Communicating with Children

Bill Cosby recorded an awesome standup routine called "Himself" that I used to listen to when I was a kid. I still have some of it memorized. There are lots of family/marriage/parenthood jokes and they're great because they really ring true.

Among the many nuggets of wisdom he shares is the idea that children are brain damaged. If you haven't seen it, I'll let Cosby explain it to you himself:



When my children were babies, I couldn't communicate with them very well at all. I would sometimes try to reason with them saying things like, "Look, I know you're tired, but crying about it isn't helping." or "I know you're uncomfortable, but I've got to tell you - you'd feel a whole lot better about yourself if you'd stop pooping in your diaper." For some reason, they never really responded to those bits of parental wisdom. But as they've gotten older, I find that I'm able to appeal to their reason more and more. My oldest can have a pretty intelligent conversation with me and I can make logical arguments with him that he understands. I compare him with my youngest who repeats the same acts of disobedience over and over and seems, at times, an awful lot like Cosby's "I dunno!" brain damaged child.

And then I thought of myself and how I sometimes repeat the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again. And I think that God must look down on us sometimes with a smile and a shake of his head and think "Brain damage!". It occurred to me that this experience of being a father could be leading me to a much greater understanding of what God sees when He looks at us. There are times I get frustrated with my children when they repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I don't think God gets frustrated with us. But I imagine there are times when His attempts to communicate with me are about as effective as my attempts to communicate with my dog, who in all respects, is even more retarded than my brain-damaged children. When I talk to my dog, I imagine he hears his name, a few command words like "come", "go", "sit", etc and the rest sounds like the teacher in the old Peanuts cartoons.

The only downside for me in this analogy is that my dog really seems to try to understand me. When I'm talking to him, I have 100% of his attention and he seems to hang on every word. Maybe I should try to be as faithful to God as my dog is to me.