| TRAINING CHILDREN IN GOOD ATTITUDES Dear Sisters The Lord has impressed upon my heart an urgency to train my children '...in the way they should go....'. When we took our children out of public school six years ago, we began a journey of learning many things. What we learned mostly was how unruly, rude, rebellious and selfish our children were. Being at home with them ~ daily ~ brought this to light. We lived with each other day after day, with no 'breaks' by them going to school. They saw me and I saw them ~ with all our flaws. Many of them! What challenging, hair-pulling, and frustrating times they were. I blamed my children, called them to others. I am not proud of how I reacted towards them, nor how I behaved. Had we never taken our children out of school, allowing ourselves to be in this circumstance, I doubt that we would have ever realised just how much they needed to be properly trained into 'decent' human beings! I blamed my children for their character flaws, and yet it was us ~ their parents ~ who had done a good job of training them IN these flaws. We had allowed it. We had allowed them to continually get away with rebellion, bad attitudes, laziness, selfishness. Furthermore, it became more apparent that they were copying us. We learned that their was no greater mirror image than young children, admiring their parents, and proving this by copying them. We were their heroes ~ even though, over the years, the Lord has shown us how wrong we were. But.... 'tis never too late, dear sisters. With a sincere desire to change our ways, live to be obedient to the will of God, repent from our sins, we are still in the process of turning this damaging behaviour of ours around. For the sake of our children. We knew we needed to be good examples to them. We have learned that giving, caring parents create giving, caring children. Frustrated, anxious and fearful parents reproduce themselves. Bitter mothers who teach their daughters to be sweet and kind still produce bitter daughters. Critical, impatient fathers train up disrespectful bullies, unworthy of a mother's love. We have also learned that the first step in child training is to decide what we wanted our children to become and then began the life-long task of attempting to become those very people ourselves. And this, we believe, is a life-long commitment. Love, Helen |