"I love babies," a young mom said to me recently.  "Then they turn into two-year-olds.  Too bad they can't stay babies forever."

That's not an unusual comment to make.  After the initial sweetness of a very young baby, accepted wisdom is that children will become an endless source of worry and irritation for the next twenty or so years until they finally mature.  Yes, all mothers expect to love and enjoy their children too...but many expect to struggle for years with childhood terrorism and teenage upheaval.  The sad thing is it really doesn't have to be that way: and our very acceptance of these concepts become self-fulfilling prophecies!

I love babies too.  And two-year-olds.  And five-year-olds.  And ten-year-olds.  And thirteen-year-olds.  In fact, as much as I've loved the babies, I only love and enjoy them more as they get older.  Granted, they're my siblings right now and not my children, but according to my parents and others like them, there are two big secrets to having kids only get more enjoyable instead of being difficult to live with until they grow up.  The first is recognizing God created everything to be good - bratty toddlers and obnoxious teens are certainly not good and don't have to exist.  The second secret is to reject the popular cultural philosophy of "normal" developmental stages.

There's no denying kids mature and change a lot as they do so.  There are characteristics of different ages that are more or less the same among all children of those ages.  You can't expect a kid to drive a car at the age of three because they don't have the physical capability and experience to safely do so.  But the thing I think is missing in our culture today is an understanding of children as people, not "A Two-Year-Old" or "A Teenager", or any of the other labels we've invented.  The simple idea that something not acceptable in an adult shouldn't be acceptable in a two-year-old has been lost.  The idea that God didn't create young children to terrorize their parents and siblings has been even more thoroughly lost.  People act according to the stage they believe they're in to the point that many excuse their bad behavior by saying, "I can't help being rude and oblivious - that's just what you do when you're old"  Or, "I'm a college kid and I'm supposed to be trying things out - everyone else does!"  Or, "Well, I've just fallen in love so I can't listen to advice now."  How many bad things result from these attitudes?

Instead of acting truthfully and with the same standards our whole lives, we're constantly changing them to fit whatever box we think we're currently in.  It's confusing and destructive and it's like trying to live out a movie or a story instead of paying attention to what's really going on around us.  And it all starts with the babies we expect to throw tantrums and be generally difficult to keep out of trouble simply because they're babies.

It's not that two-year-olds in our house act like adults.  They don't.  They haven't gotten the experience they need to be adults: but it's not excusable for them to throw themselves on the floor and scream because they're only two years old.  Around here, a person's life is one long path instead of a staircase: if something isn't right to do down the road it certainly isn't right now.  So we've never experienced the Terrible Twos; and supposedly "normal" teenage rebellion doesn't exist either.  After three who've grown past their teens and two currently in them, this is a reliable trend.  It's made for interesting choices for us along the way because we don't see life as putting our time into this box until we move on to the next one.  Instead of going to college because that's the thing to do after you graduate high school, for example, each of us assessed whether it really made sense in the long run to go (so far, none of us have).  In a similar vein, many girls my age are doing things they only expect to do until they get married because the "stage" they're in is "Young Single Woman".  I don't want to always live my life jumping from one stage to the next: I'm going to do things I think are important, not simply fill time until I get to the next stage.

This simple concept has in many ways defined the way my siblings and I were raised.  We were expected to behave as we always would be expected to in the future: and if we didn't, we were corrected and trained to do so.  If as adults we wouldn't be expected to hit someone we didn't like, we weren't expected to do so as babies.  Mom and Dad didn't have a picture of the perfect two-year-old when they were training one of their children: they had a picture of a Godly great-great grandfather or mother...with all the children we would be affecting years and years in the future.

When I learned to drive, I remember the instructor saying something really interesting: "You can't drive by looking at the road right in front of you.  You have to drive at least three cars ahead, because that's the only way you can make corrections in time or even drive in a straight line."

Trapping kids into life stages is driving by looking at the road right in front of the tires instead of looking ahead.  Constantly having to re-evaluate what's acceptable behavior and what isn't based on a nebulous stage of maturity is the way to create confusion and exasperation in both parents and children.  The consistency and purpose of beginning a life the way you want it to end seems to be what King Solomon referred to in that favorite old Proverbs verse: "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." (Proverbs 22:6, NIV)  Recognizing God made children to be good at every age and starting them off in the way they should go means having the same standards of good behavior no matter how old - or young - the person happens to be.