Tag: gifts

I just read a great blog on inCourage entitled Respecting our Children by Sarah Mae.  Here is the link if you are interested: http://www.incourage.me/2016/07/respecting-our-children.html.  If you are not familiar with inCourage, I highly recommend you take a look.  The whole purpose is to encourage women to be “in Courage.”  This particular post highlighted how to respect our children in various ways, and it got me thinking.  Sarah Mae’s essay was directed more at families with smaller kids, and since mine are older, the focus is different.

I have teenagers – 13, 15, and 17.  We are staring down the barrel of young adulthood.  We have one more year with our oldest under our roof, and my tendency is to try and hammer home every lesson I feel he needs to learn before adulthood.

NOT A GOOD PLAN!  Because here is the deal.  Nobody likes to be hammered upon.  And, if I have been doing my job (which I sometimes question, but that is another blog), I should be able to start letting go and trusting my children.

I have great kids.  They are responsible, trustworthy, kind, funny, and bright.  But they are kids, which means that sometimes they do things that leave me wondering about their future survival.

And yet, in one short year, the oldest will more or less be responsible for himself.  I won’t be there to do his laundry (he knows how), or make sure he has done homework (I stopped checking years ago.)  Or even that he gets himself up and to class.  That will be his bailiwick.

He is our practice child.  You know what I mean.  He is the kid on whom we have tried all our cockamamie parenting ideas.  His sisters benefit from the fact that we don’t continue the ones that don’t work.

I know, I know.  Each child is different.  Boy howdy, are they different.  And so no one parenting practice will work.

Except this one.

Respect.

Respect each child.  Respect the gifts that God has given them, and help them to develop into what God has created them for.

The oldest child, the practice one, begged to be allowed to play football.  I, in my wisdom, said “Uh, NO!”  I like his brain.  I like it un-concussed and intact.  Besides, I find football incomprehensible and mind-numbingly boring. So I suggested cross-country as a viable alternative.  Except my child is not built for speed.  He is built for strength.

Here is how all that played out:

First day of cross country.

Me:  How was it?

Boychild: I hate running.

Second day of cross country.

Me: Did you make any nice friends?

Boychild: It’s hard to talk to people when you are dead last and they are miles ahead of you.

Third day of cross country.

Me: So how did it go?

Boychild (forlornly): I wish you would let me play football.

Hmmm.  He tried something based on my desires.  He really didn’t like it.  So I took a long walk and had a talk with God.  What God said back to me, over and over like a broken record in my head was, “Train up a child in the way HE should go…” (Proverbs 22:6, emphasis mine).

Ouch.  Not the way I want him to go.

God gave my kid specific gifts.  They aren’t the same gifts that I got, or Sam got, or the girls got.  He is unique and different, and God wants to use him in a unique and different way, and I need to RESPECT that.

I need to respect that my son is strong, not fast.  That he is a big picture guy, and hates the details.  That he is social and relational, and needs very little time alone.

And I need to get out of the way.  My job is to guide and to coach, not to boss (oooooh, is that one hard.) I am to set reasonable boundaries, and then let my kid make his choices within those parameters.  And the older they get, the bigger the boundaries need to be.  So that when my arbitrary boundaries are removed, my kids know how to set their own.

So I said to my boychild: Fine. Call the school.  I think it is probably too late to join (they had already been practicing for two weeks), but if they let you in, and it’s REALLY what you want to do, you can do it. Wasn’t I oh-so-gracious about it?

They let him in.  As a matter of fact, the school called ME to tell me how mature my kid was in handling the whole matter.  Respect.

Football is one of the best things that could have happened to my kid in his high school career.  Instead of the locker room mentality that I feared, he found some fantastic friends, Christian and otherwise.  He has learned how to stand up for his faith.  The coaching staff focus not on winning, although they like to win, but on creating men of character.  (And what mom doesn’t want THAT for her kid.  And to let someone else teach it?  BONUS!!!) He has learned that it doesn’t matter if he starts and is the big hero of the game (he doesn’t and isn’t), perseverance and hard work are worth it.  Football is helping make a man out of my first-born, using different tools than what we have at home.  It has created some great dinner conversations about choices, and ethics, and how to treat other people who aren’t always nice to you.

In her blog about respecting our children, Sarah Mae uses the text “Treat others the same way you want them to treat you” (Luke 6:31) as the thesis for her essay.  Isn’t that what we all want?  Do I do that with my teenagers?  Isn’t that the basis for respectful parenting?  My kids just want the freedom to explore their gifts.  And so do I.  Should I not afford them the same respect that I ask of them?

Sometimes I think we forget that our children are the “others” that Jesus talked about.  It’s a good reminder that loving our neighbor might just mean the teenager in the next room.  As my kids grow into young adults, it’s important for me to remember that they need to be afforded respect, listened to instead of talked at, and allowed to make their own decisions.

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