Emotional Babies

Babies have it made.

Photo by Jason Sung on Unsplash

And the Toddler life, assuming the parents are not terribly dysfunctional is filled with a lot of fun as well.

However, it is interesting to note that no matter how good the parents are, children still wail and completely lose it fairly regularly.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

If someone doesn’t give them everything they want immediately they can morph into more agony than is displayed at most of the common tragedies of life. I suppose when tragedies come in the future, the humans at least know what to do, having rehearsed it so well during their earliest years.

What can we learn from this?

Perhaps losing one’s grip in the harder moments of life is sort of a built in reflex. And perhaps maturation is learning not to fall into the very natural reflexive whine we learned, and was quite effective at times when we were three years old.

There is another side to this temptation to play a child and that is the temptation for parents to cater to it even when the child has reached adulthood. It’s hard to let go and let God step in and manage the problems of loved ones. This may be because there is an expected response that comes with the word NO, which many consider a complete sentence requiring no further explanation.

Short term pain for long term gain comes to those who learn to calmly establish and the maintain healthy boundaries.