Parenting Doesn’t Work, It Woos

It's easy for us to think that when our workday is over, our work is over.

But William Smith says our new job is just beginning when we get home from work. You have to put your primary shepherding care into your family. That's the foundation from which you shepherd the rest. And why do I know this? Because I did it backwards. I was much better to an early ministry than I was to my wife at the time and had to realize, wow, I'm a peacemaker by day and a warmaker by night. That makes me a hypocrite.

And that means something has to change. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. In the long run, it's the work we do at home with our spouse and with our kids that's going to matter most to us in life. We'll talk more about that today with William Smith. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. I've been thinking today about something I heard Dennis Rainey say over and over again. Oh, this is going to be good. We all love Dennis.

Because this was one of those things I had to lock on to as a parent. And I'll share that with our listeners here in just a minute. But David Robbins, the new president of Family Life, who took over for Dennis a couple of years ago, is here with us to talk about the fact that the end of the year is coming. That's pretty important for us here at Family Life. I think a lot of people are cheering the fact that this year is almost over.

2020 has no doubt been pretty unpredictable. But there's been one thing at Family Life that's not been unpredictable, and that is your faithful partnership that keeps ministry going at this time when families need it the most. In the year ahead, it's going to be more important than ever that we are reminding the world of what God has to say about marriages and families. There's an acute need in this season to impact and develop godly homes.

And to do this, we need your help. Would you stand with us in giving families help and hope that's anchored in biblical truth? This is an especially good time of year to donate because we've had some friends of the ministry come alongside us and offer to double every donation we receive. They're going to match it dollar for dollar up to two million dollars for us to take full advantage of that matching gift. We need every listener who's benefited from this program over the course of this year to be as generous as you possibly can.

Because we want Family Life Today continuing to be aired on this station. We invite you, and really I challenge you, would you help us go into this new year in a powerful way to keep ministering to families on this station? It's easy to make a year-end contribution. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to donate, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Not only will your donation be doubled, matched dollar for dollar, but we're going to send you a couple of thank you gifts as well. A copy of my book, Love Like You Mean It, all about 1 Corinthians 13 and how that applies in a marriage relationship. And a flash drive that has more than 100 of the best Family Life Today programs from the last 28 years. Really the best of the best. So those two resources are our gift to you when you make a year-end contribution, and we hope to hear from you.

Again, donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation. Now, the thing I was telling you about that Dennis Raney shared with me so many times. He would often say that a relationship with your children is like a bridge over which you can deliver a truckload of truth. I've heard him say that. But he said when the bridge goes out, there's no truth getting across.

That's a wise statement. So if you want to interact with, if you want to be able to share truth with your kids, you've got to make sure the relationship is solid and stable and can bear the weight of the truth you're going to take. Yeah, Ann and I did a sort of a teenage parenting seminar a few years ago at our church. For parents of teens? Yeah, not teenage parents, but parents of teenagers. Just clarifying.

And by the way, sold out, right? They all want help. We're all like, oh, my goodness.

It's our desperate times. Not that we know anything about it, but our kids are now longer teens, so we can look back and say, here's what you shouldn't do. But I think the thing we started with is the key to parenting teens is relationship, relationship, relationship. If that's gone, like Dennis said, the bridge is gone and you can't transfer truth. And here's the thing. It's easy to blow up the bridge.

Because life and death are in the power of the tongue. Right. Bill Smith is joining us on Family Life today. Bill, welcome. Thanks, guys.

It's great to be here. Bill is a pastor from South Jersey, from the Philadelphia area. He is a counselor and has written a book that I think is going to help a lot of moms and dads know how to keep the bridge up. It's a book called Parenting with Words of Grace. And this is a part of the thesis of your book is that, in fact, the subtitle of the book is Building Relationships with Your Children, One Conversation at a Time. You've seen both as a parent and as a counselor how important this relational stability is for all we do, right?

