Expectations

Hello ladies,

Sorry for the late post but I’ve been really sick. It would seem that I have round 2 of the pneumonia I had in January. I’m still coughing and wheezing a lot so I guess I can honestly say it’s improved but definitely not cured.

Since we finished our series on the Beatitudes, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about for this post. But after this past week, I settled on Expectations. All of us who have raised children know that it can be challenging figuring out rules, chores, and consequences that are age appropriate for our kids. Jason and I are starting over with this over the past six months. And there are different challenges with children you haven’t raised from birth. They’ve had different rules, chores, and lifestyles so you can’t just say here’s how it is going to be now. You can, but there’s a learning curve and it takes time.

When I look back at how I did things with my birth children, I think there are many things I would change if I was doing it over. Sometimes my expectations were too high for their stage of life at a particular time. Overall, I feel they were pretty good kids so I don’t waste time reliving all the things I could have done better. But I do consider it as I look after the kids I have now.

Children need rules and guidelines to follow. I believe they feel safer when they have those in place. We need to have expectations for them, reasonable ones, but ones that teach them how to live in this world and be responsible citizens. It certainly doesn’t happen spontaneously. A child raised with no expectations most likely won’t reach their full potential in life. Things may be harder for them than they needed to be. We’ve all worked with that one person who couldn’t get along with anyone, never did their share of the work, and worked harder getting out of work than if they had just done it.

We live in a world that no longer teaches morals, work ethic, respect for others, taking personal responsibility, among other things. As parents and grandparents, we need to model those behaviors daily in our interactions with the children and one another. Children need to understand that it’s not just kids that have rules and expectations, adults have them too, whether it’s the laws of the state or county we live in or the rules that God laid down many years ago. There are rules at work, at church, in traffic and everywhere else we go.

Correction and discipline should come from love rather than anger. There are a number of Scriptures that talk about this.

Proverbs 22:6 tells us, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” This isn’t so much a promise as it is a generality. The training should start early and work well with the nature of the individual child. The parents need to model it. This creates lifelong spiritual habits. They may wander at some point, but they’ll be unlikely to depart from it completely when they are older.

Proverbs 13:24 says, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” Scripture isn’t saying we should be beating our kids with a rod, but we are supposed to guide and discipline. The rod that is spoken of in Scripture is often referring to the rod that the shepherd used in herding sheep. He used in to guide and I’m guessing he used it to protect his sheep against predators. God disciplines us out of love and that is what is this verse is indicating.

Colossians 3:21 reminds us, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” I understand this as for parents to be careful in the words they use with their children. Words should build up and not tear down. Our words should be truthful but never unkind.

And it’s never too late to begin teaching these things to our kids. The longer we wait, the longer it may take to sink in, but with patience and love leading the way, they will begin to see the benefits of what we are teaching.

Like I said in the beginning, it’s been a rough week for me, but I was surprised and grateful on Saturday morning. I was up before 6 am because I’ve had trouble sleeping. Three children came down at 6 am without being woken up by an alarm or anyone else. They got dressed, made their beds and straightened their rooms. Then they had breakfast and they had a plan. They cleaned both bathrooms, swept all the stairs, the kitchen and living room, shook out the bathroom rug, wiped down the microwave and stovetop, took garbage to the dumpster, and ran four batches of their own laundry which I folded and they put away. They finished all of this before 10 am. No one told them to do it or supervised the work. I was so proud of them for seeing what needed to be done and just doing it on their own initiative. We hear about how today’s kids are lazy and disrespectful, but I think that happens when we adults don’t set the example and we push our responsibility off on someone else. It’s easy to be a lazy parent and put a screen in front of the kids so we don’t have to put in the effort, but if we proceed that way, we shouldn’t be surprised at the results.

Hopefully I didn’t ramble this week because due to lack of restful sleep. I’ll be back on schedule with the blog on Friday. If you haven’t visited our little church on the hill, it’s definitely worth the drive.

Lori Hug