Forget self-esteem. Don't teach your kids self-esteem.
Does that sound counter-cultural? Well, what if your parenting breakthrough came when you taught self-respect instead? Strong hearts are morally courageous children who are fortified with self-respect and grounded in truth.
Of course, God's Word grounded in truth. And a strong heart is a kid who's going to be able to defend their faith and defeat their foes, even those foes within, those foes within and those foes without. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, author and founder of Manners of the Heart, Jill Garner shares her unique perspective on how to raise a generation of kids with strong hearts. If you're struggling in your parenting, don't miss the help and hope straight ahead as we talk about her book, Strong Heart, Cultivating Humility, Respect and Resiliency in Your Child.
It's our featured resource at buildingrelationships.us. Gary, I'm looking forward to the response to this program, you know, after we have this conversation and air it, because it feels like some of the sage wisdom from long ago is surfacing in our world again. What do you think? Well, I think so, Chris, and I think it's good. I think many, many parents are realizing that there have been a lot of things that have happened in the whole culture and our kids are not always getting what they need. So I think the topic today is exceedingly important for our contemporary parents.
So I'm excited about our program today. Well, let me introduce our guest. Jill Garner is an author, speaker, founder of Manners of the Heart, a nonprofit reawakening respect in our society for the sake of the next generation. She's written the award winning book Raising Respectful Children in a Disrespectful World, as well as Raising Unselfish Children in a Self-Absorbed World. Her work is endorsed by folks on the family, Family Life Today, Dr. Kevin Lehman and many others. And our featured resource is her book Strong Heart, Cultivating Humility, Respect and Resiliency in Your Child.
Find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Well, Jill, welcome to Building Relationships. Thank you so much, Dr. Chapman. Glad to be here. Well, we're delighted to have you.
You know, for those who are not familiar with your organization, let's begin by just telling us a little bit about Manners of the Heart. Well, it's near and dear to my heart and it's most definitely my calling. I was an interior designer by trade and degree many, many years ago. And I was doing an interview and the commentator said Jill thought that she was meant to be an interior designer of homes, but God intended her to be an interior designer of hearts.
And somehow I think he was right. And that's really been my calling. And out of that, I founded Manners of the Heart, which is a nonprofit organization.
Almost 22 years ago now. And our mission has been unchanging and all that time to reawaken respect in our society through the education of the hearts of children so that they can carry this into the next generation, carry respect once again and carry it into the next generation. Well, it's so important and I'm glad today we're going to touch on at least part of that mission for your organization. You know, there's a story you opened the book with where you're speaking to a group of elementary school children making the leap to middle school. I think that story sets up what we're going to talk about today.
So I want you to share that with us. Well, I was so honored to be asked to be a commencement speaker for a fifth grade graduating class at one of our Manners of the Heart elementary schools a few years ago. And as I contemplated what I needed to say to these children, what they needed to hear and ask the Lord, you know, what do they most need to know at this point in their lives? This idea of strong heart, really this vision of a strong heart character came to mind.
And so I said, well, yes, sir, that'll do it. And so that morning I took a white board and I drew a heart on the center of the board and then turned it into a little character with a head and feet and arms and all. And I turned to the children and I said, you know, you really can teach this lesson today because you're Manners of the Heart kids. You've had Manners of the Heart now for five years.
And I think you're going to know the answer to my question. What is in the heart of a strong heart? And they had really not had that terminology of a strong heart at this point yet in the curriculum. And so I just threw it out there and hands went up and they started saying things like obedience and compassion and respect and self-respect and forgiveness and these wonderful qualities.
And this was a local public school and all these amazing qualities. And in some ways I let them keep going and you kind of found the fruit of the Spirit even listed, even though the children weren't aware necessarily of what they were speaking. And I filled the heart with all those beautiful qualities. And then I turned to the kids and I said, so here's what you need to hear today. This is what your heart is full of today.
And as you move into middle school, even some of your closest friends might take a wrong turn and start trying to break into that heart and fill it with the wrong stuff. And I want you to see what happens if you make those wrong decisions. And I let them give me some scenarios which were mind-boggling because they already knew the troubles they were going to face and that they were already facing. And I said, what if you said yes when you should have said no? Here's what happens. And I erased a piece of the outline of the heart.
