The Importance of Your Relationships

So I'm sitting in the Home Depot parking lot, waiting to turn in to a parking space, while this lady in a car is screaming at the top of her lungs at her kids in the back seat. She stops in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, yells again, and as she drives off, reaches into the back seat and gives her kid the middle finger!

There are just so many things wrong with this picture that I could write for weeks on multiple topics but let me stick to the theme we began last week- getting to the heart of the problem. This lady was obviously struggling with her own inability to control her children and given her actions, I think we can safely conclude that the relationship side of this equation is so damaged that this scenario is not going to end well.

I know from personal experience that there comes a time when no amount of control will work. Eventually the only influence you will have will be from the strength of the relationship. So if that is the inevitable endpoint, we have to keep that in mind as the goal as we transition out of control mode. Even as you operate out of control during the toddler years, you have to focus on building a relationship of trust so that you will have a foundation in place as the relationship begins to take over.

Nurturing that relationship means connecting to your kids at the heart level. That begins with unconditional love. Perhaps the most important foundational concept you can teach your kids is that your love for them is not affected by their behavior. Now that may be a disconnect for you if you grew up in a home where love was dispensed or withheld based on your ability to be good. But think about it- God's love for you isn't based on your performance. In fact Romans 5:8 says "But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners."

Since all of us were created with a basic social need for love and acceptance, demonstrating unconditional love meets that need and provides a relational safe place that kids will always run to. I've told my kids, "You can't do anything bad enough to stop me from loving you." In that kind of environment a kid knows he or she is loved and protected and the magnetic force of that relationship will allow you to have influence in ways you never thought possible. And as they get older, that influence will be more effective than any other control mechanism you could ever devise.

So remember, you are never more like God than when you love unconditionally. That's the foundation on which a strong parenting relationship is built.

Getting to the Heart of the Problem

"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.