Why are parents so unwilling to encourage--is "force" to strong a word--their kids to do hard things? I'm talking about everything from cleaning a room, to eating vegetables, to dealing with a painful social encounter.
I fear the answer stares back at us from the mirror. I don't expect my kids to do anything hard, because I'm not willing to do anything that measures beyond a "3" on the diff-i-cult-o-meter. Hebrews 12: 4-11 gives the perfect example of parenting. It comes from the perfect Father.
Read it. The text is full of hard things. Our heavenly Father brings the difficult into our lives because He loves us.
When we say we aren't going to make our child do something that he or she ought to do, because it is hard, can we really say we are doing it because we love them? Or is it possible that we don't make our kids do the hard-but-right because it is hard for us to do so?
I fear that an honest--and therefore painful, another hard thing we tend to avoid--examination may reveal that the reason we are not willing to require the difficult but right in the life of our child is because we have abandoned that in our own life long ago.
Child discipline begins with self-discipline.
It's STTA.
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