And I continued doing that until the outline of the heart was gone. And I said, so what's going to happen to all this good stuff? And they knew from their lessons, well, the bad stuff comes in when the good stuff falls out. And so we replaced love with hate. I replaced respect with disrespect and continued until now the heart of our strong heart was filled with horrible stuff. And so this was the shattering part of this moment. So I said, so now take a look.
Who is our strong heart become? And a little boy raised his hand and he said, oh, he's a murderer. One of the little girls said, oh, she's really depressed. And just as it struck you, Dr. Chapman, it hit me in the same way and the parents and the educators present in the room. To think fifth graders, for one, would have that level of emotional intelligence was quite astounding.
As hard as it was to hear, they really understood. And I said, you know what? You could be right.
You could be right. And I said, so here's the really tough question. Whose fault is it? And I let it sit for a little while. And then the children started saying, oh, it's strong heart's fault. Oh, oh, it's my fault. Oh, it's my fault. And they understood fully.
They fully understood the idea of responsibility and accountability. Right. And so I said, all right, now, what are we going to do to fix this? Now, we have to understand this is public school. I couldn't go to the full cross to take them to the foot of the cross. I wanted to stand up and say, right, we need Jesus in your heart.
Right. So how, you know, so where could I take them to lead them in that direction? So I said, well, I said, what are we going to do to fix this? And one of the little girls said, we're going to remember our manners of the heart lessons. And I said, that's right. So next time when somebody says, are you going to do it?
You're going to say, no, not me. And every time you do and you make those right choices, you start repairing your heart. And now that hate gets out and the love comes back in. The disrespect leaves and the respect comes back in.
And as we repaired it, I continued drawing around and around the outline of the heart. And I said, look what's happened now. Now it has become easier to do the right thing and make the right choice and harder now to do the wrong thing because your heart's going to tell you. And now you're going to know. And now you will become a leader.
You truly will become a strong heart. Yeah. Wow. Pretty powerful for fifth graders.
Fifth graders. So now we know why you titled the book Strong Heart. How did you formulate this strong heart concept?
Well, you know, I realized in that moment, this really was the culmination of my 25 years of work with families and children. And it all came together in that moment because our goal in any of the work we've done with children and parents is to help them build strong hearts. And strong hearts are morally courageous children who are fortified with self-respect and grounded in truth, of course, God's word, grounded in truth. And a strong heart is a kid who's going to be able to defend their faith and defeat their foes, even those foes within, those foes within and those foes without. Yeah.
It's a pretty powerful concept. And if we can pull that off as parents, at least doing our part, we're going to be setting them up for a lot of success, right? Yes.
Yes. If we protect and prepare, I always like to say that a parent's role is to protect their child while at the same time prepare them. Sometimes we get off balance and we're too protective, right, and we're not spending time preparing them. And sometimes we work so hard to prepare them that we let the world come in too quickly and they're not ready yet. So we have to find that balance between protecting and preparing.
Yeah. Jill, in today's culture, most parenting experts and mental health professionals offer advice on mindfulness and controlling our thoughts and helping children develop strong minds. Why the emphasis on the heart rather than the mind? I love this question because Scripture clearly tells us that it's the content of the heart, whether it's good, whether it's bad, whether it's ugly, it's the content of the heart that determines what a child will think.
What a child will say and what a child will do. We know that Scripture tells us that it's the good inside the heart, right, that comes out. That's where the words and the actions come from, whether they're good or evil. It's dependent upon what is in the content of the heart. And so I really squirm, to be totally honest, I squirm when I hear the word mindfulness because it's heartfulness. It's really where we should be focusing our attention because it truly is the heart that informs the mind.
It's not the other way around. It's what's in the heart that's going to determine what's in the mind. Yeah. So out of the heart, we speak, right? And we do. Yes.
And we think. Right. That proverb that says, you know, so is a man thinketh in his heart.
Do you use King James? Yeah. So is a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Yeah. Right. Now, you mentioned self-respect in your definition of a strong heart, not self-esteem. Why do you go in a different direction than a lot of the culture who super, super emphasizes self-esteem? Phew. Loaded question.
