I Am Too My Child's Holy Spirit

That got your attention, didn't it? Now that I have your attention, let me acknowledge that no, I am not. There's only one Holy Spirit and I am very clearly not it (for which we may all be thankful!). But I am His little helper, and so are you, especially if you are a parent.

I frequently hear parents say that we can't be the Holy Spirit for our children, and I disagree with them- not with the factual statement, but with the other things implied behind that claim. It's not really just a statement of obvious statement of fact, is it? We don't feel the need to say "I'm not my child's Congressional representative," Or "I'm not my child's boot-maker." These things are understood. We say we are not our children's Holy Spirit because we mean something else. I'm afraid that some parents seem to use that phrase to absolve themselves of certain burdens of responsibility.

We are not the H.S, but we are divinely appointed stewards with responsibilities and *authority* from God to carry out those responsibilities. We do not have the right to decide not to actively train, disciple, discipline, and teach our children because we are going to let God deal with that.

God already set up the mechanism for 'dealing with that' into place, and we are, so to speak, the first reponse team. He gave the children parents and told the parents to train, teach, disciple, and discipline our children. If we are not our children's Holy Spirit we most certainly are our children's parents. We are failing in our duties before God if we do not address wrong behavior and attitudes and help teach our children and inform their consciences. Sometimes parents think is effective to just leave an issue up the child's conscience, when by and large, our consciences know what we have taught them to know. It also requires some maturity and strength of will to slow down and hear the voice of conscience.

I know a man who, when he was much younger was the sort of naive young father (uncomfortable with his own authority) who told his two young daughters, "I'm not going to tell you what to do. You can go outside to play or you can clean your rooms. I'm going to leave the decision to you and I trust you to do the right thing." Since the young ladies were about 4 and 5 at the time, they were already outside playing before he got to the part about trusting them. Had they waited, it wouldn't have mattered. They still would have raced outside to play, because their consciences were not as informed as they might have been, and their wills were not brought under their own control yet.

There is such a thing as a nascent conscience; most children have an inborn sense of right and wrong in certain areas. They have a broad idea about what is good and what is bad. Our job is to help them refine that nascent sense and to make sure the apply it outward. For most children this nascent conscience is most active in connection to themselves. Had that father sent one child out to play and made one child stay in to clean the room, the child cleaning the room would instantly have known this was wrong. No child needs to be taught when it is being treated unfairly, they generally know it at a very young age. The child sent out to play probably wouldn't have given it much thought. They are not always able to distinguish between what is just and what is fair. It takes some training to learn to expand that nascent sense to an informed understanding of the more abstract
concepts of right and wrong and to place oneself in another's shoes.

They can learn this on their own, but why should they not have help?

It is the business of education to find some way of supplementing that weakness of will which is the bane of most of us as well as of the children.

... it surely is not just to leave the children all the labour of an effort of will whenever they have to choose between the right and the wrong.~ Charlotte Mason, page 101, Volume one of her six volume series

Wherefore, it is as much the parent's duty to educate his child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed him and clothe him; and that in spite of his nature, if it must be so. It is true that here and there circumstances step in and 'make a man' of the boy whose parents have failed to bring him under discipline; but this is a fortuitous aid which the educator is no way warranted to count upon. Page 100, volume one of Charlotte Mason's six volume series

I do not undervalue the Divine grace––far otherwise; but we do not always make enough of the fact that Divine grace is exerted on the lines of enlightened human effort; that the parent, for instance, who takes the trouble to understand what he is about in educating his child, deserves, and assuredly gets, support from above; and that Rebecca, let us say, had no right to bring up her son to be "thou worm, Jacob," in the trust that Divine grace would, speaking reverently, pull him through. Being a pious man, the son of pious parents, he was pulled through, but his days, he complains at the end, were "few and evil."

The Trust of Parents must not be Supine.–– And indeed this is what too many Christian parents expect: they let a child grow free as the wild bramble, putting forth unchecked whatever is in him––thorn, coarse flower, insipid fruit,––trusting, they will tell you, that the grace of God will prune and dig and prop the wayward branches lying prone. And their trust is not always misplaced; but the poor man endures anguish, is torn asunder in the process of recovery which his parents might have spared him had they trained the early shoots which should develop by-and-by into the character of their child.

Nature then, strong as she is, is not invincible; and, at her best, Nature is not to be permitted to ride rampant. Bit and bridle, hand and voice, will get the utmost of endeavour out of her if her training be taken in hand in time; but let Nature run wild, like the forest ponies, and not spur nor whip will break her in. ~Charlotte Mason, volume one Page 105

In other words, raising free range children is neither responsible, nor very helpful to them. They don't take to it quite as well as chickens do, and it doesn't really work out all that well for a fairly large number of chickens, either.