I have. And relationship is the thing that everybody craves, I think. They want to build friendships with their kids, but I think we really struggle to know what that actually looks like.

So what does that look like? Great question, Dave. Thank you. That was a hard one. When I talk to people, I find people falling off on two ends of the continuum. On the one side, how do you build a relationship? You do the great event.

So you have the vacation to end all vacations or you go to this wonderful activity in the afternoon or take everybody out to dinner. And the expectation is that because we did all of this really cool stuff together that cost an awful lot of money, relationship just comes out of that. On the other end are people who are like, yeah, I don't know. It just sort of does or doesn't happen.

There's not a whole lot you can do about it. And you go back to scripture and you realize, no, relationships happen in these very mundane little moments of life. It's how you look at someone, it's whether or not you greet them, it's how you greet them, it's what you say to them. And conversation is just one of those things that throughout scripture, Genesis to Revelation, God is very interested in helping us understand what a conversation looks like that actually has a prayer of building a relationship. It's the doing chores, it's driving the kids to school, it's the dailiness of life. If we're there and we're there together, relationship is forming in those moments.

It really is. And I think it's that mundaneness that, is that harder for us as Americans than maybe some other people? I don't know.

But it doesn't feel all that exciting. Yeah. Your book is about how communication, how it's essential to building and maintaining a strong relationship. In fact, you say that every conversation between parents and children, there's an implied question in that conversation. What's that question?

If I could back up maybe even before then. So in every conversation, I'm always sharing something of me. I'm always sharing what I value and what's important to me.

I can't not do that. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. So that's just coming out of us naturally. Not even, we aren't even aware of that.

We're not. And it comes out when we say things, it comes out in what we don't say. But all of our expressions physically, whether that's verbal or otherwise, always express what's most important to us.

That's always true in a relationship. So when I'm talking to you all right now, you're getting a sense of who I am as a person. When I'm talking to my children, they get a sense of what I value. In that expression of what I value, I'm also saying, here's where your place is in that. Here's how I see you.

Image of God with eternal glory and someone to be respected and honored or chess piece on my board that I manipulate. But I'm always communicating who I am. I'm always communicating how I see you in that world. And therefore, the question that you really asked is, having experienced me this way, would you like to have another conversation with me? There's always an implied invitation.

Would you like more of me? If this is what I am and if this is what I'm like, could we consider conversation tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now? Or when you finally have enough autonomy, are you going to say, yeah, no, thanks.

Find that somewhere else. Yeah, when I read that question in your book, I thought, boy, that is the question in all relationships, really. I mean, it's like you want to say to your wife, you know, having experienced me as your husband, do you want to be married to me? And the same thing, obviously, with our kids. And they're feeling the same thing toward us. It isn't just we're communicating who we are through our words. We are receiving who they are through their words. And I know for me as a dad, often I'd be with them in the mundane, but I'm not there.

You know what I mean? I'm physically in the car driving, whatever, but my mind may be on work. I could literally be looking at my phone, not while I'm driving, but, you know, while I'm with them thinking I'm not fully present right now. And to have a relationship, you've got to be fully present, not only expressing yourself through words, but really discerning and listening to their words. But talk about that a little bit more. How do we know if the person, especially our kids, want to experience us the way we're presenting ourselves?

Is there feedback for that? That's a great question, because what's the ugly way of asking that question? The ugly way is what can I do to guarantee that my kid's going to want to come back after they go to college? And the sad answer is there is no guarantee because they're an independent, autonomous human being.

They have their own heart and they have their own, if you want to say it this way, their own issues. I think the question more is how can I create a context in which they are more likely to want to interact with me? How can I speak in such a way that says I care about you? I want to sacrifice myself for you. I don't want to browbeat you, but I also won't allow that on the other end either.

How can we have a mutual respect and interaction? I remember a time in our marriage that ends up helping me be a better parent. But this is a moment in our marriage where, early in our marriage, I think our kids were toddlers if that, where Anne came to me and shared something in the kitchen. Do you even know what I'm going to say?

