When you’re a young parent, you are likely in your 20’s or early 30’s. And because life is still new and coming at you pretty fast, there are so many things to learn and juggle that some elements just aren’t noticed or given the weight they should. That’s just the way of things. As life progresses and you get your footing, you gain the time and mindshare to look a little more deeply into the relationship between how you are a living example for your children and how they will follow your lead. That makes sense of course. How else could it be? They can only receive what you provide. Your child will learn their key traits from you – the way you speak, the way you laugh, the way you react in happiness or anger, the way you drink, the way you work out, the way you worship, the way you love them and love your spouse, the way you love yourself, and the way you manage your life. In other words, they will come to mimic the real you despite your efforts to only show them parts of you.
One particularly important nuance that evolves over time is standing up and facing difficulty square on. By the time the teenage years spring up in surprise and you are faced with using words to convince your child to hang in there and be resilient, they have long ago learned from you how to face difficulty. You can hear in the news how colleges are facing ‘snowflakes’ that need puppies and safe rooms to handle difficult ideas. When we, Lis and Dave, dropped off our kids at college, we were horrified at the tales of parents calling their child every day to make sure they got up on time and to go over homework assignments. These sad examples are merely the midpoints in long personal tragedies that started in early childhood.
You may note first hand, when your kids are in daycare, those children who are not taught the skill of self-management, most particularly how to handle themselves in the face of interpersonal conflict. Sure, it takes time to acquire that skill. But after a while watching, you’ll see the connection between a child’s progress along that path and their parent’s own abilities. Hey, it’s not judging, it’s observing. Because often, that’s how we learn and get motivated as parents – “I don’t want to be those guys”, or better, “Ooh, look at that family. They’re great.”
It’s been said that we raise our children physically and they raise us spiritually. All too true because we can’t pour out what we don’t have. And so the motivation to be a truly better person often comes in those bundles of joy given to us by God. They become versions of us – for good and bad. Therefore, the first step in teaching your children self-management is having a long conversation during Couch Time with your mate about how you want your life to go, how strong you want your marriage to be, areas in which each one of you are strong and areas where you need some work. This is like your best friend holding up a mirror to you in a time of non-conflict and in a loving non-accusatory way and saying, “This is what I see. Our children will look like this.”
The next area of discussion is the challenging tipping point of when difficulty becomes too much for a child to handle alone. Of course, there is no single yardstick by which to measure this dilemma. Every child, every circumstance, every era of development is unique. But in general, the progress path is the same:
Quit Endure Persevere Transcend
When a child must, for example, clean up their toys at the end of play time, looking around a messy room might be overwhelming. They may want to quit before even trying. It’s easier to throw a fit to get mom to clean up rather than attempt self-managing emotions and pick up a single toy. It takes parental resolve to help them not quit and hang in there for a while and endure the frustration. But of course, progress moves the goalposts. Picking up toys becomes making the bed that morphs into getting dressed, being on time, that evolves into making sure teeth are brushed, bed is made, homework is done and the day’s backpack is ready to go. No longer is cleaning up an emotional test of character, but rather one of perseverance until it finally transcends being a struggle and is a learned behavior and routine.
You can see how a child’s emotional/character path takes on ever increasing levels of responsibility. But can you also see how doing so isn’t in isolation? Children just line up with family norms. Does it make sense for a child to make their bed if the rest of the house is messy? And so we mature as adults because we quickly come to realize that to teach our children, we must lead by example.
We are creating the legacy from which our children will face the world. It takes time to see clearly how we do that and to make the appropriate adjustments as we mature. It is often frustrating to have a spouse point something out that needs work. But little eyes will be looking to understand life by our actions and not our words. Therefore, we must persevere that they might follow our lead.
Proverbs 22:6 – Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
Many, many blessings,
Lis and Dave Marr