Delight in Your Children: The Key to Their Hearts

Homeschooling is all about relationships. It’s about math and reading and sentence diagramming and geography and all those things too, but all these things amount to nothing in God’s eyes if we don’t raise children of character ready to tackle big enterprises for the Lord. If you sometimes feel like homeschooling or parenting is drudgery, you can bet your kids feel the same way. It’s such a temptation to stress out over things like teaching predicate nominatives or the steps of division that we forget to delight in our children and make time to enjoy being with them.
We have found through our now 35 years of parenting and 30 years of home schooling that this is actually the key to instilling values that stick and building in your kids a heart for things of the Lord. Foundational to preparing your child to do great things you need to focus on your relationship with each child individually. When your relationship with your kids is right, they will respond to your attempts to make learning fun.

1. Learning to View Life From our Children’s Point of View
I have 14 children, and all of them are different from one another as I’m sure your children are as well. It takes time-quality time- to get to really know your children as individuals. I’ve always liked to “step into the shoes of another”.
It helps in raising children to do the same kind of thing. Remember what it was like to be a kid and how certain tones of voice made you feel, or being yelled at (to this day I cringe when I hear parents yelling at their kids)

I remember clearly when my son Tim was a little boy. He was very shy and when he was embarrassed he often dealt with that embarrassment in a way that appeared that he was angry. One of those times, Rick was about to spank him for displaying anger. I called him aside and explained my theory. He began to observe and we could clearly see a pattern. He wasn’t angry, just trying to save face. We needed to guide him to do that in a more acceptable manner, but would have wounded his spirit by misinterpreting his reaction as anger.

All this to say, it takes time and wisdom (skill) in learning how to handle our child’s hearts in a proper manner. (More insight is available in Parenting From the Heart)

• A good rule is to always aim to treat our children respectfully.
We always corrected our children for three things: disobedience, disrespect and irresponsibility. If our goal is to teach our children to be respectful, we must treat them respectfully. I always think, “Would I treat another adult the way I just treated my child?”
In some ways, it’s even more important to treat our children respectfully so they can learn to trust us with their hearts. Not that we need to be perfect. Of course we can’t and of course we’ll make lots of mistakes, but our kids are always ready and willing to forgive us when they sense we are truly repentant and have their ultimate best interests at heart. It’s actually a positive thing when our kids see us fail and we admit it. We are modeling for them what they will need to make use of many times in their lives too. So,don’t be afraid to blow it. You will! Kids are masters at reading our hearts, especially when they reach the teen years and learn that Mom and Dad aren’t perfect after all.

• When correcting your children, be sure to correct for their benefit, not because you’re mad

• Show them how what they did violates Scripture. Always point them back to Scripture. We have a resource that you may find helpful. It’s called Identifying and Dealing with Offenses. It is a list of Scriptures I used to show my kids how their unacceptable behavior violated a command of Scripture, and to reach them what they should have done to handle it God’s way.

• We always taught our kids why we needed to correct them. We were obeying God to do this verse:
Hebrews 12:11- “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.”

• Teach your kids to use Scripture as the guidebook for their lives. The Bible has the answer for every problem they will ever face and they need to learn to become skillful in applying God’s Word to everyday situations.
For example: Ephesians 4:29- “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment that it may give grace (desire and power to do God’s will) to those who hear.
or in another version:
“Say only what is GOOD and HELPFUL to those you are talking to and WHAT WILL GIVE THEM A BLESSING.”
This verse gives some practical guidelines for teaching your child how to evaluate their speech. Was what you said GOOD?, Was it HELPFUL? DID IT GIVE OTHERS A BLESSING? If not, don't say it.
More Practical info on this subject can be found in Obedience from the Heart CD

To be continued next week....
"Delight in Your Children as God Delights in Us"