Can’t Teach Your Kids What You Don’t Do Yourself
Parents are supposed to teach their kids not to make excuse right? Own up to your faults, failures and responsibility. Don’t make excuses! Right?
That’s a tough message to convince kids of when many (most?) PARENTS are the ones engaging in constant excuse-making about… their parenting.
The other day I witnessed a a little girl stomping and screaming and throwing a fit in public. Her mother sheepishly explained to those near her “she’s just not a morning person. She’s always like this.” Puh-leeze…
I’ll bet the little darling isn’t a “bedtime person” or a “take you to a restaurant person” or a “sit still in church person” either. This is not about the little girl, it’s about us PARENTS. It is an issue of parenting, that lost skill of raising obedient, respectful and self-controlled children.
I was delighted this weekend to see families like the Blocks, the Patterson’s and yes, the Riggs‘ who between them have about a hundred children… every one of them sat attentively and quietly through an almost 2 hour memorial service. Only the two babies had to be taken out as they grew restless. All the others, from teens to toddlers, were well behaved and disciplined.
Accident? No. You won’t find an excuse-making parent in the bunch. They believe in those old fashioned qualities of discipline, obedience, selfLESSness and even this shocking concept: the world doesn’t revolve around WHAT THE KIDS WANT every second of every day.
The whole point of parenting is to mature and discipline our kids away from childish impulsiveness, training them to control their emotions and their feelings. That’s a hard sell when the parents themselves haven’t even learned the lesson.
Parents today are awash in psychobabble and sadly, intimidated by all the Godless “experts” out there who have cast aside Christian parenting concepts for humanistic and frankly WORTHLESS modern parenting tricks like the ever popular IGNORING your child while they throw a rip roaring, embarrassing and shameful fit because they want the red sucker not the green one (I know, I know… “they just don’t feel well”).
Then there’s the “let’s video or make jokes about our little monster-in-training and turn it into a big laugh”. Or proclaim “they are just tired and need a nap”. That might distract the parents embarrassment over their child’s inability to behave in public but it doesn’t fool other people, or the child.
Okay… that ought to be enough to get me a truckload of ugly email full of fun words like judgmental, intolerant, religious zealot and nazi parent.
Parents: don’t expect your kids to stop making excuses until you do. And don’t expect them to grow up respectful, obedient and disciplined adults if you don’t require that of them while they are still inmates in your house (did I just say “inmates”?).
Signs of the Times
Graffiti in bathrooms… am I the only person who gets tired of having to ignore a thousand variations of the f-word on bathroom walls as well as the numerous crude drawings of genitalia? Or worse, having to figure out whether to explain it to my kids (depending on their age), or hope I can distract them long enough to avoid any questions?
I know: age old problem, just live with it. I know. But it’s still frustrating and worse, a clear sign of the common moral temperature of our nation. It used to be just public restrooms in seedy gas stations. Now it’s every where. In fact, I often notice the great lengths businesses have to go to when building bathrooms trying to find materials that cannot be scratched, written on or painted… then cleaned off if they are.
Now it’s pretty much any bathroom anywhere in public. I’ve even seen it in CHURCH bathrooms, book stores, McDonalds, malls, restaurants… you can’t send your kids in anywhere without wondering if they are going to come out asking questions about various sex acts or creative uses of the “f-word”.
Christians get criticized for “sheltering” their kids but give me a break… bathrooms are pornographic; you can’t walk into a convenience store without seeing a magazine rack full of nekkid girl covers; you can’t drive down the road without billboards full of barely dressed women; you can’t go anywhere during the summer without a constant buffet of thong underwear and buttcracks on display. And now, even worse in my opinion, is this constant, habitual male habit of scratching, grabbing and rubbing their…. you know what I’m talking about it. It’s disgusting, crude and sadly becoming ridiculously common IN PUBLIC. Not just “thugs” either… I’ve seen grown men, college kids, athletes, you name it. Doesn’t anyone have any sense of modesty any more?
We are a Corinthian (highly immoral) culture now and Christian parents just have to work that much harder to spiritually strengthen and train their kids to live their faith despite the rampant and increasingly normalized immorality.
Mama and Obama
One of my mama friends told me the other day that when her kids ask for money and they aren’t willing to work for it, she replies with:
“I’m your mama, not Obama”.
Classic. There’s enough truth in that simple phrase to write a book. Hey, maybe I will.
Another Sign of Time
While we are on cultural indicators, I just saw an ad for a music group called “God Smack” or “godsmack” or some such blasphemous, shameful thing. They have an album called “The Oracle” with a popular title song “Cry’in Like a B–ch”.
Is that really what we’ve come to in our country? Something that heathen doesn’t even get anyone’s attention? 50 years (maybe 25), that would have been boycotted or condemned by someone or some group with morals, values and principles.
Okay, One More
I generally disdain beer commercials (because they make all guys look like lustful idiots and women manipulative party animals) but I saw one I thought was both funny, culturally relevant and made good point (even that was not their intent). It went sort of like this:
A soft looking professional guy with a bag slung over his shoulder was holding a drink. A girl bartender said something like “hey, when you get ready for a man drink, put your purse down and I’ll pour you a beer.”
The guy says, “it’s a ‘carry all’ not a purse.”
“No” she replied with a condescending and “you’re pathetic” look… “it’s a purse.”
I think it says a lot when even the world is making jokes about how feminized and sissy men have become. Serious Christian men have long lamented the “soft-i-fying” of males today. It really says something when even the Godless culture is making jokes about it.
Of course, that same beer company would probably shrivel and pull the commercial if the “bi-tri-les-gay-hom-trans-let-me-live-whatever-immoral-lifestyle-I-want-fem-aclu” groups attacked them over the ad. Then again, those groups are too busy trying to legalize immorality and get tax payers to subsidize their politics. So the beer companies need not fear them.
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