Jay Kesler

It is important to teach children the relationship between cause and effect. In fact, maturity can be measured by the degree to which one is able to accept these realities and live within their boundaries.

In our media-saturated society, parents need to pay special attention to showing their children the effects of their actions. Many young people see a constant series of images of unreality. They can go to the movies and see Rambo shoot several hundred people without ever being hit by a bullet himself. They can watch people hitting one another with all sorts of weapons and yet get up and walk away unharmed. They may not realize that this is make-believe and that it can only happen in the movies. They may not know that this is not how the real world works.

One of the most tragic situations I remember from my counseling ministry involved a sixteen-year-old boy who sat down with his girlfriend and told her that if she broke up with him, he would kill himself. She tried to reassure him that he would survive the breakup of their relationship, but he got out a gun and began to wave it around. Suddenly he put it to his chest and pulled the trigger. The bullet went through his heart. As he was dying, he looked at the girl in disbelief and said, "I've killed myself."

It was as if he were saying, "I didn't really mean to do this. I didn't think it would happen this way. In the movies, guys get sympathy for doing this-and here I'm dying." The girl had the awful experience of holding him in her arms as he gasped his last three or four breaths, disbelief in his eyes.

This unrealistic view of life is planted in our children when they are very small. Roadrunner is a good example; one cannot get flattened by a steamroller and then get up and be whole again the next minute. Parents have to point this out their children.

Obviously, we do not want to teach our children about cause and effect by allowing them to suffer physical harm. We don't tell them to go play in the street in order to learn the cause-and-effect relationship between standing in the path of an oncoming automobile and getting run over. This would be absurd and ridiculous. We can tell them what will happen, though, and we can show them the effects of traffic on careless squirrels.

Handling money, by contrast, is good area for direct learning about cause and effect. A child learns what zero is by being given an allowance with no reinforcements when it runs out. Our credit-oriented society demands this kind of understanding.

Another way to teach financial responsibility is to allow children to take care of maintaining their own possessions. For example, a boy who forgets to turn off his new battery-operated toy is going to wear out the batteries. Point this out, and then if he doesn't listen, let him wear them out and save up the money to buy new ones. He will learn that there is a relationship between his behavior and what happens in his life.

Parents need to look for every possible opportunity to teach this lesson. Too much kindness can be cruel: if parents always provide a safety net for their children, the children will never learn to take responsibility for their actions. A friend who works with juvenile delinquents says, "If your boy jumps off the roof every day and you catch him, someday he'll jump off when you're gone and he'll be hurt."

Of course, parents also need to apply grace as they bring up their children. I have a friend who decided, when his son began driving, that he would pay for the first accident and the first traffic ticket in order to show the boy that everyone does stupid things once in a while and needs to be forgiven. No parent should adhere so closely to the law of cause and effect that he or she forgets grace in the process-but nowadays, few parents seem to be in danger of doing this. Far more common are the parents who apply so much misguided grace that their children are unable to mature into responsible adults.

Teaching children to understand the law of cause and effect is a vital part of child rearing. It is especially important in our media age, where many people live as if they are in the wings watching themselves acting on the stage of life.