Many Christian parents adopt this “Christian determinism.” They figure that if they can protect and shelter him well enough, if they can always be positive with him, if they can send him to Christian schools or if they can home school, if they can provide the best possible childhood experience, then their child will turn out okay. These parents are sure that a proper environment will produce a proper child. They respond almost as if the child were inert. Such a posture is simply determinism dressed in Christian clothes.
I have a friend who is a potter. He told me that he can only create the type of pot the clay he is working with will allow him to create. The clay is not merely passive in his hands. The clay responds to him. Some clay is elastic and supple. Some clay is crumbly and hard to shape. His observation provides a good analogy: You must be concerned with providing the most stable shaping influences, but you may never suppose that you are merely molding passive clay. The clay responds to shaping; it either accepts or rejects molding. Children are never passive receivers of shaping. Rather, they are active responders. Your son or daughter responds according to the Godward focus of his or her life. If your child knows and loves God, if your child has embraced the fact that knowing God can enable him to know peace in any circumstance, then he will respond constructively to your shaping efforts.
If your child does not know and love God, but tries to satisfy his soul’s thirst by drinking from a “cistern that cannot hold water….” (Jeremiah 2:13), your child may rebel against your best efforts. You must do all that God has called you to do but the outcome is more complex than whether you have done the right things in the right way. Your children are responsible for the way they respond to your parenting. Determinism makes parents conclude that good shaping influences will automatically produce good children. This often bears bitter fruit later in life. Parents who have an unruly and troublesome teenager or young adult conclude that the problem is the shaping influences they provided. They think if they had made a little better home, things would have turned out okay. They forget that the child is never determined solely by the shaping influences of life. Remember that Proverbs 4:23 instructs you that the heart is the fountain from which life flows. Your child’s heart determines how he responds to your parenting. Mr. and Mrs. Everett had a rebellious 15-year-old son. They could see that they had made many mistakes in childrearing. Their mistakes, however, blinded them to his needs. When they saw their son, they saw their failures. As a result, they never saw him as a boy who was choosing to sin. They failed to see that he was choosing not to believe and obey God. They had not been perfect parents, it was true. Their son, however, had not been a good son. That part was true too. Their view failed to consider the fact that human beings are creatures who are directed by the orientation of their hearts. The child is not inert during childhood. Your children interact with life.
This leads us to our next chapter.
Application Questions for Chapter 2
1. What have been some of the prominent shaping influences of your child’s life?
2. What is the structure of your family? How has that affected your son or daughter?
3. What would your children identify as the values of your family? What are the things that matter most to you?
4. Where are the secrets in your home? Do you share too much and thus burden your children with problems too big for them? Do you share too little and thus insulate them from life and dependence on God?
5. Who is the boss in your home? Is there a centralized authority, or does your family make decisions by committee?
6. What are the patterns for conflict resolution? How have these patterns affected each of your children? Is change warranted? If so, what change?
7. What constitutes success or failure in your home?
8. What events have been pivotal in your family history? How have these events affected you? How have they affected your children?
9. Do you tend to be a determinist in the way you look at childrearing? Are you able to see that your children are active responders to the shaping influences in their lives? How do you see them responding?
Tripp, Tedd (2011-07-22). Shepherding a Child's Heart (pp. 9-18). Shepherd Press. Kindle Edition.