I'm going to come out with all fillers firing on this one. So if we go back to the late 60s, early 70s, that's when self-esteem was given to us. It was formulated in the late 1800s. And the word, the concept, which we'd forgotten it was just a concept. It was a theory. It was not a truthful statement in the beginning, but it was not truth. But that's where it was originally formed. But in the 1940s, it kind of sat in the clinical circles.
In the 60s is when it was brought forward, and the person you really can give credit for bringing it forward to the rest of us really was Carl Rogers, if you do the research. And Carl Rogers is the grandfather of humanism. Well, that should have been a red flag to us as Christians, but somehow we missed it because the truth is self-esteem is the same as the sin of pride in the Garden of Eden. The glory, vanity of self, as we heard a lot of talk of it in the 1600s and 1700s. The difference is that we understood in the garden and we understood in the 1600s that it's a bad thing, that the sin of pride got us in a lot of trouble. Vain glory is the glorifying of self. Neither of those make any sense as ever, the thought of being good. And then that same term, that same concept or that reality was reframed and called self-esteem and this time we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
But it's the same thing. The esteeming of self. Go back to Scripture. You're not going to find in Scripture where Scripture tells us to esteem ourselves. Scripture tells us quite the contrary, to esteem God and to esteem others. And it's through that process that we gain respect for ourselves, which is what our children truly need.
They don't need to esteem self. They need to esteem others and God and respect themselves. And whatever little caveat I'll throw in there, a lot of our generation is having difficulty with the next generation that are raising our grandchildren.
And we feel those tugs and those struggles. And a lot of that, I believe, has come from this cycle of respect that first children learn respect by respecting parents. We then introduce them to God, hopefully through our love and our attention and our respect toward them. And then it's through that respect for God that they begin to turn outward and have respect for others, as Scripture tells them. And that process brings them to respect themselves. And that process begins again and that cycle of respect continues. But if we have spent our time, which our generation was so guilty of buying into the self-esteem notion, and we poured esteem into our children, well, they grew up with plenty of esteem but not enough of respect.
What is the major difference between those two? The major difference between those two, I would say it would be self-centeredness, which is self-esteem, and other-centeredness, which is self-respect. You know, if you think about how do we gain respect, we gain respect by first giving respect. So to develop self-respect always must come first, must come that focus on others, not the focus on self.
Can I ask a question? Is that where the participation trophy thing first started, that everybody has to get a trophy? Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. Yes, that's where all of that was born out of. And so now we've seen it born out in a couple of generations with that, that the respect comes from playing hard and doing your best, not necessarily winning every game or winning all the championships or winning all the trophies or ribbons either, because the ribbons are in there. What has that done to us then, to our kids and the culture? Well, in so many ways, it's keeping our children from becoming all God intended them to be. You know, when you think about Chariots of Fire and you think about Eric Little, who said, when I run, I feel God's pleasure, you know, because he was running, because God had made him to run and to run fast, as he told his sister, right?
And it was in doing what God had created him to do and given him an ability to do that he felt God's pleasure. And so often with this self-esteem emphasis, I'll give you another way to look at it that goes along with this sports analogy. You know, if little Johnny comes off the baseball field today and he struck out twice and he missed the fly ball, if mama's worried about his self-esteem, mama's going to say, Johnny, you listen to your mama. You're the best kid on the team.
If every kid played like you, we'd never lose a game. Well, obviously there's something wrong with that, right? Johnny is going, did she not see me? Was she not looking today? Oh, she was talking to her friends. I guess she wasn't paying attention to me. You know, she doesn't pay a lot of attention.
She's not paying attention or she would know a bomb today. And when mom does that, he also knows she just lied to me. If every kid on the team played like I did today, we'd never win another game, right? And the child knows that. And so what happens when we give kids false praise, which is what we get caught up in with self-esteem, we're chipping away at their ambition because either they're thinking, well, somebody's going to tell me I'm great when I do nothing, that participation trophy, or someone is going to help me because maybe that really is the best that I'll ever do. So either way, they stop trying.
