Parents, when your children sin and they are not respectful to you, how do you want to respond? If you make the matter primarily a personal offense against yourself and respond in anger and frustration, you will do what any ordinary parent might do. You might get angry at them. You might just let your children know how painful this is for you. You might yell. You might walk around in silent pain. You might tell your kids they have gone too far this time. All these responses would be ordinary and totally understandable. In this way you would associate God with the ordinary actions of ordinary people.
When you give in to anger, resentment or self-pity at your children’s bad behavior, you make yourself the center of the problem. You are loving yourself first and most. You must love your kids enough to show them the danger of their behavior. They need to see that their first problem is with God, and only secondarily with you. You must be more concerned for them than for yourself, and you must be concerned most of all for God. By modeling patience, love, self-control—and all the fruit of the Spirit—you teach your children how extraordinary God is. You must trust God and not give in to anger.
Trust must be practiced; it is not automatic. To show God as holy requires trust. Often it is not easy. That is why you must prepare for your children’s bad behavior. You must respond to sin in a way that honors God first, even when all your emotional responses are telling you to lash out or to give up. Trusting God when you are sinned against is an act of holiness. In your everyday life there will come times when your children’s sin takes you by surprise. Prepare for that day so that your talk will show your God to be a holy God. Make your everyday talk holy, not ordinary.
From Chapter 5 of Everyday Talk.
10 thoughts on “When Your Children Are Disrespectful”
How would one show their children that “They need to see that their first problem is with God,” exactly?
You do this by making conversation about the gospel part of your everyday life with your children. You do this by following what James 1 & Eph. 4 have to say about anger. You use pleasant words instead of angry words. You do this by letting children know your love for God and for them. You do this by talking about God’s mercy to you.
How would one show their children that “They need to see that their first problem is with God,” exactly?
So….please tell me how to respond!??
Please see the response to Dulce.
Thank you!!!!!
I’ve managed to say the ever helpful “I love you, and i always will. I just dont like you very much right now. What you did was not nice and not reflective of the person i know you to be.
But it’s human nature to lash out. And every time i had made that mistake i have apologized. I was never apologized to as a kid when my parents went overboard or handled something poorly. So i taught my daughter that i respect her and her feelings. That i am not a dictator. That i make mistakes. But when i do i fix them. And i always talked with her about how we both thought we could have acted differently. That helped. We came up with code words to help stop any verbal fights.
I have a teen 16 who is always speaking in a disrespectful tone. She has poor grade I take her phone away but the disrespect continues. Advice please and yes she is born again.
Shelly, there are no easy answers. I would recommend Age of Opportunity by Paul Tripp and Instructing a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp.
I have a 14 year old son who is now in high school. During his last year in middle school I had the hardest time with him being disrespectful and his grades were terrible! I kept on contact with his teachers and did everything I thought I could do. Then I read something somewhere and I remembered when I was younger, that I wanted to be recognized for all the good things I did and NOT just be recognized for all the bad things I did. Not only that I wanted some kind of respect and I hated being treated like a little kid (even though I was one). Any way I ended up trying something new, first off I prayed like crazy for God to show me how to not be so prideful and allow my son to make some decisions and come up with his own choices on how he would get his grades up. I also decided that I was not going to yell at him anymore when it came to his grades but instead show him that I understood that school can be hard and distracting. I also found a coach from school and a teacher from his school that was willing to help, without letting my son know that we were working together. They would pull him aside and tell him what a great kid he is and how smart he is and build him up and when he would come home I would do my best to put my pride aside and let him know that he is doing great in art and that he just needs to work a little harder on math (even though I wanted to just yell and let him know that if he didn’t do what I said and being his grades up he would be grounded and that I would take his phone and so on.) Things ended up changing little by little. He would come home and tell me that the coach at his school is cool and that his grade in whatever class he was doing terrible in was coming up. I was amazed, how this was working out! When I start to yell at him (cuz I still need a lot of work my self) I try to use words that would still complement him in some way like “you are a man now” and “you have your own responsibilities” and I also try to turn my self around when I find myself yelling and I say I’m sorry for yelling, basically letting him know that as an adult there are better ways of handling things than yelling. BEFORE I would tell him that he is just a little kid and that I am the parent and he needed to show some respect, which of course always made things worse. He still gets grounded from time to time but he now understands why. When we talk about him being grounded he says “I know mom I should’ve done this or that”, or “I’m sorry mom, I was just mad then he explains him self”. My son has come a long way I am Soooooo proud of him. I have four children and I will definitely try to keep my pride inside, they know I’m the parent, they know when they are failing in school, they know when they are messing around when they are not supposed to be, I will reassure them that I know that they know and I will ask them how they will handle the situation and maybe give them some suggestions (and help in the background with out letting them know so they feel they are doing it on their own) I will always follow up with an “I know you can do it, and I’m here if you need help”.
I hope this makes some kind of sense.
Well it’s time for me to head out. I hope this helps 🙂
Have a wonderfully blessed day! And always remember Jesus saves.
In Christ,
Jennifer S. 🙂