I have no idea. She has no idea. It was monumental in my life. She shares something with me in the kitchen and I sort of blew up. I have no idea what it was, but I got angry. And she looks at me and she goes, you know what, I'm just not going to share things with you because that's the response.

And as she walked away, listen to this, she walks away, I go, what are you talking about? She just sort of looked back like exhibit A, you know, because I blew up even more. Long story short, and it's a long story. I had an anger problem that I identified later.

Here's how it went down. I met with the three guys I was in accountability group with two days later and I say, hey, guys, let me ask you a question. Of all the emotions you experience as a man, which one do you experience the most? And I'm not kidding, they all look to me like, what are you talking about, emotions?

Give me an example. And so I said, well, you know, like sadness or joy or happiness or anger or all of them. Oh, anger is number one. And they go, why are you asking? I said, because Anne said to me yesterday that I experienced anger and she experiences it and she's not going to bring things up because I just blow up.

I think I better. And again, I did a study of anger and I realized I had displaced. It was coming from other places. But I thought, how many times do our kids feel that? Same thing they're experiencing from us as their parent, a sense, you know, a level of anger, a level of frustration, or I don't know what it could be that they don't want to continue to be in our presence because that's what we and that's what Ann was feeling. If I hadn't attacked that. And again, it didn't go away in a day or a month.

It went through, it took years to understand where's that coming from? I always say it's like an extension cord. It's like, what's that plugged into? But as a parent, boy, oh boy, don't we need to know? Because that's going to come out in our parenting words that aren't going to be graceful, right? You've got to dig into that. I'm looking at a counselor going, oh, and you know exactly.

He's analyzing you right now. It's all good. So when your kids are little, they don't have much of a choice. You're physically larger than they are. You provide for all of their needs. They don't have the access to other emotional connections that would be satisfying.

And so in that moment, you're it. But as they continue to experience that and experience and experience and experience and experience and then they start to experience something else from someone else and they start to go, wait, not everybody's just like mom, dad, whoever. And as they mature and as they individuate and start to become able to make those decisions, they have the ability to actually physically leave your presence and emotionally differentiate.

Then they start to make those choices. And I think we lay down a lot of context. It's not just anger. That's what American men are allowed. We're allowed to be angry. We're not allowed to be sad. We're not allowed to be depressed. We're not allowed to be scared. We can be angry.

And so a lot of our emotional reservoir comes out, I think, in anger. It sounds like you're saying we need to be aware of the fact that we are either wooing or alienating our kids in how we interact with them. And part of me is going, no, wait a sec. I'm the parent. They're the kid. So I'm supposed to pander to their their desires and woo them and romance them and get them to want to come. They should just do that because I'm the parent.

So if I wanted to be nasty, then my response to that would be, well, then don't pursue them any more than Christ pursues you. Oh, that's good. Oh, I like how you just put Bob right there. No one can see that I'm smiling when I'm saying that.

But those are the questions that go right to my heart, because I often feel like that. I take care of you. I provide the home. I have sacrificed.

I've laid down. I drive an old car I don't have. I had my son ask me one time, I said, Daddy, why don't we have a truck? And I said, because we have you. I think I actually said because we have kids.

And he looked at me and goes, what? Someday you'll understand. But what you're saying, this is always in the back of your mind in having conversations with your kids, which is amazing. You start out the book going toe to toe with one of your sons. Tell us about that. Take us back there, because I'm reading this like, oh, where is this going to go? And we've been there. I think it's normal.

I think all of us are. Again, young man standing in my living room deciding he didn't really like what I was thinking or saying. How old was he? I always pick 12 or 13 when I don't know.

Early teens. Again, at that point where feeling comfortable enough to rebuke or push back would probably be the better word. And I don't like being challenged in my house. I don't like being challenged when you're wearing my clothes that I put on your back because I fed you and you now have the energy. All of those sort of, you know, I do want anger. I can match anger.

