"The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?" Jeremiah 17:9
ANSWER- any parent! Sure your baby looked so innocent when first born but it wasn't long before you realized that he or she had a will of their own and it didn't gravitate toward doing good.
So we typically go into the "battle of the wills" mode and make sure they understand who is in charge. And that carries through the toddler years and into the elementary stages and by the time they reach their teen years, we're still controlling them by invoking Bill Cosby's parenting rule- "I brought you into this world and I can take you out!"
One of the most common parenting mistakes is never shifting out of the control mode that worked during the toddler years. Out of frustration we default to forcing kids to behave instead of training them to make good choices on their own. So we employ things like "time out" and "restriction" because they produce the short term control we want but unfortunately they don't produce long-term change.
In his talk about dialing into your child's heart, Reggie Joiner asks his audience to think about their own experience with restrictions- did you ever come out of a restriction thinking something like- "You know, I've had a real awakening here. I need to change my behavior and do things differently!" Nope, me either.
Why is that? I think it is because we have handled the symptom and not the problem. We have controlled behavior but not changed it. And that gets to the heart of the problem- many of our defective parenting tactics are designed to control behavior, not change the heart where the behavior originates.
In the weeks ahead we'll look at some things that contribute to heart change since that is the real source of the behavioral challenges we face. Change the heart and you change the actions.
