I am no parenting expert nor am I perfect. I come from good parents who were not perfect, either. However, I married very well and my wife, Julie, has been a great inspiration and influence on our joint-parenting efforts. This lesson I learned from her…
One of the worst things you can do is a parent is teach your child, especially your young child, delayed obedience. Let me give you an example:
“(Child’s name) come here, put that down, stop it, eat your food, etc. ” Parent says.
Child doesn’t respond. Parent issues another statement,
“You have until I count to three, ONE….(LONG PAUSE, calmly), TWOOOOOOOO (louder with more emphasis and force)……THREEEEEEEEE! (you are yelling and fuming now!) –Your Three Count was really about 300 seconds.
You reach your boiling point, you yell, “That’s it…”
Child still hasn’t moved or obeyed, so parent begins the Walk of Consequence. You are mad, you are fuming, you are exhausted, you are annoyed.
Then and only then, does the child move, “I’m coming!” yells the child. You are glad to finally have obedience. But, it’s your fault, well, at least partially…
Parenting Tip: Don’t “count to three (or five or ten)” when asking your child to obey, you are only reinforcing their disobedience and teaching them to devalue your word. Ask them only once, and then proceed with consequences. Make sure you communicated correctly and they did hear you (not hearing only works once!).
When you haggle, barter and bribe your child you place the child in the position of authority. You, as a parent are suspending your authority by the counting process. You are diminishing your expectation of obedience that you have for your child.
Someone might argue that counting gives the child time to work out their obedience in their heart. Yes and no. Yes, obedience is always a heart issue and you must remember when dealing with a child there always exists a measure of childishness ignorance and outright rebellion. Parents must teach to enlighten ignorance and put a stop to rebellion. No, a child doesn’t need time to work out obedience. Delayed obedience is a form of disobedience.
Remember the most influential place you will deal with your child is not their emotions, their mind or their intellect, it is their heart. The heart is the throne of the child just as much as it is for the parent. Your children are not mini-adults. They are children and must be raised up from childhood to adulthood.
“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” (Proverbs 22:15) and your counting only makes it worse.
Let me know, do you count? have you stopped? what’s working for you?
This is one of the biggest takeaways I got from the book Shepherding a Child’s Heart. Thanks for sharing!
Good to know “experts” agree! Thanks Jo!
I used to count with my kids all the time and never even thought of anything like this or thought of how bad an idea it is and have heard this said before, of course all after my kids are grown and I do not do this anymore but ya know it makes me wonder if this is why my kids when I ask them to do something, they procrastinate bad and it annoys me to no end! Ugh!
We’ll deal with procrastination in a future post thanks for the idea! Any more topics you’d like to see?
Hmmm good question, I will have to think on that 🙂
Ok so been thinking about a topic for a future post and here is what I came up with, it is something personal for me so allow me to get real for a sec. My daughter and I have been going through a really rough time right now, not sure if you were able to see it or not, but she and I were really close, like best friends almost. Well she did something around Halloween that just blew my mind, disappointed me and hurt me and broke my trust in her in a huge way and it has just about ruined the relationship we had. Because of what happened I have been struggling bad with true forgiveness for her in my heart and the other person involved, and then too struggling with giving mercy and extending grace to her and the other person involved. I know it is wrong of me to do but all I can say is that it is because of what she did, it’s not some small potatoes little thing. So maybe a post on those things would be awesome, I am sure I am not the only person in the world who has gone through something like this.