These children will also develop a growing sense of community and a wider sense of the world outside of their own, safe community. When such youth see the world as it is, they can aspire to ideals of service. They will choose a life dedicated to helping others and sacrificing themselves. They become aid workers, refugee helpers, human rights activists, pastors and missionaries who dedicate themselves to a life of self-giving, thinking more of the needs of others than their own needs and wants.
As growing, maturing children in a secure family, they will not need to be scolded, lectured, disciplined and reprimanded. When problems and disagreements arise, frank sharing and rational, caring discussion will help solve them. Children who feel cared for and supported will have an open communication and sharing of daily experience of feelings, relationships and events in their lives with their parents. Children will see their parents as friends, counselors, and advisers whom they can communicate with and trust. This is what forges the bond of a loving, lasting relationship in a family. It gives security and confidence and a profound sense of self-value and worthiness to growing children.
Children who are given trust and freedom of choice and taught to choose wisely will resist and overcome the temptations of the world. They will continue to be idealistic and uphold the values they see in their parents. As a result, they are grateful for the friendship and opportunities provided for them by their parents. Family love based on these values will never end.
Contrast these with broken homes, where lost sons and daughters leave the family due to overly strict parents and sad misunderstandings resulting from perhaps a Romeo and Juliet relationship, drug use, or the excessive demands of parents that the youth can’t meet. Under this scenario, the perfect family does not exist; striving for the ideal is indeed a struggle. Sadly, it only takes this much to ruin a family; creating a mature and loving one seems to require much, much more.
I am surprised how few have actually read and know the many important values in the story of the prodigal son in the Gospel of St. Luke. The young man is clearly at odds with his father and elder brother. He demands his father to give him part of his inheritance that he would normally receive after the retirement or death of the father. Reluctantly, the father does so.
Soon the youth goes off into the world and spends it all irresponsibly. His pride, however, could not let him accept that he had thrown away a great life of security and success. When he was near starving, he woke up to reality and decided to go home, admit his mistakes and ask for forgiveness. His father’s servants, he realized, had a better life than he had. When he was still far from the house, his father, waiting daily by the roadside, ran to welcome and embrace him: no reprimand, no scolding, no punishment. He asked just to be treated as a servant. In fact, his father restored him to his status as a son.
The point of the story is that God our Father has such immense love for His children that when they stray and leave Him, He still waits for them to realize their mistakes and loves and forgives them. It is a great happiness to live with the blessing of forgiveness than struggle with the burden of guilt.
Humans may not have this divine virtue of forgiveness and reconciliation but it’s a gift worth striving for. Family peacemaking needs both sides to accept faults and forgive each other.