Either way, we chip away at their ambition. The contrast of that, if mama was worried about self-respect, when Johnny came off the field that day, she'd go, whoosh, boy, Johnny. Boy, we had a rough game today, huh? Man, couldn't hit that ball and the bat didn't connect. Your feet didn't get off the ground. Golly, what a rough game.
Son, I was sitting in those bleachers feeling your pain. But I got an idea. Maybe Friday we'll make those famous, those good cookies everybody loves that they talk about and we'll get those boys over who figured this out and get out there and give them some cookies and y'all get out there and work at it because I know if you keep working at it and we get the people to help you, I tell you what, I think you'll get it. What do you think, Johnny? Wow. What a difference, huh? Huge difference. I can imagine that there are parents listening today who are hearing this and it's hitting them in a way they've never heard it before. And so I think it's extremely important.
Another aspect of your teaching is to move away from happiness toward joy. Tell us about that. Yeah, I'll give you an illustration. I love stories.
I think you can see things, see things clearly in stories sometimes. I have identical twin sons, by the way, far into manhood now for sure. But when they were young, one of the boys wanted to play the drums and so made him wait a while because you don't get everything you want when you want it, right?
Got to wait on it. And we waited a while and he really was serious. And so Christmas rolled around the next year and I got him a drum set and he started playing and it was awful. No rhythm. I was standing in front of him. Okay, son, here we go.
One, two, one, two, three, four. And it was terrible. He couldn't find any rhythm. He had a teacher and he was helping him work and he'd listen and he'd try to mimic what the teacher was doing with little tapes and things that he'd bring home. And after several, and I'd sit and I'd encourage him.
And I didn't tell him it was great because he wasn't. I encouraged him to keep going, keep working at it, let's keep trying, let's keep working, keep trying. It's the trying, son, that matters.
We're not going to give up. And so after a few months, I hear him in the room playing something. Or I thought that actually in the moment it was the tape. It was so good. And I opened the door and it was my son. And he slammed his sticks down on the drum and he said, Mom, I can feel it. Son. I said, Oh, son, mama feels it too. Rip it. He ripped it out.
And here's my question. Was that a moment of happiness or was that a moment of joy in my son? What do you think? I think it sounds like it was a joy for both of you. Absolutely, Chris.
Absolutely. It was joy out the rooftops. Now, if I had told him from the get go, right, you are so good.
You are great. And had given him all that false praise in the world, right? Because I was worried about his moment to moment happiness. And all I was concerned about was keeping him happy in the moment.
He would never have achieved that moment of joy. And that's what happens to us as parents when we buy into that notion that our goal in life is to keep our children happy. Think of a Walmart moment with a child. Most mamas immediately start chuckling if I say a Walmart moment because they know exactly what I'm talking about. Mama's coming into the finish line to get out of the store and the child's in the buggy and they're having that discussion which has now become a total tantrum, right? But I want, but I want. And mama's saying no. And the child's saying yes.
And they're having this horrible Walmart moment. And I've learned to step over because I care so much. I don't really care anymore. And I'll take what comes. And I'll step over and say, let me help you.
Can I help you? Listen, stand firm, mama. I'll stand here with you.
Don't give in to this. And I'll stand there with her. I haven't had anyone slap me yet.
Some haven't been so welcoming, but they haven't slapped me. But I'll stand with them to try to keep them strong. But what does mama say to me? And I'll say, don't give in. No, no. But you know, I just want her to be happy, right?
And I'll say, no, no, no, no, no, no. You want her to be humble and you really want her to grow to become holy is what you're really looking for. But not happy. Don't worry about being happy. That's not your job as a parent. And truly, we prevent our children from finding true joy because we masquerade it as this moment to moment, keep them happy all the time. Don't you think part of that, as I'm listening to you talk about this, I'm remembering some of the mistakes I made as a parent in the past with my own kids, especially around birthdays and holidays and wanting them to be happy, you know?
And it stems from my own times when I didn't feel happy with the circumstance and I don't want them to experience that or something like it in their own life. So I'm trying to protect them, but I'm really protecting myself. Is that where some of it stems from? Oh, I think so. You know, if all of us, me included on the top of the list, I have a crooked nose from hitting myself with a nose so much and my toes are a mess from stepping on my feet all the time, so please don't anyone think I didn't mess up all the time.
