4 Inability
Principle: Recognizing what you are unable to do is essential to good parenting.
It was a public scene. If you were near, it was impossible not to stop whatever you were doing and look and listen. And for me it was impossible not to wonder how many times that same scene was repeated by parents that same day, who meant well, but who had lost their way. I know the belief that was behind what that mother did in the mall that day. I know that belief because in my earlier parenting days I bought into it too. In her heart of hearts that mom felt she was being a good and faithful parent, that she was doing exactly what a parent should do in that situation. And I don’t doubt her motives, but what she did was propelled by something that many parents believe, but that is dead wrong.
Unaware of those of us around her, she hurled accusations and threats at her little boy. Her face was stern and her voice was loud, and she just knew that talk would change that little boy. She knew that what he did, he would never be so bold as to do again. She was letting him have it, and she believed that letting him have it would change him. He quietly cried as she was so up in his face that I’m sure he could not only hear her words, but feel her breath. Yes, he would remember his mom’s anger, but I’m not so sure that anger would do what was intended. She grabbed his hand and walked away, still making her point as he dragged on behind her.
Do I think that that mom loved her little boy? Yes, I think she probably did. But the way she parented him was shaped by buying into something that just won’t ever work.
You may be wondering what the title for this section of this chapter has to do with the story you just read. That mother was in her son’s face with threatening anger because she assigned to herself power that she doesn’t have. I’ve bought into this delusion. I’ve heard parents verbalize it. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get my children to believe.” “I will discipline the hell out of my children.” “It’s my job to ensure that they do what is right.” “If I do nothing else, I will send children out into the world who are prepared to live right.” “After I’m done with him, he’ll never even think of doing that again.” The assessment in these statements that children need to change is right. The deep desire for that change which motivates a parent is right. The commitment to work for that change is right. Then what is wrong with each of these statements? Each of them assumes power on the part of parents that no parent has, and that assumption creates all kinds of parenting trouble.
If you are going to be what God has designed you to be as a parent and do what he’s called you to do, you must confess one essential thing. This confession has the power to change much about the way you act and react toward your children. It is vital that you believe and admit that you have no power whatsoever to change your child. Now think again from the perspective of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the central theme of the book that is our most reliable parenting guide. If any human being possessed the power to create lasting change in any other human being, again, Jesus would not have had to come! The incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus stand as clear historical evidence that human power for change does not exist. The reason God went to such an extreme and elaborate extent in controlling the events of history so that at just the right time his Son would come and do for us what we could not do ourselves, is because there was no other way.
Parenting is not about exercising power for change in your children. Parenting is about your humble faithfulness in being willing to participate in God’s work of change for the sake of your children. Parents, here’s what you need to understand: God has given you authority for the work of change, but has not granted you the power to make that change happen. But we buy into the delusion of thinking again and again that that power is ours. We think that if we speak just a little bit louder, or stand a little bit closer, or make the threat a little bit scarier, or the punishment a little more severe, then our children will change. And because the change doesn’t happen, we tend to bring it on even stronger.
Oh, sure, you can scare or reward your children into temporary change. You can temporarily buy them off or scare them off. You can exercise temporary control over a child’s behavior, but what needs to change in order for that change to last and bear fruit is something inside the child. Let me say it this way: the behavior of your children is symptomatic of what is going on inside your children. Inside change always precedes lasting outside change. In parenting, what you are dealing with is way deeper than the need for behavioral change. What you’re always dealing with is the need for heart change, and we simply have no power at all to change another person’s heart. (If you want to know more about that, there is a chapter coming dedicated to that discussion.)
Now here’s the point: if as a parent you think that you have power that you don’t have, you will do things that you should not do and you will fail to do things that are vital to do. When you think your job is to change your child and you’ve been given the power to do it, your parenting will tend to be demanding, aggressive, threatening, and focused on rules and punishments. In this kind of parenting you are working to make your children into something rather than working to help them to see something and seek something. In this form of parenting, it is all about you and your children, rather than you being an agent of what only God can do in your children. Your hope is that you will exercise the right power, at the right time, and in the right way so change in your children will result. That process is profoundly different than working to be a useful tool in the hands of a God of glorious transforming grace, who alone is your hope and the hope of your children.
