The Third Principle: Learn true love in the school of the family

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LESSON 13: The Children's Realm of Heart

A. Children's realm of heart.

1. Every child is born out of the love of God. As he or she grows, he unfolds stage by stage the invisible nature of God in visible manifestation. After all, in adulthood, he is destined to fully embody God's divine nature as a temple of God.

2. As the child receives his parents' love his heart grows.

• The child is innocent, curious and open. The child believes in others.
• Receiving parents' love stimulates the child's love and causes the child's heart to grow, as sunlight coming from the sky causes plants to grow and multiply. Children naturally offer love and respect, faith and trust, obedience and gratitude to their parents. Thus, the mind of filial piety develops. As a result of receiving parental love, they naturally develop love among brothers and sisters. This is how love multiplies and fills everything.
• The parents are the primary conduit for God's love to the child. The face of his parents are the first image of God; in their love he can understand the reality of God. As he is receptive to his parents love, he becomes receptive to God's love and truth. He is filled with wonder at his world and is grateful for its blessings. We have the heart to love God because He first loved us through our parents.
• Grandparents' love is a valuable supplement to parents' love. Grandparents represent the larger world. They have more time. They have broader perspective than the parents, in general.

3. Within God there is yin and yang, masculinity and femininity.

• Children receive God's masculine love from their father, and His feminine love from their mother.
• Boys and girls grow in different directions. The older they grow, the greater the difference. Boys respond more to their mother's love. As they grow up, they must separate from dependency upon their mother and begin to identify and inherit from their father. Girls children respond more to their father's love. As they grow up, they must separate from their attachment to their father and begin to identify with and inherit from their mother. This means their love for the opposite sex grows, though latently, while their ability to become a husband and wife grows.
• As children, boys and girls persecute each other. They are not meant to manifest sexual love, by natural law.
• American educator Allan Bloom lamented the terrible effect of early sexual experience upon his students, calling youths who experimented with sex "flat-souled . . . unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals." (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987], 134.
• Explicit sexual education taught by non-family members is harmful. Children cannot deal with such thoughts and ideas.

4. Learning to live by conscience.

• The conscience represents God, who is the source of the vertical ethic. Therefore the conscience will promote the principle of life for the higher purpose. The physical body cannot transcend its own needs and appetites. Therefore the body will insist upon life for the self's purpose.
• Our conscience knows we should be able to get along with everyone. Its perspective transcends self-interest.
• In the conscience, the child has a natural compass to guide the growth of her heart.
• However, children need to be taught norms to educate the conscience.
• Filial piety is the basic standard of good and evil for children's conscience. In the story of Pinocchio, his conscience was always telling him to obey his father. When he realized the truth of this, he gained the power to sacrifice himself to save his father's life.
• Children have a desire to know right from wrong.
• Children have an innate sense of the difference between good and bad.
• They test the limits.
• They do not complain when their parents push them to study, because they know it is for their benefit. The heart of true parents is to pray for their children all night, shedding tears.

5. However, parents who have not developed good character cannot give true love to their children.

• Their children are deprived of the love which can nurture the children's realm of heart.
• Their children's personalities become crippled, unable to relate evenly with all types of people.
• When children's love is lost, later in life they distrust and disobey their elders and all forms of social authority.
• Worse, they lose their relationship with God, who is first perceived by a child in the love of their parents. Thus atheism comes about.
• Without a full relationship with God, the conscience is weakened and cannot develop fully.
• Without receiving proper education as children with which to bear fruit in the children's realm of heart, none of the other realms of heart can develop properly.
• Parents who have distorted relations with their own spouse or parents cannot function within the parental realm of heart. They will abuse their authority as parents, even making sex objects of their children or young relatives (incest).
• One of the most sorrowful results of the failure of parents to establish the realm of children's heart is homosexuality. Homosexuality arises from the failure of true love within the family, especially in the relationship between father and son, mother and daughter.

6. As we grow, we move into the realm of brother and sister love. This will be the focus of the next lesson.

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