You're not taller than I am yet. But in that moment, the Holy Spirit is so helpful. And the thoughts don't come because I'm smart or anything. There's that little sense of be very careful with what you say next, because you are at a point in this conversation where that will have bigger impact for longer than just the next half hour. Yeah.

And those might be words you literally regret for decades. Yes. When I hear that, I think, oh, it's abiding in the Spirit. It's one of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control.

And sometimes we're in a point where we do lose our self-control. Oh, yeah. I'm looking at her. I remember one day she walked in our family room. Oh, this is classic. Oh, no. You're going to tell her story.

Oh, she'll tell plenty of mine. Remember this, though? I don't know what the boys were doing. And it got sort of heated a little bit. And she comes running and she goes, you want to go? You want to go right now? You and me, right here, right now.

I mean, I'm looking at her. No, no. This is, you're taking the saddest content. Okay. Now we're going to hear the truth.

They were, I can't even remember what was happening, but they were getting very disrespectful in their tone and what they were saying. I should have been saying, do you want to go? But I didn't mean, do you want to fight? I just meant, let's go there. Let's go.

You want to go? I'll go there verbally. That's the first time I've ever heard that's what she meant. I would never do that.

I know you would. We've never, we're physical. No, no. But we were emotional.

Thanks for bringing that up, Dave. I cut you off, honey. I don't even remember now.

What were you going to share? But you know, the point you're illustrating here is that words do have power. Yeah. And I don't know if your boys remember that moment, but I know that all of us can think back to things a mom or a dad said to us when we were kids that never went away, that are still there. We can think back to things we've said that have left such an indelible impression in the hearts of our kids. The old adage, sticks and stones will break my bones, words will never hurt me.

Yeah. What a lie. Words break. Words destroy.

This is where we've got to be walking in the Spirit. We've got to be conscious of the power of our words and be very careful of the idle word that can do so much damage. So I was asked a question a couple of years back. What do you wish you had known about parenting before you got started? What are the things that are really significant?

It was one of those questions that makes you go, I need to think about that. I walked away and thought for a while, I wish I knew how important those small moments were. I wish I had been smart enough to understand earlier how much you can hurt, how much you can help in those small moments. Again, I probably fell off on that side of the big event kind of a person. No, those small moments are really where relationship is built and it flourishes or it dies.

That would be one. The opposite side of that is I wish I had someone help me understand the grace of God and the resurrection of Christ means there's countless numbers of times to try again. And countless numbers of times to come back to your children and say, I am so sorry, please forgive me. To speak to the Father and to say, I cannot live in regret.

What I did, I did. What is past is past and now we're going to have to wrestle with the fallout. But that doesn't mean it's hopeless.

There's still hope. You rose from the dead, therefore nothing has to remain the same. I wish I knew those two things, how important those small moments are and how powerful the gospel really is. What would you have done different in those small moments? Probably wouldn't have had to wait until my son was 12 or 13 to realize how important that conversation could be. Or I think about a different child of ours.

I completely misunderstood, misread this person. What was very helpful for one of their siblings was that their sibling needed me to be big. The world is scary, dad needs to be big, dad's got this. The same bigness for this other child was terrifying. And I didn't figure this out for like four years. And then I was like, oh man, now my child is scared, terrified of me.

What am I going to do? And that was a, okay, one step at a time, dug the hole for four years. By God's grace, we have the opportunity now to make a different path.

And it took another six years. Is that what you mean by saying parenting doesn't work at woos? Because Bob used that term earlier and I thought, boy, that came right out of your book.

I'd never heard it said like that. Explain that. Yeah, that goes back to a lady at a seminar who said, okay, I get that I've not been gracious, but if I was more gracious at home, then my parenting would work better.

And I thought, you're looking for a guarantee. You're looking for, if I do A plus B, then I always get C. That's not the way a human being works. You can offer people the opportunity of a relationship. You can't force them to take it. You don't have the key to someone else's heart. You can help them see that it would be attractive, that it would be beneficial, that it'd be good for them. You have to pursue them. But in that pursuit, you're wooing them. You're saying this is actually a better world for you. Why don't you try it? It's an invitation rather than a, I will force you to have this.

