Are you constantly saying to your children, will you please obey me? Why won't you obey me? You must obey me. If that sounds like you, I have a different way of approaching obedience that I cannot wait to share with you.
Influence has the capacity of affecting the character development and behavior of a person knowing that truth. If your children are not obeying you, it means that you do not have the capacity to affect their character development and behavior, meaning that you do not have influence over your children.
Parents Gotta Have Influence
That's a dangerous place to be, and it's one that every parent faces at some point in their parenting because we are mere humans who are making mistakes, and we don't truly understand this under this concept of influence.
We think that as parents, we must understand obedience and we must expect instant obedience instead of understanding our role in what obedience looks like.
I'm gonna probably step on a couple toes in this episode and, I'm sorry, Put your steel shoes on really quick before I get started, because my goal is to help you approach parenting in a way that actually influences your children so that you can change their character development and behavior to align with the word of God, to get you equipped for your kingdom assignment of raising your children to bring honor and glory to him.
So by doing that, I'm going to give you this simple mind shift.
Instead of expecting your children to be obedient, would you take a step back and recognize you have to have influence. You just gotta have influence.
I want to take the pressure, the focus off from your child's obedience and put it directly onto you as the parent.
I want you to recognize your children are not obeying you because you do not have influence over them, in at least that area.
It could be increasing depending on how long you allow yourself not to have influence over your children. Now, there's a lot that I can say, and I do say inside Wholesome Influencers in level one Lasting Influences. I walk you through step by step exactly how to get to that place of influence.
But let me get you started right now.
Here's the key thing.
We must approach parenting differently than what you're approaching parenting today in order to get different results.
How many times has yelling at your children changed their behavior for the better? No. Right?
Usually when someone comes up against us, it doesn't matter if they're a friend, a spouse, a neighbor, a child, it doesn't matter who they are. If someone comes to us aggressively, we automatically become defensive.
I want you to recognize that we are playing a very big role in our children's life, and we need to be approaching it in two ways.
Number one, we need to be offensive.
Number two, we need to be defensive.
So in order for us to move our children towards the calling in their life, the purpose, by fulfilling our purpose of raising them and the ways of the Lord, we need to first recognize how to become defensive. We need to recognize how to make sure that the influences of these worlds are not impacting our children to change their opinions about us, their parents.
I'm telling you, it's a scary world we're living in because these influences of those world are hitting our children in four or five and six years old.
It's very overwhelming and depressing to see how these beautiful little children are lost in influences with their parents and they're putting their influence on other people. They're allowing the influences of this world to affect their character development and behavior. Influences are everywhere. And so when we recognize that we as parents need to become defensive, we need to protect our children of all ages until they have learned how to become discerning of the influences and to be able to follow the right way, which isn't about age, it's about strength.
We'll get there in another episode. So stay with me. Now, what I want you to think about is in this defense, we are fighting against the influences of this world, but those influences of this world are changing our children's character development and behavior, and we begin to fighting our children instead of fighting the influences, we become defensive against the wrong person. We're getting defensive against flesh and blood and not against the spiritual influences of this world.
That's the first thing.
We need to start taking our defenses away from our children and putting it on the world. Then we need to become offensive, just like in in football where they protect that football. To get to the other side, I want you to wrap your arms around your children, and I want you to be thinking about how I can get the influence more in our child's life so that we can push them forward towards that race that we're running on that final touchdown, that race towards God's goal for our life.
So how do we do that influence?
The only way that we can influence our children and know that we're influencing our children is if what we ask of them, they're willingly doing. And when we see that our children are not obeying us, guess what's gonna happen? We're losing more and more of those influences.
So what we have to do is yes, look to see how our influences are being received, which is the result of obedience, but we cannot be looking on the results as our meter in how we're parenting, if that makes sense.
We're not defensive against our children. We're defensive against the influences of this world, but we're approaching our parenting in an offensive way to get our children to feel safe, trusting, and calm with the influences we're putting into their minds. And we will watch to see if our influences are effective. We're not going to look at our children's behavior without first looking at ours.
So I want you to do this with me. I want you to start adopting this new way of parenting. I don't want you to sit and think, you must obey me. Point the finger back and say, you must influence them to willingly obey you. If we can just change that focus to us, we can then become the defensive parents against the influences of this world and the offensive parent that is bringing our children in obedience towards the will of God in their life.
Is that making sense to you?
I want you to stop focusing completely on how your children's actions are and focus on how your actions are to your children, because that is the only way that your children will become obedient to the things that you ask of them. By first thinking, do I have influence over my children? And when you do, you'll see better results in how you're parenting your children.
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