What is the most important influence in a person's life according to psychiatrists?
Psychiatrists now tell us that what a child puts together in the mind during those first six years will be the biggest influence in the rest of his life. Those earliest formative years, therefore, carry more shaping power than any later period.
Les explains that psychiatrists now say a child's first six years form the biggest influence for the rest of life. He illustrates with the saying, 'Give me a young lad until he is six, and he's a Catholic forever.' He then applies this to Moses: during those five years nursing on his mother's breast, his parents, people of faith, revealed that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would take Israel out of Egypt and put them back in the land of Canaan. Moses had that locked in by age five and never forgot it, even after 35 years under pagan idolatry and Pharaoh's lifestyle. Les also reminds distraught parents of Proverbs: train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.