Consistency Is Key

Having rules and boundaries in your home and then not enforcing those rules or boundaries, that can be a big problem. Sam Crabtree explains what happens when parents don't enforce the rules. Let's conclude, and rightly so, that when you mouth the words, get your pajamas on, you don't really mean that, apparently. And the issues can escalate as they get older.

So it's not just get your pajamas on, but keep your pants zipped on your date. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. There is a positive, loving way for you to keep boundaries in place and to enforce rules, even if your kids don't like it at first.

We'll talk with Sam Crabtree about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Did your kids, did they see you as a mean mom? Were you a mean mom? I think they thought I was really fun. I'm an adventurous mom. I do crazy things. She was fun.

Really, really fun. She still is. I'm not saying she isn't anymore. But I also made them toe the line, and it was exhausting. With three little boys, I was exhausted, because sometimes it felt like that's all you do.

But I think I had a combination. She was a good balance. One of Anne's real values in life is make a memory. And so I'm telling you, she made memories. Unbelievable memories. Was Dave a mean dad?

No. He was fun dad. He was fun dad. The kids in the neighborhood would want to come to our house to play with Dave. They'd come to the front door and not get in and go, can Mr. Wilson come out and play?

I'm not kidding. And we'd play capture the flag and a little wiffle ball in the front yard. We wanted our home to be the home in the neighborhood where the kids wanted to be, because there was a lot of joy. The joy of Jesus radiated. We wanted that to happen in our home. And laughter was important to us.

What about you, Bob? Were you the fun dad? See, I was a camp counselor when I was in high school and then college. And I thought that's what parenting was, was just being an extended camp counselor. Honestly, that was my paradigm, was just if you can have fun with the kids and have them all, you know, corral them all and get them to go along and, hey, let's all go do this. So I was much more like that.

And Mary Ann would come along and say, no, they need to be molded a little bit more. It's not just let's all go have a party today, but we're actually raising real human beings. As a dad, did you do table chants for table prayers?

Oh, that's a good question. We have a song. We sang prayers. By the way, this is Sam Crabtree, who's joining us again on Family Life Today. Sam, welcome back. Glad to be here.

Glad to be here. Sam is an author. He has written a book called Parenting with Loving Correction that we're talking about.

Sam is on the pastoral team at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. So still today when our kids come home for a holiday or something and it comes time to pray, I'll go, okay, for health and strength and daily food, we praise thy name, O Lord. Amen. And they'll join in and sing along. The whole family? And the grandkids will look at their parents like, what is this all about? But yeah, we would sing that little prayer.

I think I'm looking at you that way right now, Bob. Really, you guys still do it. We would sing that, yeah. The Lord's been good to me, and so I thank the Lord for giving me the things I need. The sun and the rain and the apple seed, the Lord is good to me.

Amen. We'd sing at the end. Oh, Sam, did you sing that? That was a camp song? We'd sing dig in sometimes and say amen at the end of the prayer. The reason we're talking about all of this is because.

What just happened here in the studio? I've never heard either one of those songs. Really? Have you, honey? No. You can download the file and you can memorize them and share them with others.

I can try it. We're talking this week about correction and about discipline, and part of the reason we're talking about this is because I think there's an observation that there are parents who are a little intimidated by the idea of correcting their kids. They don't want to be abusers in any way.

They want to nurture their kids and want them to thrive, and they're concerned that correction is going to work against that nurturing and thriving, that kids are somehow going to grow up angry and frustrated and even violent if their parents try to correct them. And so moms and dads just back off and let things go that some of us in the older generation look at and go, you can't let that go. You know what I'm talking about? Well said. We should be interviewing you, I think. I didn't write the book.

Well, here's my question on that angle, Sam, because you're the expert. I, you know, as a young dad with my first child, I had this idea that if you set a boundary or a rule and then you enforce it, the child feels unloved, and yet I discovered the opposite is true. And you talk about this in your book is, no, when you set the boundary and enforce it, it actually makes them feel loved. And a lot of parents are afraid to do that because they think, I want my son or daughter to feel so loved, and if I really enforce this rule, this boundary, they're not going to feel that.

