There was a time when a community helped to raise a child. If an adult witness you misbehaving they would correct you and then tell your parents. Now a days, if you correct someone else’s child you may get cursed out by both the parents and the child. I don’t know about you but I want my children to be raised the way God instructs us to raise them. The word says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
What does the bible mean by train? In short, to train means, be who you want your child to become. It is not enough to just teach our children the right way to behave and the right things to say. We must be a living example for our children. If we can’t live the way we are teaching our children, then what makes us think that our children will be able to or even have a desire to live that way.
Seriously, even Jesus, are greatest example took the form of a human so he could experience what we go through every day. We should at least attempt to live the way we are training our children to become. Statistics say that we remember:
20% of what we read
30% of what we hear
40% of what we see
50% of what we say
60% of what we do
90% of what we see, hear, say, and do
So, if we just go by this statistic we understand that the more engaged we are in training our children the better off they will be. I realized I needed to change a few things about myself, when my daughter Julia decided to play a game of “Let’s pretend I’m mom.” She begin playing this game about a month or so ago. I could hear her from the kids playroom. She was yelling at my other two kids, Joshua and Janna. So without even thinking, I yell from the kitchen,” Stop, yelling at them!”
After about a week or so, I realized that she was pretending to be me. The truth is, kids are sponges, anything they know at a young age is because of the environment they are around. So I decided to work on me, I still correct her but I realize that she must first see me practicing what I preach to her about.
If we aren’t careful we could end up getting annoyed with our kids for the things we taught them, or did not teach them during our interactiom with them. Let’s do better! Let us become who we want our children to be!
Challenge: Make a list of all the characteristics that you want your child/children to acquire. If there is a character trait that you are asking of your child/ children that you yourself do not have, begin to work on acquiring that trait each day.