Oh my goodness, did I ever. But it is in those mess-ups that we learn, right? And that's so true for our children. When we don't allow them to have those moments of disappointment and those moments of unhappiness and truly even those moments of failure, if we don't allow that in their lives, how are they ever going to learn and grow and mature just as we did in those tough moments?
Because it's in those tough moments that we have to dig deeper and that we need, that's when a child needs mom and daddy to stand with them, not to walk away certainly, but to stand with them and walk through those disappointments with them. But we must allow them because if we don't, we really are stunning their growth. You know, we want to think today that kids are growing up faster. That's so not true. I know, Dr. Chapman, from your work, you agree with that. Kids aren't growing up faster.
In fact, they're maturing at much slower rates today than ever before. And a lot of it has to do with this topic that we're discussing because someone made it their job to keep them happy all the time and didn't allow them to have those disappointments from which they could grow and mature. Yeah, so important. Thanks for joining us today for Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. If you go to buildingrelationships.us, you'll find more ways to strengthen your relationships. If you'd like to hear today's conversation again or suggest it to a friend, go to buildingrelationships.us. You can also find today's resource right there, Jill Garner's book, Strong Heart, Cultivating Humility, Respect, and Resiliency in Your Child. Again, go to buildingrelationships.us. Jill, talk about GRIT, G-R-I-T. You say you want to develop this in your children.
What does that stand for? Yes, so GRIT, good old-fashioned GRIT. Guts, resiliency, integrity, and tenacity. I decided late in life at some point in my 40s, I guess closer to 50, that it was time to get in shape. And I went to the gym and all and found this trainer who had this amazing European accent. He was this huge man who had been a world-class weightlifter in his career, and he was now well up in age and just continued to love on people and help them at the gym. And he would get down in my ear when he was trying to get me to do more reps, and he would say, where is your GRIT? I would say, what was that, Ani? His name was Ani.
I said, what, Ani? He'd say, GRIT, it takes GRIT. You must use your GRIT. And it has so stuck with me because the moment at which he would choose to say that to me, it was that moment when I thought I knew I couldn't go any further. I thought I knew myself better than he knew me. But he actually knew me better than I knew myself, right? He knew I was capable of more than I thought I was. And in those moments, that was just something that has just stayed in my mind all these years when I think about GRIT.
And that's really why I chose to use GRIT, was thinking about Ani and the way in which it was such an incentive and such an inspiration to me to keep going because I recognized, wait, he knows something about me. He sees something in me that I don't see. And that's what we should be doing as parents, right? We see into the hearts of our children. And that truly is one of my top ten daily prayers I love to offer to parents is to always pray, Lord, help me to see with your eyes into the heart of my child. Help me to see what's there that might not be revealing itself outwardly in the moment. Help me to see deep inside. And so if we're going to really help our children become strong cards, we have to help them develop guts, resiliency, integrity, and tenacity.
And I'll give you just a one or two little sentence quickie on each one of those for the listeners today. If we're helping our children develop guts, what I mean by that is that is simply trying. That is the ability to say, I'm going to try again. In a high school program that we did for several years, I would always tell the kids up front, those high school students, when I would ask the first question, or I'd say, I need a volunteer to come up and help. And of course, dead silence in the room, right? Nobody would raise their hand.
Nobody would move. And I would say, you know what I found in these years of working with you teenagers? The first one to respond and offer to volunteer when no one else is volunteering, that's the kid who's going to go far in life. And of course, you know, 25 hands in the room suddenly would go up, right?
Those hands would go straight up. That's what I mean by guts. Having the guts, the willingness to try, you know, raising our kids with that willingness to try. Because whether you, and I would go on and tell those teens, whether you succeed or whether you fail in this moment really isn't the issue. The issue is you are the one willing to stand up and try. You win just because you're willing to stand up and try.
You've made a step forward. That's guts. Resiliency.
So that's even a bigger part of the book. And this resiliency is, you know, the old, the old Weebles? Remember old Weebles, that toy? The Weebles wobble, but they... Don't fall down.