Here’s the bottom line for every parent: the change that has to happen in each of your children, you can’t create. In fact, nowhere in his Word has God tasked you with the responsibility to create it. Good parenting is about becoming okay with the fact that you are powerless to change your child. In fact, good parenting is about celebrating the fact that God has never and will never put the burden of change on you. Because changing your children is a burden that we could never bear, God bore that burden for us by sending his Son to be the author of lasting personal change. The burden that caused his death liberates us parents and gives new life to our children. Now that’s good news! So our job is simple; it’s not to create change, but to be humble and willing instruments of change in the hands of the one and only author of change.
This means that you and I have to be willing to let go of those old, human-power parenting habits. We have to stop with the loud voices, the escalating threats, the subtle name calling, words of condemnation, ever-worsening punishments, telling our children how much more righteous we are than they, the silent treatment, and withholding affection when they’ve upset us. Don’t get me wrong here. Your children do need you to exercise authority, but not as the creator of change. They need you to exercise authority as the representative of the author of all lasting change. This means that you quit trying to exercise whatever power is available to you to get your children to change and begin to think as a representative. Representing the God who gives us grace for change means looking for daily opportunities to communicate that grace, helping our children to see how they need that grace, and modeling that grace in the way that we speak and act toward our children.
Now in case you’re wondering, I’m not talking about forsaking your authority as a parent. I’m not talking about letting your children do whatever they want to do. I’m not talking about parenting that has no correction or discipline. I’m not talking about ignoring the wrong things that your children do or ever calling wrong right. What I’m talking about is the exercise of parenting authority that submits to the essential power of transforming grace. This kind of authority abandons hope in human power and gladly places its hope in the awesome power of God. His power alone is the hope of every parent and every child whether they know it or not. You don’t get up every morning and shoulder again the burden of your children’s change; rather, you get up and surrender everything that you will do and say that day to the God of change who has sent you to be his representative.
Power Tools
Let me point you to the three most often used tools of parental power than we tend to use to create change in our children.
The power that we buy into here is that we can issue a big enough threat that creates a big enough fear to change our kids. So every day with our children is marked by threats like this: “You do not want to know what’s going to happen if I have come up these steps one more time. I will be on the news! ‘Father disciplines his children, pictures and details on the news at ten o’clock.’” Or like this: “You clean up your room and fast or I’ll empty it of everything but a mattress and a pillow. Then you can sleep on the floor and think about how sloppy you are and about all the things that you used to have that have been taken away.” And like this: “You do that again and you’ll be grounded for months. I’ll ground you so long, you’ll forget what the outside looks like!”
Why do we use threats? Because they’re temporarily effective. Think about it: when you’re a full-grown adult and your child is half your size, you are a threatening presence. Your bulging eyes, red face, pointed finger, and loud voice are threatening. You can do things that will make your child afraid to cross you, but a distinction needs to be made here. Having a child that has enough experience of what happens when you get angry, to make him afraid to cross you, is profoundly different from having a child who is motivated by an internal desire to do what is right and a knowledge that he needs God’s help in order to do it.
The first child has not changed at all; he’s simply trying to avoid your threats. If you would remove the threats or if he would discover how to disobey without you knowing it, he would go right back to the behaviors you have prohibited. Your threats haven’t stimulated internal change; rather, your threats are a system of external control. Remember that you represent the ultimate Father, who is not satisfied with using his power to just control us. He exercised his rule by sending his Son to radically rescue and transform us. Yes, he does put holy threats before us, but it is dramatically clear in Scripture that if all we needed were a list of divine threats, again, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus would not have been necessary.
I need to make another observation about the power of threats. I’ve experienced what I’m about to say, and I’ve talked to many parents who have experienced it as well. There comes a time in the life of all children when they are no longer threatened by their parents. If you’ve depended on threats to control your kids, the moment that I’m now talking about is both scary and depressing, because the tool that you’ve used for years suddenly doesn’t work. I have four children. I’m about 5'10", and my shortest child is my daughter and she’s about 6'1". She has three taller brothers. I ended my parenting days, when our children were still in our home, by looking up to talk to my kids. If your children are physically taller than you and way less dependent on you than they once were, you are no longer a threatening presence. Once your kids begin to be your intellectual and physical peers, they stop being threatened by you.