Yeah, and I've found that I'm a better wooer outside my home than in my home. Why is that? Here we go. I'm not even looking over there.

She's just looking at me. I mean, we've talked about this many times. Like, wow, you walk in the church, you walk out and you light it up and you can be very warm and inviting to people. You walk in our home and you can shut down and not woo your own children.

I think a lot of wives can feel that about their husbands as dads. And again, not knowing you and you don't really know me, but I think pastors, we have that public place where it's sort of the job. And this is now going to be a counseling session.

I get the opportunity to mentor a bunch of young guys. And I've taken them back to 1 Timothy 3, which lays out the qualifications for an elder. And we've looked and said, most of these are how you relate to your family. You have to put your primary shepherding care into your family. That's the foundation from which you shepherd the rest.

And why do I know this? Because I did it backwards. I was much better to an early ministry than I was to my wife at the time and had to realize, wow, I'm a peacemaker by day and a warmaker by night.

Wow. That makes me a hypocrite. And that means something has to change. So ministry doesn't end at six o'clock.

It starts. I remember talking to a well-known author and speaker, national speaker one time, and he said, I will sometimes shock people when I say, I want you to know ministry is number one with me. It's the top priority. And they all kind of look at me like, don't you know that's the wrong answer? Like you're saying something heretical. And then he said, I will pause and I will say, and my number one ministry is to my wife and to my kids. Yes. And all of a sudden it was kind of like, okay, that makes sense. These are not two separate things. We are called to ministry and our first ministry has got to be happening inside the home. In fact, as you said, if it's one thing out there and something else in here, we're not seeing the real thing.

It's hypocrisy. Well, one of the things that you said, Bill, was you said that parents should start by considering at their most basic who their children are. So who are they? You've talked about that a little bit and how do we discover who they are? This is one of those, again, strange places where they come from our bodies generally, or we adopt them into our homes. We provide everything for them. We think they're ours and they're not. And that's always startling to people when I say it that way and I do that for the shock value. They're gods, first and foremost.

They're on loan to us. And if you start to think about who they are supposed to become, okay, so maybe they're what, 25, 30, 35 years behind us. That seems really significant if you're 50. But if you actually believe your faith that you're not going to live 70, 80, 90 years, you're going to live 50,000 years. A 35-year head start is really nothing 50,000 years from now. These are young people who are growing up to be your peers. In fact, you all have kids. You see places where they've surpassed you already.

It didn't even take 50,000 years. And so what are you doing? You have the privilege of interacting with people, offering them the opportunity to have a friendship with you if they so desire. They're potential future peers. And when I think of them that way, that changes the way that I actually interact with my kids.

There are two things about that and I agree with you. One is we desperately want a relationship with them because parental love by God's design is so compelling and so powerful that it's one thing to say, you know, if you'd like to have a relationship with me, we'd be open to that. No, we're like, we want to be with you. Our hearts are knitted together.

So you make it sound kind of calculating. The other thing is I think there's part of us saying, and if we don't have that relationship, I lose some validation. Part of who I am is diminished. I need you to want to have that relationship with me or else I've failed. I'm not who I'm supposed to be.

Just talk about what's going on in us when we hold out this invitation, desperate for them to say, of course, I want to be with you. There is a depth of passion in our God to be with us. You have these pictures of him almost pulling his hair out in the minor prophets that I absolutely love.

You know, Israel, I can't stand that you've been doing this. I'm sending you away. Oh, my heart turns within me and I have to have you get this picture of someone yanking on his hair. There is that longing and desire in us that does not begin to approach his longing and desire. So think, okay, within bounds, we should feel that passion. But it's passion to have a relationship that's not a codependent relationship where I need you to like me so that I am a valid person. You never have the sense that God's going to be eternally unhappy because somebody has rejected him and we will now have the ability to ruin his eternal future.

