Emotional Babies
Babies have it made.
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.
If someone doesn’t give them everything they want immediately they can morph into pathetic looking emotional blobs. I suppose when tragedies come in the future, we humans, having rehearsed it so well from our earliest years, know what to do — at least what has worked well for us in the past.
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 the child. It is to manipulate parents — even after the child has reached adulthood.
This is because it is so hard for us as parents to let go and let God. Instead, our greatest default temptation is to reflexively want to step in and manage their problems ourselves.
Short term pain for long term gain comes to those who learn to calmly establish and the maintain healthy boundaries.