Copycats
Children are copycats!
When I was a young mother in Oxford, Mississippi, I taught the four- and five-year-old Bible class with Lillie Fay, who was a master teacher.
On one Sunday evening, we were teaching the children about the Lord’s Supper. Lillie Fay gave the children the opportunity to act it out, as it was practiced each Sunday in our church. She gave our son John the role of a man passing out first the bread and then the fruit of the vine to the other fours and fives in our class.
I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday John’s posture as he fulfilled his assignment. He stood erect with his hands folded behind his back.
No one told John how to stand; he was simply doing what he had seen men do each Sunday since he was a baby. He consciously or subconsciously thought, “This is how you stand when you do this.”
I was struck, as we have all been struck again and again, by the fact that children pay attention, and they mimic what they see others do.
Ray and I recently played Sunday School with our granddaughter. In the midst of singing and reading books, she asked me (the pretend teacher) if she could go to the restroom..
She wasn’t really using the restroom; she told me she was just pretending. She was simply doing what she sees older children do during our Wednesday evening outreach class. To our little granddaughter, part of playing Sunday School was children getting up during class to go to the restroom. The last time she and I played Sunday School by ourselves, the first thing she did (with a big smile) was “ask to go to the restroom.”
Pretending to go to the restroom while playing Sunday School with your Little is part of our Sunday School game now. It is innocent, because she doesn’t actually disrupt class when we are at church, but it does put us on notice again that children soak in what is around them.
Part of being a good parent is guarding children from bad examples and making sure they have plenty of good ones.
Children are copycats. It’s our job to monitor whom they copy.
He who walks with wise men will be wise,
But the companion of fools will suffer harm.
Proverbs 13:20