Right. That's what we want to see with our children. We want to raise this generation of strong cart Weebles, right? Who they wobble and they're going to get hit. They're going to get hit by life. They're going to get hit by friends. They're going to get hit by circumstances, right?
They're going to get hit by their own poor choices. But we want to make sure when they fall over, they don't stay down, that they get back up, right? And that's resiliency.
And of course, that resiliency comes through hope. You know, one of those side notes here is, you know, don't ever let your kid come in and go in the room and close the door and come out for supper and go back in. Well, no, no, no, no.
Don't. We always had an open door policy at our house. The boys, when they needed their time, they had their, of course, their, you know, quiet personal time. But as a rule, we had an open door policy because we, I was not going to allow them to get off to themselves and get lost in themselves because when they get lost in themselves is when they can't see the hope. They can't see the hopefulness.
They can't see their way out of situations when we allow them to get lost in themselves. And integrity. Of course, integrity, the old thing of doing the right thing when no one's looking, right?
But it's even so much more than that. Integrity, the root of the word is integral, which really means having that strong, firm foundation so that whatever happens and the world crumbles around them that they don't crumble because they have such an integrated personality and they're a whole complete person. And so they're going to do the right thing no matter what, even in the difficult moments when it's easier to go along with the crowd, they're going to be the one, because of their integrity, who doesn't go along with the crowd, turns their back on the crowd, turns in the other direction, and you know what happens. When they look over their shoulder, there's going to be another kid who's going to follow them because everybody's just looking for someone to be the leader. And so that kid with integrity is the one who turns away and then becomes a leader because others will follow in their steps.
Tenacity. Oh, goodness. Back to Ani. We'll come full circle, right? That grrrt.
Where is your grrrt, right? That is tenacity. That's that not stopping, not giving up no matter what. Trying, trying, and trying again. When I wrote my first book, someone said, you know, Jill, you've got to get 30 no's before you finally get a yes. And when you're trying to get a publisher or something like that, and I would come to the mailbox and my neighbors would see me and I'd see a letter and I'd rip it open and I'd go, yes, oh, yes.
And they'd go, Jill, then holler over Jill, oh, did you get it? No, no, I didn't. It's another rejection. I'm one step closer.
That's tenacity. That's great. That's great.
Well, I had four refusals on my first book, so. Yeah, we've been there. We've all been there. If you've tried, you've been there, right? That's correct.
That's absolutely right. Now, you've combined two words that are typically considered opposites, humility and confidence. What does humble confidence look like? Don't you love putting those two words together?
I love putting opposites together, just like in relationships. That humble confidence. So, let's go to Scripture. Moses. Scripture tells us that Moses was the, quote, most humble man on earth. Well, when you think about Moses, you don't necessarily think of humility as we think of humility in modern-day terms. So often humility has almost gotten a bad rep today, like that mama who said, I want my child to be happy. And I want to tell her, no, you really want to raise a child to be humble. Because a child who's humble is a child who has the greatest confidence.
So what do I mean by that? Moses stepped into his God-given place of authority, not for Moses. He did it for the good of his people, right? When he accepted his call.
It was for the good of his people. He understood that it's not about me. It's about God's calling in my life. So that, we talk a lot about so that's at manners of the hearts. The so that is how you judge your motive. I'm going to do this so that this is the outcome.
So it's a way to check your motives. Especially when it comes to humble confidence. I'm going to take this action so that others can learn the lesson that I learned the hard way.
And maybe I can make it easier for them. That's humble confidence. It's not about you. It's about taking what you've learned, taking what you've mastered.
Working hard to really become all God created you to be. Step into that place of authority He's given you. But the so that is what makes the difference.
It's the motive behind it. It's not so that the bright light shines on me and the world says, well, look how smart he is. Boy, he knows it all. He's something else.
No. And so when the bright light shines, you step out of the way so the light shines behind you. And you have the great satisfaction and privilege of helping someone else now learn what God has taught you. That's humble confidence when it's not about you, but it's about the calling. And I'll just mention, I love the thought that God's calling in our lives. Our calling is truly God calling out what He placed in us when He created us. Our calling is when God says it's time to use all that I put in you when I created you. The time is now to pull it out, use it fully for the good of the kingdom.