He is in himself complete and satisfied. It's not dependent on your response. He says, I am passionate for this.

If you reject it, I will be sad, but I won't be less than. I will not be ruined and destroyed. There is something within the power of the community and the Trinity that is fully independent. Yeah, that's good. And we don't make our kids our idols, which it can be easy to do that, as I'm just saying, especially for a mom, that we can find our life source through them and then we're dissatisfied and we're let down. And so I think making sure God is King and the Lord. You even say parenting, therefore, means I invest in these fellow human beings, but I am not wrapping my world around them, nor am I trying to get them to wrap theirs around me. That's good. And really hard in a fallen world, right?

Yes. And I would just add, I mean, we started here a few minutes ago, the value of the relationship. I underestimated when I was a young dad, now an older dad with adult children who are married with grandkids, I underestimated how much I would appreciate and value our relationship as men to men, adult to adult. And so I would say to the young parent listening, man, parent with words of grace, because you're building a relationship that's going to be one of the most special things in your life 20 years from now. You know, that I can look at my sons and we don't have this perfect relationship, but they're my friends and they challenge me man to man and I can challenge them. It's beautiful and that could have been lost if you made big mistakes in the forming years.

And so I just say, boy, cherish it. You know, the book titles, one conversation at a time, man, every conversation is significant. The mundane ones, the big ones, they are building a relationship that you're going to cherish the whole rest of your life. And I would add this, Dave, I think the best conversation too that we can have is our relationship with our Heavenly Father, because that's where it starts. When we understand his love for us, our role, how much he loves our kids, how he carries our burdens, how he's there with us and for us and for our kids, that's that first conversation. For me, that starts at the beginning of the day of saying, Father, I need you and please help me in being able to love my kids and see them and say the things that you would say and see.

What is the model? There is not a single one of us around this table that had a perfect upbringing. Again, we don't know all each other's stories, but I know that. And so how do we have a prayer of entering into our children's worlds? It's not because we were perfectly parented by human beings. It's that we have a perfect Heavenly Father who actively parents us right now nudging us.

It's that pulling me up short in the living room. We have a prayer because we have prayer. We have a prayer because we have a relationship with God. And as you said, Anne, through us can flow to them his love.

We experience it and then it flows out to others. And we can learn how to do it better by reading books like the one you've written, Parenting with Words of Grace. We've got copies of William Smith's book available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order the book online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy of William Smith's book.

Again, it's called Parenting with Words of Grace. Order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy. And if you have not gotten together with other parents yet and gone through the Art of Parenting video series, think about the new year starting in January or February, getting together virtually or distanced.

If we still need to be distancing, probably will. Think about getting together in some way with other parents and going through the Art of Parenting. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to find out how to get this eight-session video series that's all about parenting. Find it online at familylifetoday.com. Now, as some of you heard David Robbins say at the beginning of today's program, we're hoping to hear from Family Life Today listeners over the next few weeks.

This is a critical time for us as a ministry. We're trying to take full advantage of a $2 million matching gift that's been made available to us. Your donations today will be matched dollar for dollar when you give, and we're going to send you as a thank you gift a copy of my book, Love Like You Mean It, all about what the Bible has to say in 1 Corinthians 13 about building a stronger, healthier marriage relationship. And we'll send you a thumb drive, a flash drive that has more than 100 Family Life Today programs from the past 28 years, the best of the best with Dennis and Barbara Rainey, David Ann Wilson, guests talking about parenting, about marriage.

The book and the thumb drive are our thank you gift when you make a donation today, and you can do that at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. We appreciate you, and we hope to hear from you. Now, tomorrow we want to talk about how important it is for us to make sure we are communicating the biblical why behind our correction with our kids.

They need to understand not only that they're doing it wrong, but why God's way is the right way. We'll talk about that with William Smith tomorrow. Hope you can be with us 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 next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.