Talk about that, because they do. Yeah, boundaries help. I taught sixth grade for seven years. We had a large playground adjacent to the school, and every once in a while a stray kickball or something would go out into the street, and it was a significant hazard. So the school district then wisely put up a chain link fence along the border of the property there between the playground and the street. And whereas the children used to play some distance from that street, but a stray ball would get away from them, now they would lean up against that fence and have their little gossip sessions or whatever they would do there, because the boundary was there and wasn't going to move, and they didn't have to fear the traffic.

So I think the boundaries do provide safety. There were a couple years ago I did a talk to some high school kids, and a 14-year-old girl came up to me and she said, I feel like my mom, her mom was raising her, I feel like she doesn't love me. And I said, what makes you think that? And she said, all my friends have boundaries, rules, curfews. And I said, and? She said, my mom has no rules, no curfew.

I can be out whenever. I have never had a rule in my life. And my mom's nice to me, but I feel like, does she love me? And I was so fascinated by that because she felt so insecure by the lack of rules in her home.

Yeah. My point here isn't to get parents to establish a bunch of rules if they don't have them, or to tell parents which rules they should have, like if you have a curfew, should it be this o'clock or that o'clock or whatever it should be. But my main interest is, once you've set a rule, then enforce that rule for multiple reasons. One is that if you set rules that you don't enforce, the children can think you really don't care about those rules, they must not matter to you. Another is that you teach the children to disregard what you're saying. And to take it one step further, they even learn that your words don't mean anything.

If you say, get your pajamas on, and then they do everything except get their pajamas on, and there's no response from you, they just conclude, and rightly so, that when you mouth the words, get your pajamas on, you don't really mean that, apparently. The issues can escalate as they get older, but if they've learned when they're small that, well, you know, your rules are just, you know, their wishes, you hope I'll comply, but you don't really expect me to comply, and there won't be any consequence if I don't, then they throw your words right out. And then enforcing that boundary, or that fence, is so important. I remember one time Ann and I were doing a parenting series at our church, and I was trying to make the point that, Sam, you do such a good job in your book of making a point that you've got to set the fence.

I call it a fence or a boundary. And then here's the other thing. You should expect your children to push on that fence.

They're going to do it. We are sinners raising sinnerlings. You know, and so parents often are surprised, aren't they? It's like I set the fence, and now they're pushing against it. They're like, I don't want to go to bed at this time.

I don't want to obey your rule. What do you do in that situation? We parents, it's good for us to know that parenting will take us to the limits of our endurance, of our energy, and children in general, and specific children given to us in sequence, will continue to test the limits of our endurance. They're gifts from God, really, to test our endurance. From infancy on, our children will test what we really mean. And if we don't meet the test, then they won't either.

They'll climb the walls because we haven't said don't climb the walls. Weren't there times, though, when your kids would, you'd laid down something, and like you had a standard family rule, like lights out at 11 o'clock, and there's one night, and you're walking down, and it's 11.15. You see a light on a kid's room, and you go, what's going on?

Lights out at 11, and they go, yeah, it was this and this and this. Did you immediately bring correction and a consequence, or were there some nights when you went, okay, just turn off the lights, and we'll be done with it? Yeah, I think it's important to listen first, find out where there are extenuating circumstances.

You have more flexibility in doing that if it's a lights out in the bedroom kind of thing, rather than don't go through red lights. But yeah, I don't think you need to rush to judgment, but neither should we abandon consistency. When we were working on the Art of Parenting video series, I asked Pastor Kevin DeYoung, I said, so when do you correct and when do you give grace?

And he said, well, that's a false dichotomy. He said, when you're correcting, you're giving grace. And I had not thought about that, because we think giving grace means let them off the hook, but it is a grace response to actually correct. God is being gracious to us when he corrects our wrong behavior, isn't he? Yeah, I mean, you posed it well at the outset when you talked about those who correct may feel like their children will think it's unloving.

It is love to do the correcting. So I just think in the Christian church, we've not done well with the fallacy of the excluded middle, the false dichotomy. There are lots of issues where we think it's either this or that, and there are nuances where we can work out a creative solution. And so, same with disciplining children, it doesn't mean either 100% compliance or we're going to drop the atomic bomb on your bedroom. I think, too, all of our kids are so different, and we're going to correct in a different way with different children in their response.

Know your children. Exactly, and I think that's important. And also, I just want to say this culture with a comparison with social media, I think most listeners probably, as moms or dads, can feel overwhelmed and feel like, I am a bad parent. And I think they judge themselves and they're hard on themselves.