Threat without grace is a tool of external control that will fail to change your son or daughter in the foundational way that every child needs to be changed.
This may be the most popular way we fight our inability to change our children. We manipulate them to do what we want them to do by holding certain rewards in front of them. This strategy should not be confused with God’s righteous work of motivating our obedience by the promise of spiritual reward. Instead, we find something that our child really wants, and we hold it out and say, “If you do ______ I will give you _______.”
Josh is eleven years old and is not getting along very well with his seven-year-old sister, Mary. Mary is often left crying after one of her encounters with her older brother. Josh’s parents have become increasingly frustrated and discouraged because this has become a daily occurrence. So Josh’s dad comes to him and says, “Josh, you know that little drone that you’ve been looking at on the Internet? Well, the drone can be yours. All you have to do is get along with Mary for one month, just four short weeks, and that drone will be yours.”
Josh then has the most loving, altruistic, patient, and kind four weeks he has ever had with Mary. Josh’s mom and dad are amazed that for a whole month Mary hasn’t cried once. They are basking in their parental wisdom and success. So Josh’s dad orders the drone and even pays for a rush delivery. The drone arrives, and Josh and his dad assemble it together. They give it a little test drive in the backyard and fifteen minutes later, they hear Mary crying as Josh is chasing her around the back yard with his little drone.
Now think with me about what has happened here. The promise and purchase of the drone were Josh’s parents’ attempt to produce something that they have no ability to produce. What looked like a stunning success was a massive failure. You see, Josh wasn’t nice to his sister for those four weeks because he had come to the point where he saw how wrong his mistreatment of her was, confessed it to God and his sister, and prayed for help to be more loving toward her. Not at all! There was no recognition of wrong and desire for change at all inside Josh. He hadn’t begun to feel a new compassion and love for Mary. In fact, the only reason Josh was nice to Mary for four weeks is because Josh loves Josh! This self-love was the same reason he mistreated her in the first place. Now, not only has the self-love, which caused Josh to do what was fun for him but hurtful to his sister, remained, but it’s been rewarded. And what Josh does with the new drone proves that there has been no change in him at all. This will sound harsh, but it needs to be said: Josh’s parents’ strategy is neither Christian nor parenting because they are not functioning as ambassadors of what God wants to do in Josh’s life and because they are not accepting their inability. They are not functioning as tools of change in God’s hands.
But there is more. Although I’m sure Josh’s parents are not consciously intending to do this, they are teaching Josh a skill they probably don’t want him to have. It’s the skill of moral economics. As the parental rewards are waved before him, Josh will do a cost/benefit analysis. He will ask himself, “Is the reward they are offering me a big enough payment for the behavior they want from me?” Josh will learn to negotiate with his parents and up the ante. If a child is negotiating reward with his parents, he has no moral guilt and desire to do what is right inside him. He is just after what he wants, and if a little temporary obedience is the price he has to pay, he’s willing.
Change is about learning what is right, acknowledging that it is right, confessing that you have been wrong, committing to a new way of living, and seeking the help you need to do it. None of these things have happened inside Josh, because his parents sadly succumbed to the temptation to opt for control rather than to give themselves to the hard, exhausting, and often discouraging work of being tools of change in the hands of the only One who can produce it. It is tempting for every parent, on any given day, in one of those hard moments to see momentary control as better than long-term change and to reach for whatever tool is at your fingertips to get your kid to do what you want him to do.
Like fear, this tool will produce what you’re looking for only for a while. When your child is young, there are many small and inexpensive things that she might want which would grant you momentary control. But as she matures, the cost for what would produce what you want from her goes up, until there is nothing that you can afford that might motivate her to do what you want. It’s at this point that many grieved parents say, “What has happened to my child?” The answer is, nothing has happened to your child; this is who she has always been. You have just masked what was really going on inside her with an endless series of rewards.
