These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
9. Children and Young People
Children and Young People: Queries
How do we provide young people with explicit guidelines in
a Quaker faith and practice?
Do we see children and young people as individuals we
want to know and care for?
How do we provide opportunities where they can get to
know and care for us?
How do you share your deepest beliefs with children
while leaving them free to develop as the spirit of God may lead them?
Children and Young People: Advices
Rejoice in the presence of children and young people
in meeting. Recognize and affirm the gifts that they bring to the
life of the meeting community.
Children and young people need their peer groups. They
also need whole group sharing where they are an integral part of
the meeting, sharing experiences that deepen relationships. Part
of sharing is learning to know of our past as Quakers. Even
more important is the sharing of what we as Quakers understand
as the Truth today and how it shapes our lives.
Parents are the children's first teachers and they need to
help their children understand what it means to attend meeting
for worship. Children need specific expectations placed upon them.
All Friends need to be mentors to the children in their meeting.
Children and Young People: Voices
To watch the spirit of children, to nurture them in
Gospel Love, and labour to help them against that which would mar
the beauty of their minds, is a debt we owe them; and a
faithful performance of our duty not only tends to their lasting
benefit and our own peace, but also to render their company
agreeable to us. A care hath lived in my mind, that more time might
be employed by parents at home, and by tutors at school, in
weightily attending to the spirit and inclinations of children, and that
we may so lead, instruct and govern them, in this tender part of
life, that nothing may be omitted in our power, to help them on
their way to become the children of our Father who art in heaven."
John Woolman, 1758
We seek to affirm in each child at school, each member of
the meeting, each person we meet in our daily lives, the person
that he or she may with God's help grow to be. We are all the
merest infants in God's world, struggling to stand upright and
walk unaided, trying in vain to articulate our halting thoughts
and feelings. We stumble and fall. We give way to self-pity and
shame. God hauls us to our feet again and makes sense of our
childish babble, never ceasing to believe in what we may
ultimately become. Do we do the same for our children and one
another? We have a responsibility to follow Pierre Ceresole's
dictum: "Speak to every child as if you were addressing the utterly
truthful upright individual which under your guidance he may one
day become."
…When we find ourselves teaching - as we all do in
our relationships within meeting - can we draw upon that respect
for one another that will enable the other to feel taller and
more capable?
Barbara Windle, 1988
All children are listeners, but some stop listening
and remembering sooner than others. ...It makes me sad when I
hear discussions about not introducing children to God until they are
old enough to understand. I grew into the Lords prayer, and I
am still growing into it. All religious language, all devotional
books, and particularly the Bible, provide growing room for young
minds and spirits..
Elise Boulding, 1975,
I lament more than I can express that a military
education and training is being introduced into our public schools. It
has no business there. With such profession as we are making,
a Christian profession, we have no right to be instructing
children in the art of war, in the art of murdering their fellow beings.
Lucretia Mott, 1869
I want that we may all show our faith by our works, by
our honesty and justice and mercy and love; I want love to
begin with little children; they should be governed by love, and
love only. I am glad the rod is so far banished in the family circles
and the schools. Children love peace. The little child knows when
it says, Mother, I love everybody. There is a Divine instinct in
them which prompts to this feeling.
Lucretia Mott, 1876
These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
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