I love my children. One is a teenager, one is a tween. One struggles in school, one is bored by it because it is so easy. One is athletic, the other is not. One has a way of getting along with almost everybody, the other often finds conflict.
How is it that two children can come from the same parents and be raised almost exactly the same way and yet be so very different? The more I raise my children, the more that I realize that so much of who they are may not be determined by what their mother and I hope that they will be. There is a lot of them is based on various part of our genetic makeup. There is another large part of them that comes because of the various people they run across. And there are other large parts of them that come from who knows where.
Occasionally I will hear stories about parents who raised six perfectly happy and respectful and brilliant children. Maybe those parents have some kind of spectacular gift when it comes to raising children. And then other times there are parents who work just as hard and each of their children turn out to be fully messed up. And we wonder, were those parents really bad and we just didn't know it?
Scripture tells us that 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' The older I get the more I realize that while this is a proverbial statement that is true most of the time, it's not true all of the time. Good parents usually train up good children, and bad parents train up bad children. As Luke 6:43-45 tells us, good fruit comes from good trees and bad fruit from bad trees. But again, this is a proverbial truth, not an absolute one.
I'd love it if there was a perfect formula for raising perfect children. Maybe there is...that's why some people believe that genetically planning your children is what is best. But sometimes kids are just kids. Like the butterfly effect, some flapping wings on the other side of the planet may well cause a child to be a great athlete, or a drug dealer, or the scientist who cures cancer. We just don't know...but we can love our children the best we can.
