Imprinting

Being a father has taught me many things in life. It has taught me to be patient, humble, fearless, and most of all responsible. Growing up responsibility had many meanings to me, it meant to keep my room clean, to go to work, to pay my bills, or to be on time when I was picking up Rita for a date. Fatherhood brings on a completely different meaning to the word responsible as any father could attest to. No longer can I stay out late or do whatever I want, gone are the times of staying out till all hours of the night and sleeping into any hour of the day. Now I am responsible for a life and not just one life but two. Josh and Jacob don't care that Rita and I stayed up late watching a movie they want to play or they want breakfast they do not understand dad is sick or dad is tired they expect dad to be dad. This means what? To take care of myself to make sure I am being healthy, to set a good example. Example that is the million dollar word, our children follow our example and do everything we do. To them mom and dad are awesome and children want to be like mom and dad. How do they do that? By imitating what we do, early developmental psychology talks about imprinting. This is when a animal imitates what it sees or what it understands its mother to be. Wither it is the biological mother to the animal or ducks perceiving a human as their mother. In the same way children imprint themselves in what they see in their parents and the world around them. Now this goes into so many different areas of development for instance Josh likes o hit things with his tools because he thinks that is what I am doing (sometimes I am), he wants to be like dad. I think is a way God reminds me of the important responsibility of being a parent. When Joshua was baptized Msrn. Ruan told me and Rita you are responsible for our child's faith. It always has stuck with me and I thought it meant just to teach him but it was to show him. So often in our culture we have taken on his idea that it is the Church's responsibility to instruct the children. We assume that they can go and be taught about the faith. This is false though as parents we are responsible for their faith as husbands men are the domestic priests. As the priests it our responsibility to teach our children the faith must most of all it is our ultimate responsibility to show them the faith. Imprinting is how child's personality beings forming right away and who they are is given to them at a early age. My biggest problem that I hear people say is “I want them to learn about Jesus themselves I do not want to force them into anything.” This is the cultural flaw we make. You make a child go to mass? I would ask you do you have to make yourself or to mass or do you show joy and excitement for our Lord in the precious bread and wine. Not to say that at times that children are not difficult in mass and sometimes overfilled with the Holy Spirit. Children imprint themselves in what they see in us as parents. I see this is Josh and how he wants to do things that mom and dad do. As parents we should show our children that mass and living our faith is who we are not just something we do. Children will imprint what they see if they see that our faith is important they will want to partake in that. At a time when a child is in his formative years why would we want to push something off that is so important and is not only important but is essential. I would not want to be responsible for having to look my Lord in the face and say to him that I did not want to pressure my child into his faith. Our faith is not something we do on Sunday it is not something that describes us. It should be something that defines us in a culture where so much pressure is put on being the best or faith calls us to something different and we should be willing to teach our children that.

God Bless