Part of it is they don't have answers, but also because there's so much comparison going around that we don't think we're great at it. I think also parenting is different in the young years. Dave and I always said, let's really set some boundaries with our kids from the time they're born to five, and if we go hard then, it'll get easier. And I think that was really true in our case. And then parenting looked different as our kids got older.

Have you seen that, Sam? How do we correct when our kids are little, and what's that look like? Does it change as they get older?

Yeah, it will change as the children get older. When they're very, very small, even newborns, I wouldn't discipline a newborn. I'd be highly leery of correcting a little one, flicking your finger at their hand. I don't think they could respond in an appropriate way that a children at six months or so, they can start to arch their back in defiance, like, I don't want you putting me on the table to change my diaper, or whatever the issue is.

And then I think we start to correct. I will say that there are some physical forms of correcting that can be used with younger children that go away as the children get older, partly because the maturity, partly because they've reached new cognitive levels where you can reason with children as they're older. And partly they work with smaller children because you're bigger than they are, and I think that's a God-given thing for a season that, and I'm not even talking about spanking per se here, though I'd love to talk about that at some point, that you can just pick them up and sit them there. I told you to get in your chair. They don't get in the chair.

You can pick them up and put them in the chair. I mean, to simplify correction, it's no, not this, yes, this, and yes, now, and thank you after they've done it. To show that you're not just, you know, a Billy Goat gruff, and you're just tough all the time, but when they cooperate, you appreciate it.

Break that down. No means this behavior is not acceptable. Not this, what you're doing, you're explaining the specific behavior you're talking about. Yes, this is saying this is what you should be doing, so you're not just correcting, but you're saying this is what's right. This is the right way to act. And yes, now means this is not something you do next time.

We're expecting it right now. And then the thank you is gratitude for the right response. Right, and the gratitude is an important part.

I don't think it's just a caboose that has become superfluous on our railroads on trains these days. An illustration could be that one of our daughters one time, she was perhaps, I don't know, eight or 10 years old, and she was talking to her mother in a particular tone that I found unacceptable. And so I just interrupted their conversation, and I said, I don't know if you're intending to be sassy to your mother right now, but the tone of voice that you're using seems to me like it could be. And I just want you to know that if you continue in that tone, I will count it as sassy, and you will be corrected. You'll be punished for it. Now, can you talk to your mother in a different tone?

And she did. Thank you. Well done, dear daughter. So let's do this. Let's help a mom and a dad who have been listening to us this week and they're thinking, okay, if I do a little self-evaluation, we probably let our kids get away with too much. We're probably not correcting as consistently or maybe even as regularly as we ought.

Maybe we're fearful or we're tired or whatever it is, but this is an area where we need to do better. So if you're sitting down with somebody who says, I'm ready to make some course corrections, some adjustments, what would be your best tips to that person on how to get started, especially if it's not been the way you've been parenting over the last couple of years with your child? Yeah, well, bless their hearts. And I have had parents of teenagers say, we think we've squandered a decade plus with our children. Is it too late? First, I just want to commend them. Second, is it too late?

There could be some tracks that have been laid down that will be pretty stubborn to relay those tracks in those lives or straighten those arrows that have been bent a certain way, but it's never too late. I think it's always the right time to start meaning what you say and saying what you mean in terms of household regulations, rules, policies, guidelines, practices, whatever. Your stewardship as parents is to God. Under God, you're raising these children. You're accountable to God for how you're raising your children.

And so, under God, with respect and communion with Him and relating to God, you want to run the household the way you think you should run the household. So, if you're going to have to change some rules or household standards or something, it's okay to say to the children, we're coming to a place where we think we have not been doing right and we're sorry. We apologize. We're discovering we should have probably been doing some things different and we're asking for your forgiveness and for your patience and for your prayer because we're going to make some changes. And here they are. Here are the changes we're going to make.

Just lay it out. This is in all fairness, full disclosure, family meeting or whatever, and we're going to change these things. And then you'll have to go to work maintaining those changes to demonstrate that you mean what you're saying. But it's always the right time to act on what you've come to discover, what you've come to know and believe is the right thing to do.

Then start implementing it. And at that point, you've explained what the new normal's going to be, and then it's important that you start living that out with some level of consistency, right? Major emphasis on consistency.

On consistency, yeah. I've even thought, tell me what you think, Sam, of Ephesians 6, 4, where Paul writes, fathers don't exasperate your children but raise them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. I've often thought ways that we exasperate our children is we don't lovingly correct. We state things. We don't follow through.

