PART THREE OF THREE
Don’t automatically defend them and take their side.
Again, we’re not talking about an issue of physical protection. Physically, we as a society are falling tragically short in this area. We let go of children far too early, often just because they begin to look like young adults and they grow taller than their parents.
My personal story again involved one of my own. There was a “particular opportunity,” I’ll call it, where I felt my child should have been chosen. (Short background: My child had the goods.) My child was not chosen. The person whose child was chosen was best buds and in tight professional relationship with the person doing the choosing. (This child had the goods, too.) Didn’t seem fair, and the whiff of favoritism still hangs about the memory of it all.
I was pretty ticked. And I was tempted, so tempted, to be angry, and to try and assuage my child’s disappointment (and my own) by coating it with resentment and offense. “That was so clearly an act of favoritism!” “My child is losing a primo opportunity here that he/she won’t get back!” When I went to bed that night, I had a temptation facing me as strong as any other sin of the flesh: I wanted to lock down on my anger and resentment, and form a protective “bubble of offense” that would block the pain. Only one problem: I would have to put a wedge between me and the people who did the choosing. And the real power broker of the two was someone I knew fairly well, and really liked. For many good reasons, I didn’t want to compromise that. I would also have had to sacrifice any integrity I might have had in teaching on the subject of offenses.
So I wrestled, pretty much all night. And when I got up the next morning, the fight was over, the pain was lessened, and I knew that I was going to survive intact. I knew the disappointment would eventually dissipate, and I’d have no offense clogging my heart and mind. It was quite the fight, but well worth it. If I hadn’t fought, I would have lost a battle to bitterness and resentment that would have done two terrible things: It would have put a small but real distance between my friend and me that would have changed the relationship forever. This person may never have noticed it, but my every thought of the person and our every face-to-face meeting would have included that negative feeling and attitude.
The other terrible thing it would have done is to instruct my child—even if only by example—that a legitimate way of handling disappointment is to get angry and stay angry, even if the anger eventually simmered down to a judgment, a bad attitude or “some distance” between me and the “offender.” The bottom line is that the people making the decision had the right to make the decision they wanted, and I had to respect that. I had to side with them, not against my child, but against my child’s temptation to fall into self-pity, or to be angry, or to form a judgment against people who had the authority to do what they did. I first had to side with their authority to make the decision, and then had to side with my child against the enemies of anger, resentment, disappointment and bitterness. Once I took that position, I could then share the weight and sting of my child’s disappointment, and I could lead my child to the process of giving that disappointment to the Lord. If I had taken my child’s disappointment as a personal offense in some sort of misguided application of advocating for my kid, it would only have produced bad fruit for everyone involved.
Over the years, I’ve often heard a variation on this theme: “If I don’t advocate for my child, who will?” Now if by advocate you mean cheer, pray for, support, encourage, help them through the difficult times of life, and be a happy, proud parent, then advocate away! But if by advocate you mean to take their side against every authority that brings disappointment to them, then stop! No authority is going to be perfect, but take another look at Romans 13:1 and remind yourself that the Lord uses authority, and that taking the side of your child against authority is just about the worst thing you can do.
How familiar are you with these statements, or their many variations?
- “It’s not fair, because…..”
- “The teacher/principal/coach/leader doesn’t like me.”
- “He/she likes so-and-so better than me.”
Agreeing with your child in any of these opinions locks them into a self-centered entitlement mode of thinking that we all hate seeing in people we’re not related to. We certainly don’t want to create little monsters that grow up to be big ones. There are going to be deep disappointments in everyone’s life, deserving people will be overlooked, and we won’t always get what we want. What we need to do is equip our children to deal with those disappointments in a healthy way that involves neither stuffing our feelings nor adopting self-pity as a cover for the pain.
In the book The Kingdom of Self by Earl Jabay, the author sets up a hypothetical scenario where little “Johnny” has been caught cheating and a note goes home to his mother. Instead of admitting to it, Johnny instinctively and brilliantly tries to deflect attention away from himself by attacking the other authority in the picture, the teacher. By setting one authority figure (Mom) against the other (the teacher), Johnny succeeds in slipping through the crack he worked to create between the two authority figures.
