Parents Are Committed To Their Children's Survival Needs

Committed love goes into overdrive when it comes to things children need. How many good nights' sleep have we surrendered? How many dinners out, how many new cars, how many luring investments, how many unworried hours-things we wanted badly, things we figured we had a right to-how many have we surrendered to what we thought were our children's needs?

But it is not always easy to tell the difference between a Child's desires and a child's needs. What does every ordinary child need? Special children need special things: a handicapped child needs things to compensate for nature's oversight, a gifted child needs special special things to exploit nature's Blessing. But there are some things-call them survival needs-all children must have.

Survival needs are what every child requires to keep body and soul together: food, liquid, elimination, warmth, and medication, and education. But the heart has survival needs too: the comfort of another's voice, a song, a snuggle, a holding, a cuddling, and, above all, a reassuringly dependable presence. We do not have to dwell on survival needs; we all know that any parent is committed to meeting them.

Some parents are not able to keep this minimal commitment. They are too poor. They don't have enough food to give their children. They don't have a house in which their children can live. So when we talk about personal commitments on this primal level, we are also talking about politics and economics. Some parents need a lot of help. Commitment keeping in the family ultimately becomes a political issue.

But children need more than sheer survival. They need what it takes to get them started on their path of growth.

Growth is not an optional luxury. When we stop growing we stop living-at least we stop living as human beings with a life's call to become what God has put it in us to be. So growth needs are, after all, survival needs. And every parent takes on a commitment to get a child growing.

How much and how far? Nobody can say for sure. It depends on a child's potential, on the family money tree, on the needs of all the other kids in the family. We cannot be specific. Growth is a matter of degree; every child has his or her own limits.

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Hari

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