How often do you get annoyed at your kids ‘getting in the way of what you’re trying to do (whether that be on a small-scale like, trying to clean while they’re running around, or on a larger scale like them being the reason you “had to put a pause on your career”?)
Or how much of your week is spent craving time away from your kids, seeking an escape, and counting down the seconds until bedtime? And have you found yourself yelling at them more frequently than you really need to?
I want to remind you that your children are a gift, not a burden. In both the small scale, and large scale.
Think about this: what is the purpose of a parent? At its simplest verbiage? It’s to raise children, educate them, train them to be responsible and caring adults, and guide them into becoming the wives and husbands of the future.
What could be more important than that? What is of more priority, that raising them is ‘getting in the way of’? What job or task trumps that duty? Where does yelling fit into raising them? (We’ll focus more on the yelling in a future post).
It’s easy to think of parenting and raising children as something you do occasionally, or ‘when they get older, I’ll teach them that’. It’s easy to want to prioritize your own wants and needs over your children’s needs. It’s easy to want to have a break all the time.
But parenting isn’t easy, is it? So why do we always seek the easy route? It always feels good short-term, but we always pay for it long-term.
Raising children is something you do daily. We train them up on a day-by-day basis. We teach them daily what it looks like to be responsible and caring.
Our daily actions are ingraining them with what it means to be a husband or wife.
So the more you put it off, the more you’re prolonging their training. The more their training is prolonged, the more they’re being raised the wrong way, and the more problems you will have with parenting them when they’re older.
So again, here’s your reminder: your children are a gift, not a burden. I challenge you to look with new lenses, and find joy in the daily moments of spending time with your children, and when you run into those times where they aren’t listening, they aren’t making good choices, or they aren’t being responsible and caring… it’s because their training isn’t complete yet.
Stay diligent in the day-to-day, and the rewards will be great.