Jabay describes the “success” and its terrible ramifications:
The king [Johnny] won that battle effortlessly by simply turning one authority against the other and then taking the more egocentric of the two as his ally. The parent in this illustration is simply attending to his own needs to keep, even at Johnny’s expense, the affection of this child. “For, after all,” reasons the parent, “doesn’t a child need support and understanding?”
Not that kind. What Johnny really needed was a parent who would ally himself with the teacher for the sake of the child. This would mean conferring with he teacher. It would mean ascertaining the facts about Johnny’s cheating and if he did, punishing him. It would mean telling John that it is not his task to judge the qualifications of his teacher. It would mean encouraging Johnny to find some way in which he could put forth a new effort in spelling. It means letting King Johnny know that he cannot divide and conquer his authorities….”1
The presence of respected authorities besides blood relations is necessary to the healthy growth of a child. Every child needs to know that there are authorities that the parents respect—in word and in heart. Children also need to know that when one of those authorities gets drawn into their little life, that Mom and Dad are first going to work things through with those authorities—teachers, law enforcements officers of every kind, spiritual leaders–and then deal with their children. It always simultaneously amazes and saddens me when parents spend years coming between their children and the authority resting in folks outside the family, and then wonder why their children don’t respect authority (especially theirs) when they reach double digits in age.
Your child’s disappointment should be important to you, and your child should know that you understand how hard the situation is for them, and that you understand that they are hurting. It’s where you go from that point that will make all the difference. Kids are struggling to make some kind of sense of things when get into situations like this. They are inviting you into the land of All About Me, and you can’t go there. Putting blame on the authority temporarily dulls the pain, but what it ultimately does is evade the child’s ultimate responsibility to release the pain, receive God’s grace and consolation, and MOVE PAST the hurt and disappointment. Since this is something we all have to learn eventually, it’s better to learn this when you’re young, with parental assistance, than when you’re 37, when it’s a lot harder and you’ve firmly established your touchiness.
The Fairness Doctrine
This is a good time to eradicate a word from your family’s vocabulary—or at least the most common usage of it. The word is fair, and the way we most often use it is found nowhere in the Bible. In the scriptures, fair means good-looking. So if you don’t mean good-looking, it’s best to give the word a well-deserved rest.
Life isn’t fair, which is great. If things were completely fair, Jesus would never have had to bear the punishment for my sins, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to suffer at all, and we would all be on our way to hell. So I’m grateful that life isn’t fair. I’m sad that it is as sin-filled as it is, and among those sins are greed, partiality, lust, envy, and malicious speech. They are all part of this world, and will be until He comes again. The best thing we can do for our children in this area is to teach them to release their responses to these sins to the Lord, and receive back from Him the comfort He longs to give us all.
Life isn’t fair, but the defense against the pain of this truth is not to form a shell of cynicism. That’s merely a sophisticated form of pouting. As humans, we have an innate sense of justice, and that has to be reckoned with, rightly, and the earlier the better. As parents, we need to introduce our children to the God of comfort, who is also the God of forgiveness, the God of grace, and the God whose love for us is uninterrupted by circumstance. Learning to invite the Lord and His marvelous attributes into the pains and disappointments of life is the only way of actually working through them; otherwise, we are consigned to continually working around the disillusionments of life (making fear our master) or encasing our hearts in distrust and negativity (cutting ourselves off relationally from God and man). Our only survival strategy should be a Person, not a method nor a suit of armor. Our children need to see that in you as a parent, and they need to be taught that they really can survive disappointment without damage to their relationships or their own heart.
Raising kids isn’t for sissies, and kids don’t raise themselves. They come programmed with a personality, but they need training as a rose needs sun and water. I used to joke with my children when they were less than satisfied with being my offspring, that I was divinely chosen to be their parent. I was, at least in part, trying to be funny.
You are divinely chosen to be the godly parent of your offspring. Children need love and support, but they desperately need training. They especially need training in truth and grace, which is the most difficult training of all. You will need to die to yourself 100 times over to do it right. It is a heart-wrenching, gut-ripping, galling, and infuriating experience at times, but always, always worth the pain. Your children need and deserve it, the Kingdom of God deserves nothing less, and –bottom line—it is your inescapable calling as a parent.
1 Jabay, Earl. The Kingdom of Self. Plainfield, NY: Logos International, 1974. 15.
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