Pick your battles – Casting Crumbs

Parenting is a war of the wills! God designed families perfectly, giving us the experience of children, whom we love so dearly and yet can drive us absolutely crazy. He gave us living examples of how we behave toward our heavenly Father, and yet He still loves us! Parenting helps us understand our own relationship with Almighty God!

Children are born with their own free wills just like we were, and it is our job to raise them to be responsible adults. Not only do they have free wills, they have the same flesh nature that caused the issues in the Garden and continues to wreak havoc today. This is why being parents can be so darn difficult, we are training these tiny people to rein in their flesh and be obedient, while we are also constantly working on our own flesh nature!

I have so many thoughts about parenting and discipline! I could probably write an entire book (but will refrain from posting it all at once!), not because I am awesome at it, but because we have tried so many different tactics with 4 unique beings and I have definitely seen certain parenting techniques produce amazing results and others feed their little flesh demon, thereby setting us back to try again!

Here are several important things that I have learned (and confirmed).

Pick your battles so that you can win the war! You must choose your battles wisely. And, you MUST CHOOSE! Every battle is not worth fighting.

Good Lookin’ and I determined early on that we would rather our children have amazing intangible qualities over superior intellect. What I mean by that is, for us, being respectful, having integrity, being honest, having outstanding character are more important than being book smart. We believe that those qualities are slow growing and must be fostered over time, while you can always learn something new if you need it. So, with this philosophy, we set forward in our parenting.

Our primary focus in raising our children was obedience. Which means that we dealt with disobedience and direct defiance, every time! Some of you may be picturing the domineering, slave driver, but that is not at all how we parent. We set our expectations and then taught our children to meet those. Primarily, if we told them to do something, we expected them to do it! (More on how we enforced this will come in another post.)

Here are a couple examples that we have witnessed. I have a friend that would count out the number of chocolate chips that their small children could have. One, two, three, four, five. And, no more. Under no circumstances, would they allow their children to have a single chocolate chip more. That same day, they would ask their children to clean up their room. Lots of kicking and screaming followed. Eventually, the children went to another room to play while Mom and Dad cleaned the children’s room without the help of the kids. I found this fascinating! And then, years passed. These kids were now in high school and still responded to parental requests with kicking and screaming, but now, it was not cute!! They have amazing self control over eating sweets, but no respect for authority.

We never chose sugar as a battle. We always chose disobedience as a battle we would not lose! When kids are small it is a challenge to teach them obedience, but it pays off tremendously, when they are grown, helpful, and respectful adults.

I know several parents that toss around threats like party confetti. If you do that again… I told you that if you do that again… Don’t you ever listen?… And, then… the child has finally done it too many times… the parent erupts like a volcano spewing awful words and spankings that make everyone in the neighborhood uncomfortable. And, yet, it has not taught the child obedience. It has taught the child that there is a line (they don’t know where) and they can keep doing the offense without consequence until they finally cross that mysterious line. Children test boundaries because it makes them feel safe. They want to know that you love them enough to keep that line and so they WILL keep pushing if you offer a threat for doing something. They want to find the line!

The other detail about threats that I would caution every parent and grandparent with is don’t say something that you are not willing to follow through. We used to live near DisneyLand and I loved piling the kids in the car to head to “The Happiest Place on Earth”. You better believe that if I was looking forward to going, that I never said, “Do that again and you aren’t going to DisneyLand”. Why? Because then I couldn’t go to DisneyLand! So, trying to punish them, I would be punishing myself!

However, when my children were being complete rascals and nothing I did got their attention, I would often choose to go to DisneyLand just for the lesson that would inevitably follow… once we arrived if whining, crying, mean behavior or disobedience flowed, I would warn them once and then we would head back to the car for the long drive home. I did this once for each of my kids, and you cannot believe how respectful, obedient, helpful and kind they were the next time we went to DisneyLand! Not only did my children learn that one gentle warning and then there are consequences for crossing the boundary that I set, but we quickly restored DisneyLand to its proper standing of “The Happiest Place on Earth” because our frustrated, sad, angry crew left… you are welcome!