Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it..
So what gives?
How is it that we teach, preach, talk prod and encourage our children and teens to do the right thing. What do we get? We get behavior that is completely opposite of what we thought we were going to get.
We think we are instilling honesty, but what we find is that our children can look us straight in the eye and tell a lie that can possibly fool CIA agents. We have to hide our stuff from, not the criminal down the street, our children. We are afraid to take a good look behind the sweet smile they give. We may find that those aren’t their teeth in their mouth.
Today it’s almost a crime to look at your child and see the problem. It’s much more safer to look at the environment and blame the environment for our children’s problems. We know that “Pookie” is sweet. So it must be the daycare teacher, elementary school teacher, high school teacher, police, and whoever else gives us negative feedback. One thing is for certain, it isn’t our sweet, little “Pookie.”
Parenting children is like raising any other garden. We plant golden onions, but what sprouts is wild, willful onions: we plant turnip greens, we get a few of those, but mostly we get dandelion greens: we think we have planted a red, delicious apple tree, but what grows twice as fast, is a crabapple tree.
How is that?
We aren’t the only ones planting in our garden. We have this overbearing, omnipresent entity called society. Society constantly attempts to overthrow our attempts of parenting. Society with it’s over empowering, coddling, parenting style, or it’s overbearing, rule bound strict parenting style, is always pushing it’s way into our lives. Dictating to us what we can/can’t do to, or with, our children. What we can/can’t say to our children. We are almost at a loss.
I see parents with grim looks on their faces, as their children make demands on them in public. We used to only see this behavior in smaller children. Today fourteen year olds, and older are in public scowling, throwing themselves against things, and rolling their eyes at their parents because their parents said “no”. It seems almost a formidable fight. It is easily understood why some parents give in and give up on training children.
That’s a huge mistake!
Society frowns when we say in a firm voice, (maybe a bigger voice than we usually use): “Sit down, this is a grown up conversation, I didn’t ask you anything!” or whatever has to be said to restore the correct power distribution and order in the relationship. To not say it and mean it, can and often does lead to chaos. Chaos in the home and in society at large.
If our children don’t learn the correct order of things: to respect our authority first, and then those who we put over them; to follow rules, for their protection and everybody else’s. Without intending to, we will create adults with infantile abilities to tolerate society’s restrictions.
I whole heartedly recommend that we continue, the work, of pulling weeds from the garden of our children’s hearts. It is back breaking work, and the child’s/teen’s heart may not want to yield up the roots of these bad behaviors. It is much better to pluck out as many weeds as we can, as fast as we can, so that we and our children can live in peace later.
Think about it this way. Society with all of it’s slackness, will not come and help pay for speeding tickets that our irresponsible young adults rack up. It will be us, the parents, who will make the hard choice. Either, we let them learn a hard lesson in that scary place called jail or come to their aid, and protect them from yet another natural consequence of their behavior.
What Do you think?
Parents Train Up Blog! 