Global Child Protection Parenting Curriculum

Year 1, Lesson 2: An Infiltrated Garden

Time Needed: 45 minutes

Garden Images:

Index

Teacher Preparation

Introduction

New Ideas

Caregiver Connection

Application/Activity

Reflection

Closing

Resources

Teacher Preparation

Objectives

The caregiver will be able to:

• Explore how parenting is like gardening.
• Hear a Bible story about how evil leads us to damage others, while God desires to heal us. 
• Explain how evil comes to all parents and children through traumatic experiences and family inheritance: evil happens to every person and through every person.
• Define evil as: to choose what is bad for another’s heart, mind, and body.
• Explore parenting practices in the community (gender inequality, corporal punishment, hurtful words, neglect, exploitation) that damage a child’s heart, mind, and body.
• Explore parenting practices that protect a child’s heart, mind, and body, encouraging them to grow in love.

Materials

• Chalkboard and chalk
• Parenting practices sets, one per group of four parents (see Preparation)
• Small bags for each parenting practice set

Preparation

• Read the lesson and reflect on how to teach it wisely.
• Skim previous lesson. Prepare to have a quick review at the beginning of class.
• Prepare a set of common parenting practices that represent choosing what is good for children and what is bad for children. There is an example at the end of the lesson; contextualize for your community as needed. If you have better examples, you can write your own instead. Prepare one set for every group of 4 parents. Caregivers will use these for the lesson activity and decide whether or not they choose what is good for a child or what is bad for a child. Either print and cut out the examples at the end of the lesson or copy them onto separate small pieces of paper. Place each set in a small bag for groups to pull them out one at a time.
• Review the lesson activity. If many adults in your community cannot read well, then adjust the activity in this way: place the participants in groups and then create one parenting practice set for yourself. Read one at a time and allow the groups to discuss it. Then allow the groups to share after each set.
• In preparation for the discussion part of the lesson activity, keep in mind that your goal is not to just tell caregivers that certain local accepted practices such as child labor are wrong, but rather to encourage them to come to this conclusion on their own. For example, acknowledge the truth that a child who works can bring in money for a family (which might provide more food for bodily health), but also explain how education grows a child’s mind, enabling them to make more money later. Encourage the parents to think about the whole child (body, mind and heart) over the course of time and how certain practices affect the child.

Introduction

5 minutes

In our last class, we discussed how gardening is similar to parenting. One way we care for a garden is to provide water or fertilizer to create conditions where plants can grow and thrive. We can do the same as parents.

• What does it mean to love our children unconditionally? To choose what is good for their heart, mind, and body.

This might be a new way to think about parenting and we ended our last lesson with an encouragement to pay attention to your children’s heart, mind and body until our next meeting.

• What did you notice about your child’s heart, mind, and body? What choices and decisions did you see them make (the heart)? What thoughts and feelings did they have (the mind)? What did you notice about their bodies? Accept all answers. Explore how children are more than just bodies; they also have an inner life where they have strong thoughts and feelings and though immature, make decisions about how to act.

God made every human being both complicated and wonderful, just like our children. As adults and caregivers, we have the responsibility to create the best conditions possible for our children to grow; however, just as a garden has “enemies” that prevent its growth, so do our children.

• What forces affect a garden that can possibly destroy it? Accept answers. Some possible answers are: drought, flooding, bugs and other pests that destroy plants, unhealthy soil.

• Which of these forces can we control? Accept all answers. Explore how we cannot make it rain or kill all pests and predators, etc., and therefore do not control them. We can control how we respond to them. We can build fences to protect a garden or provide a watering system, for example.

Raising children in our world is similar. We cannot always control bad or evil things that occur, but we can control how we respond to them.

• How do we know that evil exists in our world? Accept all answers. Possible answers are: war, suffering, hardship, loss etc.

• How do we know that evil exists in people? Accept all answers. Possible answers are: they harm one another, they make mistakes, they damage the earth, etc.

Though evil is not a pleasant topic to discuss, the truth is that we all know it exists. We experience it through hardship, injustice and painful circumstances and we experience it when other people hurt us, or we hurt them. Evil is both done to us and through us and this is true for every person on earth.

We have agreed that unconditional love is to choose what is good for another’s heart, mind, and body. We can define evil as its opposite: to choose what is bad for another’s heart, mind, and body.

• Do you think people usually choose to hurt others? This may be a new question for caregivers to consider but give them time to think about it. Explore how sometimes in moments of anger or frustration, we might deliberately hurt others but other times, we may not know that we are injuring them. In these circumstances, we may not realize that we are choosing evil.

New Ideas

15 minutes

Think of an experience you had that created a strong negative feeling inside of you. What was it like? Accept answers.

I am going to read a story about a situation that created a strong negative feeling inside of a person. This story is from the Bible, the foundational text for Christians. The Bible tells not only about God’s plans for people, but also shares stories about people much like us. Cain and Abel are the grown-up sons of the first couple in the Bible, Adam and Eve. Listen for when Cain gets upset and then what he does with his dark feelings.

Genesis 4:3-8

3 After some time, Cain gathered some things he had grown. He brought them as an offering to the Lord. 4 And Abel also brought an offering. He brought the fattest parts of some animals from his flock. They were the first animals born to their mothers. The Lord was pleased with Abel and his offering. 5 But he wasn’t pleased with Cain and his offering. So Cain became very angry, and his face was sad.

