Now, what you may not realize is that there is a structure to a Christian family. There is authority, there is obedience, there's habits and there's relationships. All of these things play a role and what you would like to have happen inside your home that will give you happier households.
Don't Parent With Force Transcript
When any of the authority or obedience is out of place, you're going to have chaos, you're gonna have conflict, you're going to have total disaster. I want you to think about authority as an elliptical orbit.
This is something that Charlotte Mason speaks about in her original writings. You have elliptical orbits, much like the sun and the solar system have their orbits and how the planets go around the sun. I want you to look at authority one way as one of those orbits, and then I want you to look at obedience as another one of those orbits.
What would happen if we literally approached our authority and our children approach to obedience in a way that caused us to have a perfect orbit around the son?
Yes, I'm talking scriptural here. I'm talking spiritual around God.
If we could have this perfectly aligned orbit where we stay in the track that it was designed for us, and then we have, I'm probably not gonna be able to do this, right. But we have two orbits going and no collisions, no conflict, no friction going on. They're they're moving perfectly in their orbits.
But what happens if, like, let's say one, let's say the authority of a parent gets a little off culter here and, and then we have the obedience and all of a sudden we're gonna collide. We're gonna have total conflict and a disaster on our hands.
That's what happens inside a family.
When a parent steps outside of their Christ-like authority, meaning that they're forceful, they're harsh, they require something from their children in the wrong attitude, even if it's the right thing and the wrong attitude, you are per approaching your parental authority the wrong way.
Now, when your children are born to you, I want you to take it all the way back to your birth of your first, second, third. It doesn't matter how many children, your mentality is the same at the very beginning. It's a newness. And in that newness, the authority is perfect. You are taking care of your child in a loving way. You raise them and encouraging and praising them to learn new things and, and grow in the growth that is expected of us.
You know, we always take our kids to the doctors to see if they're on the growth spurts and to make sure that they're on the growth charts and making sure that they're growing and developing in the right way. But then something happens where we no longer think about those things and we never are approaching parenting with the same encouraging and praising way.
And when that changes, the obedience level changes as well. And it all comes because all of a sudden we're forcing ourselves into our children's orbit and we're forcing them to obey us. And so all of a sudden, if you think about the solar system and you think about debris in the solar system and how you have the meteors of those debris coming and going into places, and how they could literally create craters if they hit at a right speed.
That is what the force of an an parent's authority looks like. If we're forcing our children into an orbit that we want them to do, rather than let that be willing obedience, and the more we cause that, the more their orbit changes and we are going to collide constantly causing more and more damage, causing more and more conflict causing things to arise that shouldn't be there.
So when we take a step back and we think about how we are supposed to approach parenting, think about how you did it in those early years.
You were loving, you were patient, even when you're tired. I mean, I have spent countless nights, countless nights being awake with a sick child and I was patient through it. Yes, there came a point where I was too fatigued and needed care myself, but I approached it still with patience and love. I made sure my children had what they needed. I encouraged and praised them all along the way. But something switches in us that makes us believe that we shouldn't still approach the same way in how we get our children to approach obedience because they see the influences of this world where, wait, mom allowed me to do something here, and so now I guess that's acceptable and I keep doing it, and then all of a sudden we force them not to do it.
There's so many things that causes us to step into that forceful parent. There's just so many things, but a lot of it is the influence of this world where a child sees, wait a second, someone else isn't obeying their mom. I don't have to obey my mom or so-and-so does it this way. I prefer it that way and gives us into these places where we're now fighting flesh and blood.
We are now having conflict become a part of our family on an ongoing basis. If you stop that force of forcing your children because you're their authority and get aligned with exactly what that looks like as as their parent, you'll be able to walk better in the way that you're parenting your children.
Now, I know many times when I have talked to people about homeschooling, they look at me like, I'm Mother Teresa. You know, I'm not Mother Teresa. They say to me, you must have so much patience. No, I don't. I apologize far more than probably most people do because I do a lot of things wrong.
But the key is that I work really hard at being loving, encouraging, and praising our children, and that equips me to be able to at home educate them, knowing that I'm gonna fall short. And it's how I approach how I fall short. That keeps me in the game now for 23 years.
So a lot of times when people think about influences, they're often thinking, there's no way that I can eliminate those influences of this world that often brings a child into disobedience with their parents. That forces, that puts this desire of us forcing things on our children because of how it's being taught in schools and all the other influences with their peers at school, and it comes in.
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