Someone recently submitted the question: “What is your view on child training?”
It’s a bit scary for me to share my view on child training because, for one, I don’t live up to my own ideals. There are things I long to do and ways I long to live and relate that I so often fail at doing.
Secondly, I’ve only been parenting for five years, and it really takes twenty to thirty years to figure out if we’re on the right track. Plus, everyone has a perspective on child training. And they’re usually passionate about their perspective.
So, writing on child training leaves me feeling quite nervous, to be honest.
At the same time, because we have only been parenting for five years, my wife and I often seek the advice and wisdom of people who have been parenting for those twenty to thirty years. People who whose families we admire and respect and long to emulate. Our perspective of child training has been shaped by people who whose families we admire, respect and long to emulate.
And since they’ve parented for at least twenty years, they’re probably on the right track.
What if child training isn’t about accomplishing something?
Child training is a rigorous adventure. And it demands the very best you have at a time of life when you don’t actually have much to give.
Especially if you get started young, when you’re really still figuring yourself out, let alone trying to help children figure themselves out.
It will always baffle me why God gives young, naïve parents the responsibility of training and nurturing children in their most vulnerable years. Isn’t that setting us up for failure?
But what if child training isn’t about us as parents accomplishing something? What if it’s actually a part of the journey we’re on in life?
What I mean is, what if it’s more of an exercise to produce something within us as much as it is the responsibility of producing something in someone else?
My wife and I have discovered that our children tend to be uniquely designed to prick away and sharpen the rough areas in our own lives. It’s all one grand glorious story of God creating his image in us—as a family.
The reason children must be taught to obey.
There’s more what we don’t know about parenting then what we do know. But following are two things we believe deeply about child training the longer we parent, and the more we talk with those who have done it successfully already.
1 – children must learn how to obey
This really has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s about social skills, about becoming a person who flourishes and thrives in society.
All you have to do is look around, today, and you’ll realize kids who don’t know how to obey will make incredibly miserable people to relate with, work with, work under—not to mention, parent future children. Every parent I’ve talked with who has done something successful in their family has always said children must learn to obey.
Obedience must be a foundation early on in childhood. Otherwise, we raise up a generation of tyrants.
2 – teaching our children to obey needs to be about leading them into the Gospel story—leading them to Christ
Here’s where the Christian faith comes in. This is where it leaves the realm of simply developing good social people toward helping them live as they were designed to live. It affects how we teach our children to obey, not that we teach them obedience to begin with.
That training our children in obedience is about leading them to Christ is something my wife and I have become increasingly convinced of in our own parenting. There have been times we hear two voices yelling at each other, walk into the room and grab the one that seems the most at fault, leading them off to administer some discipline. Too often, our actions are motivated from a desire to teach these boys once and for all not to fight with each other, or we’re going to teach them once and for all to clean up their room when we say.
You fill in the scenario, but the problem is we can get so focused on straightening out their behavior, we never help them realize why they struggle in the first place.
You see, it would be possible for us to teach our children to be respectable people without needing the Spirit of God in their lives. But there is something much deeper going on, each of us has a sickness within our hearts only Christ can cure.
This is how God trains us.
God teaches us to obey, but he doesn’t do it with rough anger and frustration.
Sure, he’s very consistent. When he says if we do such and such there will be consequences, we experience consequences when we do it. But he administers discipline not in frustration that we’re needing to learn this lesson once again. He ministers discipline out of grief because he knows there is something desperately wrong in our hearts.
The discipline is to gently nudge us to the realization that we are broken. Our inability to obey and our constant needing to be disciplined is to cause us to confront the brokenness within us.
Teresa and I increasingly believe parenting is about helping our children realize their utter need for Christ, not about making them people the world admires and respects.
We need to teach our children to obey, we also need to show them why they can’t obey. We need to help them see what causes them to continually rebel. Then we need to show them how they can obey.
As God does with us, our discipline must be for them a gentle nudging them to confront the reality that they have a sickness only Jesus can cure.
These are the ideals I referred to as not always living up to. However, they are fast becoming our foundation for parenting. We’ve been highly influenced by Ted Tripp’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, if you haven’t already read it. I believe this addresses the core issue for all of humanity, but especially for our generation.
A warning for our generation.
I’ve noticed a lot of parents seem to be led by their children instead of leading their children. My generation seems to almost have an aversion to discipline, an aversion to making children do things they don’t want to do. If we’re not careful, instead of training a generation to see their need for Christ and leading them to him, we’ll train a generation to believe that they themselves are God.
If they can do whatever they want and get away with it, or have a justifiable reason for it, or point out areas where dad and mom are messing up and therefore should not require children to live a standard they themselves aren’t living up to, they will learn how to control.
And when any human learns how to control, they become rebels of God. It goes the whole way back to the garden of Eden.
I also wrestle with the emphasis on discipline and the lack of grace that I see in some of our homes, some of our pasts. But I am also deeply concerned about a trend that I also see of grace seeming to be about not needing to face consequences.
Throughout scripture, we see God’s incredible grace pushing off judgment from one generation to the next. But we also see him giving consequences as they (1) can’t enter the promised land or (2) lose their children to their kings or (3) get completely exiled.
And let’s not make the mistake in thinking that because we are in the New Testament era means we are in a special season Grace. We need to realize we are in a season of full access to Christ. We can see and know Christ, and that’s the reason for discipline. It’s the reason for leading our children to confront their fallenness.
Furthermore, it’s the reason to demonstrate to them confronting our own fallenness.
Our failures can be a powerful part of the journey to Christ. It isn’t about me being perfect and leading my children to my way of life. It’s about all of us being sick and needing Jesus to redeem our hearts from the sickness.
Being real about my own failures gives my children a visible picture of what it’s like to be honest about our brokenness and to invite Jesus into our lives.
My son is catching on…
In the last year, I have begun telling my boys after I discipline them that the reason I discipline them because they didn’t obey. Maybe they were also being disrespectful and unloving to someone else.
I tell them that if they ever want to learn how to obey to let me know. I do this because I don’t just want to teach them how to be good kids. I want to teach them how to be good kids, but let them know that there’s a reason they struggle to be good kids. And I want to weave into our everyday life a conversation about why we struggle to be good and how we can become the people God designed us to be.
Now, I haven’t known if this is the right strategy or not. I’ve heard of parents doing similar things with their children, but I’ve never heard of any particular person doing this exact thing. So it’s one of those areas I feel we won’t really know the effect until twenty to thirty years from now.
But the other week, my son was having a really rough day. He was fighting with his mom, beating up on his younger brother. When I got home, I took him to our room. I was frustrated—Why can’t you learn this lesson?
So I asked him, “Son why are you doing all this?”
And he said, in the middle of his own frustration, “I don’t know how to obey. Can you teach me to obey? You said one time that if I asked you would teach me.”
I didn’t what to say. I didn’t expect him to catch on so young. For the first time in his five years of life, I had the opportunity to share the gospel with him—and he wanted to hear it.
After a couple minutes he was ready to move on. He wanted to leave the room, again. So I told him that if he ever wanted to ask Jesus to help him obey, to let me know and I would show him how.
Parenting is indeed a wild adventure. And when it comes to getting children to sleep through the night or breastfeeding newborn babies, there are a hundred and one different ways to do it with valid reasons for each.
But I am convinced at the bottom of everything we do we need to continually train our children to obey. We need to help them confront why they struggle to obey. Everything we do as parents ought to be wrapped around the goal of leading each other to Christ.
Many of you have been parents much longer than me. What is your view of child training? What are some things you have learned or others have told you are important in the training process? Share in the comments below.