6 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why are you looking so sad? 7 Do what is right and then you will be accepted. If you don’t do what is right, sin is waiting at your door to grab you. It desires to control you. But you must rule over it.”

8 Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” So they went out. There Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

• How did Cain feel when God did not accept his offering to God, but did accept his brother’s gift? Possible answers are: jealous, angry, rejected, sad, unjustly treated.

• Do you think it was wrong to have those feelings at first? Why or why not? Accept all answers.

• What did Cain do in response to his strong feelings? Evil took control of him. Murdered his brother.

• Why do you think he hurt Abel when he was actually mad at God’s response to him? Accept all answers. Possible answers are: he felt competitive with Abel, he felt jealous, he blamed Abel for his rejected gift.

God tried to help Cain when he told him how to please him, but God also warned him to control his feelings, not allowing evil to control him. Instead of listening to God, Cain murdered Abel, allowing evil to work through him. One of the reasons that evil is done to us and through us is due to the dark inner thoughts, feelings and fears that all humans face. Those emotions can control us if we allow evil to grow.

We all experience negative feelings, but we might not yet understand how they can overtake us, leading us to hurt others. When evil is done to us, the pain we receive might lead us to inflict evil on others, often people who don’t deserve it. Though we may not murder another person, every human since the beginning of time has both received and committed evil in some form.

• Can you think of an example when another person had a strong emotion and turned this negative emotion on you? Or perhaps a time when you did this to somebody else? Leave a minute for this silent reflection. Ask if anybody would like to share an example.

Caregiver Connection

5 minutes

As caregivers, it is important to remember that we all have dark feelings that may allow evil to control us. We sometimes pass this evil onto our children. We take the pain from our own experiences and our own trauma, and it continues to future generations. If we want to break this family cycle, we must learn to recognize when evil is at work in us and around us.

Sometimes it is not one person who acts out of evil, but entire communities and cultures, though they may not fully grasp the wrongs they do. For example, some Western countries legally enslaved African people, paying them nothing for hard labor; yet, slave owners did not believe evil was working through them when they enslaved them. All communities make decisions like these and it can be difficult to talk about evil. However, if we want to learn to love others, especially our children, we will grow to recognize when evil is at work.

Application/Activity

15 minutes

Remember that our definition of evil is to choose what is bad for another’s heart, mind, and body. We will now do a group activity to explore how different situations that involve children show choosing what is good for a child’s heart, mind, and body or choosing what is bad for a child’s heart, mind, and body. Some will be obvious and others more challenging.

Follow these instructions for the activity:

1. Divide the caregivers into groups of 4 people, making sure that at least one person in each group can read well, if possible.
2. Give each group a bag holding a set of common parenting practices, asking them not to view them yet.
3. Each group should pull out one example at a time and respond to these two questions:
   1. How does this parenting practice affect a child’s heart, mind, and body?
   2. Do you think it chooses what is good or bad for a child?
4. Explain that they should think about how each practice affects the heart (our ability to make good decisions and choices), the mind (thoughts and feelings) and body (health and overall well-being). This may be a new way to think, but the idea is to help them connect how parenting affects a child’s whole person. For some “bad” examples such as beating a child to encourage obedience, have the caregivers consider how harming a child’s body and mind is a harmful way to teach obedience.
5. Allow the groups to pull out the pieces of paper one at a time and answer both questions.
6. After the groups have discussed them, read one parenting practice at a time out loud and have each group share their answers. As mentioned in the Preparation section, allow the groups to openly share different ideas without open disagreement. Instead, allow for discussion and ask questions about how a particular practice might affect a child’s heart and mind (which are less likely to be considered as they are often unseen). Below is a chart for your reference, though it should not be used to give easy answers. Instead it should help you lead the discussion.

Reflection

4 minutes

This activity might have made some of us feel uncomfortable, as it asked us to think about some common practices in our community that hurt children. Perhaps some of us haven’t made this connection before, so it is important to recognize such wrongs, but not to dwell in shame about what has happened in the past. In the previous lesson, we explained that protecting our children means protecting them from intentional and unintentional forms of harm. One purpose of this parenting course is to help us all grow to find more ways to love our children well and let go of practices that harm them.

The good news is that though evil can come naturally to us, we also can experience and give love to our children. That is God’s gift to us! In a moment of silence, ask God to show you examples from your own life when you knew that love was present. This might be someone caring well for you, or when you saw another person or child being loved well by another person. Allow at least a minute’s silence for examples to come to mind. Silent reflection is a new practice for many; give enough time for people to think.

After a few minutes of silence, allow the caregivers to share different examples of times when God’s love was present. Do not pressure any to share, however.

Closing

1 minute

As we discuss how evil can lead us to struggle in our parenting, we need to also keep in mind how God’s love leads us to succeed. Until the next time we meet, pay attention to how hardship and inner fears and negative feelings might lead us to fail to love others, but also pay attention to how good thoughts and feelings lead to loving others well.

As we learn and grow in how to care well for our children, we will see that these moments of love’s presence will become more frequent.

Resources

Common Parenting Practices Sample Set

Global Child Protection Parenting Curriculum