Train up your child...

Always Relationship, Not Behavior

(Excerpts from Danny Silk's "Loving Your Kids On Purpose)

Proverbs 22:6 says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” There is a way your child is to go. Do you know what it is? It is the way of freedom to be who they were destined to be. God has put a design and destiny within our children. We were all designed in God’s image for a relationship with Him.

As parents, our goal is really to introduce our children to relationship with God by doing our best to relate to them like God does. More specifically, God has entrusted us with the task of recognizing the unique qualities in our children that connect to His calling on their lives and helping them to develop those things on purpose.
We want to become apt at training our children to reach inside themselves and listen to the Holy Spirit for direction in the way they should go.

When we discipline behavior rather than addressing the motives we prevent them from getting in touch with the source of their power to walk in relationship and direct themselves toward God’s vision for their lives. It’s more than just addressing the behavior… it’s about attitude, motives, relationship.

Many parents of teens look at their kids’ wild behavior and conclude “well, they’re teenagers; they just need their freedom.” The problem is, they should have known their kids were born needing their freedom.
When you see a problem behavior don’t try to chase it down and eliminate it, know that there is a deeper problem, a heart problem. To know the heart of another person it takes time, attention, and wisdom. We need to become students of who our kids are.

We need to have a plan and an interest in the matters of their heart and how those matters are playing out in their lives (what we see in their behaviors). We are shepherding their hearts and the heart of the matter, which is always relationship, not behavior.

When we help our children practice using power from the time they are little, they become powerful people who are not afraid of the forces outside of them. They learn to draw on the power within them, the power of the Holy Spirit, to direct their lives toward their goals in life.

We need to introduce freedom to our small children and allow them to practice messing it up while they have a safety net in our home. When we create a safe place for them to fail and learn about life, they end up saying, “I want to get in your lap when I have sinned because it is the safest place I have on this earth. There is no one who has demonstrated love like you have to me”.

There is nothing that can separate us from God’s love and this should be our attitude toward our children “I will not allow anything to be more important to me than my connection to you. Your obedience, your respect level, and your success at chores will never be more important to me than my connection to you.”

Loving on purpose means that we learn to let perfect love cast out all our fear, let perfect love bring out the best in us, and make perfect love the bottom line in our homes, as it is in Heaven.