Blessed to be a blessing. That's humble confidence. A Christian parent, I would think, would have an advantage because we have that concept of Christ who humbled himself, became a man, and when he got on level ground with us, he humbled himself further to death on a cross, all for the benefit of others. You know, Jill, talk to parents of young teenagers who are struggling. You share a story, for example, of a 13-year-old girl who was getting off track and how her parents responded.
Say a word about that to them. This was a tough story that does have a good ending. But I was helping parents with their 12-year-old daughter, and she was starting to have some different kind of behaviors. Her attitude was changing, and at first I was trying to encourage them that, you know, your daughter is at that age. That's that age, and it's so scripturally correct, that age of accountability where she's now trying to decide, am I going to believe what my parents have taught me? Is this really going to be for me? Is this my faith?
Is this my belief system as she's moving in toward teenagehood? And I thought, that's the struggle that you're feeling. Well, after a few months, it became evident it was much more serious than that. And this was not that phase of life, that season of life. There was something wrong.
Something really was going wrong. And we went to see a Christian counselor and started doing some deep dive looking into, you know, where did all this come from. And through that process, we did the most interesting assessment of that child's life. We looked back at her upbringing, and the parents looked at really how their time had been spent as a parent in raising her.
What had the actions been, and just what had it looked like? Almost kind of like their parenting style. And they came up with this kind of odd percentage that's going to be startling. They recognized that 90 percent of her upbringing had been spent in entertainment. And in entertaining her. And it kind of goes back to that happiness joy a little bit.
And 10 percent, only 10 percent, had been in intentionally training her. And these were Christian parents, and they felt, you know, gosh, we do it. We're a close family. We do things together.
And we're always on the go, and we spend time together. We're intentional about that. And how could she have gotten us so off track? But what they recognized in a hard, tough way, but fortunately it was not too late by any stretch, they had not spent the time intentionally training her. They had not had regular times of devotional times.
They had not truly, truly made Christ the center of their home and God's Word as the center of their home. They kept her happy, and she had moved along, and she was an easy kid, you know, hadn't had much troubles, and easy, pretty obedient and stuff. But when it came time for her to step in toward adulthood, which, you know, before we came up with the notion of teenagehood, there was no such thing in Scripture.
We went from being a child to being an adult. When she hit that stage of life, she didn't have anything to fall back on. She was not grounded, and she was not rooted.
She didn't know what she believed because they had not spent that time to pour into her and make sure she knew the values and truly a deep belief system. I think there had to be a shock to the parents. It was a shock because they felt they had been doing a good job, you know, and in some ways they had, you know, but that they had, again, they had just gotten off track and I guess kind of gotten on the wrong train. So were they able at that juncture to make changes?
How did it turn out? They were able to make changes. They were very able to make changes partly because of the relationship that had been established to that point. They were able to begin turning things back around. They backed away from so many activities, brought her back down to having one major focus that next semester rather than three or four. They cut out so much of the busyness and the activities in their lives as well. And she had a brother who was doing just fine. He was a little younger. And they came back to true family time, not busy time, you know, but family time where they had long conversations and they had gotten away from having dinner at the table.
That had gone by the wayside in the busyness. They came back to kind of the basics and just pulled back in their whole lifestyle, really, made a tremendous lifestyle change. And the changes that it made in their child and their daughter, it was just astounding to see. And they hit it at just such a critical juncture, that 12 to 13 age, because as you're well aware of the Barna research, you know, a child's worldview begins to be established at two, by 10 it's set in place, and by 13 it's pretty much written in stone.
And so they had that window, they were just at that window of time where they could kind of reframe her perspective and really reframe the whole family's perspective on what it really meant to be a family and what did it really mean to train up a child rather than entertain their child. For those parents who are out there and their teenager is moving in a wrong direction, is it too late ever to make pretty radical changes? It's truly not. I don't believe it's ever too late, because, I mean, Scripture tells us God doesn't give up on us.
