All children are good

My view of children is this:  Heavenly Father sends His children to us to take care of them for a season, they become ours too, then we return them back to Heavenly Father.  I really have the view that ALL children are God's children and we are just truly fortunate enough to be trusted with the great responsibility of parenting them.  We are so lucky.

I hear so much labeling as a parent from people that I am surrounded by--not necessarily my friends, but just everyone in the community.  "Oh, that child is good!"  "She is so smart." "That child is a bad kid." "He listens to his mom." "She is a bit rowdy."  All the time and every day I hear labeling of children and to be honest it drives me crazy.   

In my mind ALL children are GOOD.

No matter what.  I don't care if they throw toys or talk back to their mom...I still think they are GREAT.  They just made a bad choice and they are learning.

I also hear a ton of comparing from parents about their children and other children.  "Oh, Tommy is so much better at that than...."  "I want my kid to hang around only THAT kid because he's an amazingly brilliantly talented 2-year-old."  This also drives me crazy.

I believe that God thinks that ALL CHILDREN are amazing and brilliant too.  To hear people say, "We don't hang out with them because x, y, z," totally boggles my mind.  Especially from LDS people because we are taught that the 2 greatest commandments are to Love God and also to Love our neighbors as ourselves. 

I had a conversation a few months ago with someone I admire, but the content of the conversation didn't sit right with me.  It went something like this:

She said, "My child does not want to hang out with this kid (because of x, y, z) so of course I told him he doesn't have to.  I tell him he still has to be nice to him, but he doesn't have to be his friend."

Interesting.  What part of not being his friend is "nice".  

Do we even understand what the word nice means?  It seems that people think that as long as you say polite things to their face you can say whatever you want behind their back, you can exclude them from friendship, you can snub them, and still have all of that fall under the category of "nice."  Weird. (obviously if your child would be unsafe or if it negatively affects his/her self-esteem to hang out with a specific kid that would be different)

Our Bishop said something in church a couple of Sundays ago that was actually an answer to my prayers.  He said (paraphrasing) "Our goal is to be as one.  To be able to love each other as much as we love our own child.  When we live with Heavenly Father again that is how it will be."

I have been having an internal struggle with the fact that when we die and go on to the next life we will be the same as we are here.  I've been taught that in my church.  Each of us will have the same personalities/likes/dislikes etc.  That has meant to me that we will all still act like what I have written above--judging, excluding, snubbing...because that is what we do here.  And truly, I do not want to live like that forever.  Even really, really good people still act like that on Earth.  How do we make the jump from the judging, excluding, snubbing...to being as one and treating EVERYONE (not just the people we like) as our own children?  

*disclaimer: I am not bitter about this, just curious :) And I obviously feel very strongly about it!