Shame and guilt are power tools that parents use more frequently than we recognize. “I can’t believe that you would even think of doing such a thing!” “When I was your age, I would have never thought of doing that!” “In all my parenting days, I never thought that I’d have to deal with such a thing!” “After all I’ve done for you, and this is the way you’re going to treat me.” “I sometimes wonder where in the world you came from.” “You have no idea what you’ve put us through.” None of these statements are about wooing and winning your child for what is right. None of these statements are meant to help them assess their hearts, confess their wrongs, and reach out for help. These statements are about parents reaching for a power tool: guilt. Whether it’s intentional or not, saying these things is an attempt to shame our children into what is right.
Making your child feel horizontal guilt (this guilt is about you) is very different from giving your child insight into his heart that causes him to feel vertical guilt (this is guilt with respect to God) and the desire to change. For example, a mother says to her children, who are driving her and her husband crazy, “I remember when you father was a happy man. It was before we had children. Now, he is so distressed by the things you do that he can barely concentrate at work. Yesterday he called home eighteen times because he was so concerned and distracted, and if he can’t concentrate at work, then he could lose his job, and if he loses his job, then what will happen to us? Look at him walking up the driveway. You can see how much he dreads opening the door and hearing about the horrible things you’ve done to one another all day!” I’ve set this up humorously, but you get the point.
In these moments as parents we are not working to help our children see what they need to see so that they would become dissatisfied with who they are and reach out for our help and the Lord’s. In these moments, we are denying our powerlessness and reaching for whatever tool is at our disposal that will help us to control our kids. Guilt and shame are very powerful tools, because it’s natural for our children to want us to accept and appreciate them. It’s natural for them to want us to be pleased and proud of them. Every child ever born wants to be loved. So guilt and shame are temporarily effective tools of parental control.
Notice that I said “temporarily effective.” Like all tools of parental control, guilt and shame have a short-term positive harvest and a long-term negative legacy. At some point every child quits being moved by guilt and begins to get tired of being put down. At some point children begin to understand the dynamics of their relationship with you. At some point, even though they cannot verbalize it, children begin to understand the difference between control and patient love. They begin to see the difference between you using old tools to get them to do something and you lovingly being God’s tool to help them be something. At some point they begin to distance themselves from you in order to protect themselves from the guilt and shame that often seems to come when you are near.
The lack of communication, closeness, and affection that exists between parents and their older children is often the sad legacy of the ways we tried to control our kids. Our heavenly Father is never content with just controlling us. Control is no problem for him; he’s sovereign after all. But in grace he wanted more for us. So he devised a plan that would result in our forgiveness and complete transformation. In Jesus he made a way for us to see our sin, to confess it, to be granted complete forgiveness, and to be blessed with both the desire and the power to change. He is the Redeemer, and so he is unwilling to settle for anything less than radical personal heart and life change. It is important to understand two things:
1. This is the work that he has called us to as parents, and we cannot settle for anything less.
2. We have no ability to do this work on our own, and recognizing our inability is essential to being what we are supposed to be and doing what we are supposed to do as parents.
Here’s the good news: we can admit our powerlessness as parents and not live in constant panic and frustration. We can embrace our inability and not worry our way through our parenting years. Why? Because as parents we serve a gloriously loving and powerful Redeemer. He loves our children infinitely more than we do and as evidence of that love, he has placed them in a family of faith where the story of his love will be heard again and again. He has power beyond our ability to understand. The same mind-boggling power he exercised to raise Jesus from the dead, he now unleashes to give sight, conviction, power, and desire to our desperately needy children. In grace he will never turn his back on your cries as a parent and on your children’s cries as they reach out for him. He delights in love. He delights in reconciliation. He delights in repentance and change. He delights in showering his power down on his children to do for them what is his will, but what they cannot do for themselves.
Good parenting lives at the intersection of a humble admission of personal powerlessness and a confident rest in the power and grace of God. The questions for you right here, right now are: Do you have that rest? Is your parenting driven by worry that causes you to do and say things that you shouldn’t do or say? Do you find yourself being willing to settle for control, rather than giving yourself to the hard process of change? Are you working to get your children to do what you want them to do rather than helping them to be what God wants them to be? Do you parent with a powerful and loving Redeemer in view?
God is with you. He wants what is best for you and your children, and no one but he has the power to produce it. He has not placed the burden of change on your shoulders because he would not require you to do what you cannot do. God has simply called you as a parent to be a humble and faithful tool of change in the lives of your children. And for that there is moment by moment by moment grace.