Whom the Lord loves. He disciplines, right? Yeah, and so we're that parent that's making grand statements or laying down boundaries yet not enforcing them, and it's exaspirating to a child.

Is that true? I think that and many other things. I think our children are born with hypocrisy antenna. And I think, I mean, one of the things that used to exasperate me about my dad, there were seven of us children, and so nine at the dinner table, and he would say, you know, the ketchup's not on, somebody get the ketchup, and so forth. And I don't remember seeing my dad get the ketchup, so it seemed like that's a what you tell the kids to do rule, and that's not something that all human beings do. And from that, I took away from being raised that way. I think I want to be different in terms of raising my children so that there are times when I'll volunteer to say, I see that there's no butter on the table.

Let me get that for everyone. So you're displaying a servant's attitude, kind of you're expecting them, what you're doing yourself. To not exasperate, and I think that's your question. Inconsistency exaspirates, double standards exasperate, failed promises exasperate. I mean, if you make promises, do everything in your power to keep them, or repent. That was a bad promise to make. I shouldn't have made that promise. Please forgive me of making that promise.

I can't fulfill that promise. You mentioned that you'd like to talk about corporal punishment a little bit, the challenges where we don't have time today to do that, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to have an extended conversation about that subject. It'll be available online, so if a listener wants to hear our conversation about corporal punishment, you can go to familylifetoday.com and listen to that. We've also got a section from the Art of Parenting video series on corporal punishment that I think would be helpful.

You can watch that as well. And I would just say wherever you are on that subject, whether you're including spanking as a part of what you're doing as a parent or you're not, this would be worth listening to and worth watching the video just so you can kind of rethink the subject and decide what you think is right for you. All of that's at familylifetoday.com. In addition, we've got information about your book there as well, and Sam, thank you for being here and for helping us and for getting practical with us on these issues. And let's hope there are moms and dads who've been listening who would say, I think we can make some adjustments here and it'll be better for our kids if we do. Appreciate you being here.

It's a privilege. And I appreciate your book as well. I hope our listeners will get a copy of the book.

In fact, we're making it available this week to those of you who can help with a donation to the Ministry of Family Life Today, which you can do online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy of Sam's book. We've got the President of Family Life, David Robbins, with us. And David, as we've been talking with Sam this week, I had to think this whole topic of loving correction, this has to hit home for where you and Meg are right now as you're raising your kids. We have an almost teenager all the way down to a three-year-old. And what makes it hit home even more is that I was just this past weekend with a group of guys that I've journeyed a lot of life with.

This was actually our 20th anniversary of getting together. And we were sharing, like we always do, highlights and struggles of this past year and being really honest. And all of us mentioned the climbing, boiling point frustration that we're experiencing as parents with kids. And we have great kids and we love our kids, but the loving correction where, you know, you get to that point where you're going, the things that used to work don't work and we've got to change patterns and use different tactics. It led to a discussion about how most of us as parents get lulled into using primarily two tools in our parenting toolbox when it comes to forming our kids, rewards and discipline. And they're great tools, but both of them are reactive.

They're not proactive. And there was one enormously helpful tool missing. And Bob, you mentioned it in the first episode, the foundational groundwork of training. It's loving to ensure that in every season of our kids, we're adapting to keep teaching and giving context for our reactions, that there is a proactive thing happening. And I'm so grateful for today. It's just sending me home with a renewed fervor to not just parent reactively, but to be intentional and proactive.

Well, and hopefully you're not alone. Hopefully a lot of moms and dads have that renewed sense in them. In fact, as I mentioned, we're making Sam's book available to Family Life Today listeners this week. You can help with a donation of any amount. We'd love to send you a copy of the book Parenting with Loving Correction as a thank you gift for your support of the work of Family Life Today. Our mission here is to effectively develop godly marriages and families. We believe godly marriages and families can change the world one home at a time. So if you can help with the donation, be sure to request a copy of the book Parenting with Loving Correction.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. And thanks in advance for your support of the ministry. And with that, we've got to wrap things up for this week. Thanks for joining us. Hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together with your local church one way or another this weekend. And I hope you can join us back on Monday when we're going to talk about strategies for how to connect with your grandkids. Mary LaMoya is going to join us to talk about some great grandparenting strategies. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Music