Children and Mimetic Desire

I really liked Larry Gibson’s talk in the Priesthood session of General Conference on fatherhood.  One of the scriptures that he quoted was this: “I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things” (John 8:28).  This of course was Christ’s testimony to the Jews affirming that He always did those things that were in accordance with what His Father taught and showed Him.  Brother Gibson used the scripture, though, to show that a similar pattern might prevail in our own homes: sons will tend to do as they see and hear from their fathers.

 I had never thought of the verse in that respect, and it of course begs the question: do I want my sons to say and do the kind of things that they see me say and do?  If they grow up to be like their dad, will I be proud?  The crux of the matter is that, as one writer in the New Era put it, “Human beings are mimetic creatures. All of us have a vital urge to imitate” (Keith Engar, A Father Looks at the Flicks).  In fact the idea that we have very strong mimetic desires is a core part of the gospel: the ultimate purpose of that desire is that we will want to imitate and be like Christ and our Father in Heaven.  For the young children that we raise, our job is to offer them something worth imitating, especially since trying to “be like Jesus” will likely be very abstract to them.  President Monson even highlighted this idea in the humorous story about the boy who copied him while he was on the stand but failed to reproduce the wiggling of the ears.  In that talk he said, “I’ve contemplated how, particularly when we’re young, we tend to imitate the example of our parents, our leaders, our peers. The prophet Brigham Young said: ‘We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do. We should set them an example that we wish them to imitate’” (Examples of Righteousness, GC April 2008).  No matter how independent we think we are, one of the important questions that we have to answer (whether consciously or not) in this life is who we are going to imitate; or in other words, who will we take for our examples in life?  And as parents we must likewise understand the implications of the fact that more likely than not, we will be the most influential person that our children will imitate in their early years.  I guess the goal we should strive for is that if our children “do nothing” but what they see us as their parents do and say, they will be building their lives on a solid gospel foundation.