Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern)
The confession of small children presents a particular difficulty for the priest. This difficulty arises for various reasons. First, because speaking to children in a right, truthful and natural tone is a special gift, not given to everyone. The second reason is that parents in the family cannot always give the child a proper upbringing; they do not try to give his interests the right direction, and do not develop churchliness in him. Preparation for confession, and especially for first confession, is difficult in the family and not every parent is up to it. So it depends precisely on the priest how the child's church life is rightly ordered — that is, beginning at an early age to talk with him about repentance, explaining to him everything connected with it, and awakening in the child the right disposition.
The difficulty in a child's confession comes from the peculiarity of his psychology, which differs sharply from that of grown-ups. Besides, a priest may mistakenly begin to speak to children in some unnatural, contrived tone and try to conduct the conversation according to a spiritual world and outlook of the child that he has invented himself. Children sense naturalness and sincerity much more strongly than adults. So a false tone creates a wrong approach to the child's soul.
The priest should approach the child especially directly, without any unnecessary reasoning or abstraction. He must work on the conscience, awaken it in children, call them to be sincere with themselves. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This must be instilled in children from an early age. The child should understand the fear of God not as a slavish, panic feeling but as a son's reverent veneration of his heavenly Father. The priest should not awaken in the child a utilitarian attitude toward sin and virtue — that is, he should not build the upbringing of the child's soul on some principles of correspondence taken from legal notions: if you behave well, God will send you everything good, and if you behave badly, God will do this and that to you. This is unworthy of the preaching of love and morality. In the morality of the Gospel, very often exactly this correspondence — and justice, as we understand it — is not to be seen (the labourers in the vineyard, for example, were rewarded not according to human justice but according to God's mercy and love). The priest should not misuse the threat “God will punish you.” From an early age we must cultivate in children the primacy of love, not of fear; sonship to God, not slavery. The spiritual father should try to develop in the child's soul a truly Christian feeling of love for the Gospel, loyalty to the Church, love for holy things. He should give him the examples of the saints, who dedicated everything, even themselves, to the Lord.
Particular attention must be paid to a child's inclination to lie, to the wish to use other people's things, to attempts to mock and ridicule the weak, to pleasure in tormenting animals, to insincerity, to a tendency toward rudeness, and so on. The priest should teach the child right confession while he is still young, and instil in him the need to go to church, to attend the services and to receive Communion.
