Parenting Tips - The Challenge Of Protecting Childhood Innocence

The excerpt below is from a series of articles about parental concerns

Little kids, especially barely verbal kids, watch and listen to everything. All kinds of things fascinate them; the graceful motion of goldfish, the gentle waving of tall grasses, the color yellow, and the bouncing of a beach ball. All the things adults take for granted, toddlers find endlessly amazing. They believe everything we tell them; they have no concept of lying, or even fanciful jest. Myths, childhood legends, make-believe, wonderful fantasies of all sorts and even bogeymen that lurk in their closets at night are all real to them. Kids believe it just because we say it. Like the sleeping puppy, their total absence of guile seems to last such a short time! This innocence seems to vanish within the first few years of their lives, never to be reclaimed.

What takes the place of childish innocence? We can only hope that it is wisdom. As kids learn the ways of the world, this knowledge can sometimes be disappointing. There's no such thing as Santa Claus or Superman. The tiny puppy grew into a big dog that bites if its ears are yanked. Grandmother died - she isn't "sleeping." And there are monsters, but they don't live in the closet at night; they are teachers and babysitters and the nice man next door who has some strange pictures of naked kids.

As their innocence is depleted, little kids simply accept the world as it is, not as it should be as adults often do. This is another example of a child's wisdom; things are what they are. A hurricane blew our house away. Some people who live far away don't like us, and they hurt a lot of people in New York. Many people, even kids, get really sick and they go to live with God where they won't be sick anymore. My Mommy and Daddy don't live in the same house.

Read the full article here: Parenting