And so I don't think it's ever too late. But the hard part about it is in today's world, I think Chris mentioned something earlier in the interview, that this is now really that second generation that's been fully immersed in self-esteem. And so we have a generation who knows no other than self-esteem, raising now this third generation. And so it's incredibly difficult to make this swap, because they will find themselves being completely countercultural. So I'm not saying it's easy. It's a hard thing. But the freedom that is found— so many parents are running through my mind right now over 25 years here— parents who have made that decision and made radical changes, I don't know of a one that I've helped or have been privileged to walk through it with them through the years that have ever regretted it, ever regretted it.
But it is totally countercultural. But the freedom that is found in it— I just want to tell everybody, try it. Cut out some of that stuff. Try it today. Work on it this next semester.
Have a different Christmas this year. You use the term in the book, persuasive parenting. Say just a word about what you mean by that. Rubies are a fine, fine gem. They're actually rarer than diamonds, and they are much more difficult to extrude from the ground.
It takes tremendous heat, tremendous pressure to dig deep and to pull them, get them out of the ground so that that beautiful gemstone that's beneath all that can be revealed. And that's what I mean by persuasive pressure. I'll give you a scripture on that. The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips.
It's from Proverbs 16 23. That's to me the foundation of persuasive pressure. When we use persuasion with our kids, persuasive pressure, what we're really doing is we are using our wisdom and our speech in a wise way that enables them to come out of wrong behaviors, and we use discipline, not punishment, training, not punishment, in order to help reform their behaviors.
I call it persuasive pressure. Well, there's so much more in the book, of course, that is exciting. In the closing pages of the book, you share a prayer that you began to pray 25 years ago. Can you share that with our listeners?
That would really be an honor. My husband and I put on, we call it the Armor Prayer. We put it on every morning now for our grandchildren. And I really encourage parents to do it.
In fact, everywhere I speak now, I kind of put out this challenge. Just imagine if we prayed this prayer every morning all over America, if parents and grandparents were putting on their armor every morning for the sake of those children and those grandchildren, we really could revolutionize our society and maybe call out and bring out the next great revival, which is what our society so needs. So I encourage you to embrace your spouse as you pray the prayer.
As my husband and I do every morning, we embrace. And we use a singular plural kind of pronoun in there because, as Scripture tells us, the two have become one. So we say, Father, place upon our head the helmet of salvation because the two have become one. I want to encourage any listeners who might be single parents, when God first gave me this scripture many years ago, I found myself in that position.
And I was raising those twin sons on my own because my husband had walked away from us when they were 12. And God gave me that. Out of that time is when He gave me this prayer as armor. So you can certainly pray it as a single mom or a single dad that, Father, place upon my head the helmet of salvation.
So for today I will pray it as a couple would pray. Father, place upon our head the helmet of salvation to protect our mind. Place upon our chest the breastplate of righteousness to protect our heart. Father, wrap around us the belt of truth, that we would know the truth and speak the truth, that we would not be deceived, nor would we deceive. Father, we'll carry the sword of the Spirit, Your word, as an offensive weapon. Enable us to walk in the path of peace You lay before us this day, not stepping to the left nor to the right, but walking in its narrow way. With the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, with Jesus Christ our brother standing with us, and with You, the Lord God Almighty, empowering us, we will stand and hold the shield of faith this day. And for us we say, for Garrett and Allie and Jack and Austin and Kate and Addison and Elliot, and you would name your children or your grandchildren, we'll carry the shield of faith this day until each can carry it in their own faith. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Well, Jill, thanks for sharing that. And again, there's so much more in the book. I want to encourage our listeners to get the book.
If you're a parent, you're going to find this book to be extremely, extremely helpful. So thanks for being with us today, Jill. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Chapman.
It's been my honor. Thank you. What a refreshing parenting conversation with Jill Garner today, the author of our featured resource at buildingrelationships.us, the book Strong Heart, cultivating humility, respect and resiliency in your child. And you'll find that prayer right there in the book.
Just go to buildingrelationships.us. And next week, it's time for your questions and comments. Don't miss our October edition of Dear Gary. Call and leave your message right now at 1-866-424-GARY. Again, ask your relationship question or make a comment at 1-866-424-GARY. A big thank you to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Backing. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.
