Why Parents Should Be Friends with their Children

Jesus is telling this child right now:  You must write 25 times, I will not hit my brother.   And you are not leaving your room until you are finished!!! 

This post could also be entitled:  Why I Don't Buy Punitive Parenting.

When I started having children I discovered that I was a terrible disciplinarian.  I either took the disobedience personally and overreacted or if I was in a more sanguine mood, I was a pushover who let the child get away with naughtiness.   I knew I wasn't doing things right!  I read parenting books that basically made me feel guilty.  I tried those reward charts but they never lasted longer than a day or two.  I am too A.D.D. to keep up with something like that.

Anyway, all the discipline advice felt so phony to me.  But since my oldest was very strong willed, I had a real discipline issue to deal with.  Every, and I mean every, little thing turned into a power struggle with her.  I never would see it coming!  It would just be there, bam!  All of sudden a huge tug of war of wills.  And I never would win.  Never.   Because honestly I didn't care about having the power per se, only often I was annoyed at the unpleasantness and frustrated that we couldn't get anything done without a tantrum or melt down.  It took me years to figure this out, but I remember when my oldest was about 12 and I was ranting to my husband about how she just wouldn't obey me and how first she had had this consequence (used as euphemism for punishment) and then she had been grounded and she still blah, blah, blah.  And my husband said in a very droll voice, Well, I guess it is the death penalty next.  This was a jibe at me because I used to work for the Death Penalty Defense Public Defenders office.  Rick hardly ever punished anybody.  Very rarely if someone had done something mean, he'd banish them to their room until they could be nice again.  Usually though he just cajoled them out of misbehavior by joking with them.  He's kind of magical that way.

Anyway, his remark got me thinking.  Things just always escalated.  This cycle of disobedience and punishment just kept cycling higher and higher and I felt so deeply resentful and alienated from my own child who I knew I loved with all my heart, even though I couldn't feel that love because I was too busy being put out with her.  It occurred to me that something was very very wrong.  I had a lightbulb moment when I suddenly thought:  punishing doesn't work.  It doesn't!  If it did, why do we have to keep punishing our kids over and over again?  The only time punishment works is if your kid is really afraid of you.  If your kid is really afraid of you then forget about trust or feeling close.  Don't expect your kid to come to you when they are a teenager and confide in you about anything.  Expect more rebellion and unpleasantness because that is what you have sowed with never ending time outs, taking away privileges and groundings.

So then I thought what would Jesus do?  Did Jesus punish?  Remember the parable of the Lost Sheep.  Where the Good Shepherd goes out and finds the one lost lamb.  Did Jesus give that lamb a good spanking to teach it not to wander off or ground it so it wouldn't get lost again?  Hmm.  The story certainly doesn't seem to convey that.

Jesus, the punisher

How about the Prodigal Son?  Did the father punish his oldest son who really did a lot of bad, bad stuff?  Nope, he had a party when the son, all on his own, came home.

Look at the father.  He is all set to do his duty and punish his son so he'll never sin again.

Then I thought about the woman being stoned for adultery.  Jesus STOPS the punishment, even though the punishment was Mosaic law!

Jesus is saying here:  We've got to teach her a lesson!  We can't let her get away with this!

Now there is Hell, the ultimate punishment, but that doesn't happen until a person dies.  And actually that is kind of a self inflicted punishment in a way.  If I refuse to eat, is it punishment if I am hungry?  If I refuse to be close to God in this life, is it punishment if I am forever banished from Him in the next?  But regardless if Hell is self-inflicted or not, a person gets to live their whole life with no God-enforced punishment.  There are, however,  natural consequences.  If I choose to lie, people won't trust me.  If I don't do my duty to others, I'll alienate them and be lonely.  If I live a life of moral dissipation I might contract VD or become a heroin addict.  Actions do have consequences but those are not the same as parentally enforced punishments.  I remember once a mom asking if I could think of any natural consequence to give her misbehaving child.  I thought, how can it be a natural consequence if you have to think up something?

How did Jesus teach us to follow him?  1)  He showed us how to live by his own life 2) When people went astray, he pointed their mistake out to them; he even warned them beforehand (Peter and denying Christ three times)  3) He told stories to illustrate what he was trying to teach  4) He explained things to people when they didn't understand  5) Sometimes he got justly angry.  6) He praised them when they did good (Woman, your faith has saved you).  7)  He always emphasized forgiveness and the Father's love.  8) He called us his friends.

I know some people say things like:  "I am their parent, not their friend. " I think though this is not a very Christian approach to parenting.  If Jesus, God himself, can humble himself to become human, take on all our sins, suffer and die for us and then call us his friends, surely a parent can be a friend to their child without somehow giving up authority.  Friendship from a Christian point of view is a relationship of love, trust and closeness.  What kind of friendship depends on the connection - siblings, classmates, neighbors, spouse, best friend - but they are all kinds of friendship.  I think when people say that phrase:  We can't be friends because I am the parent, they really mean I can't be their peer, which is very true.  But I think they confuse 'peer' with 'friend.'  Frankly, I think it is used as a bit of an excuse to justify alienating their child's affections in the name of discipline.  I think that is putting the cart before the ox.  Just as God wants to be friends with us and loves us unconditionally, we should want to be friends with our children and try, in our limited fashion to love them as unconditionally as we (poor, wretched sinners that we are) are able.

So I don't believe in punishing unless it is a very, very last resort.  I admit that sometimes if your kid does something so appalling the best thing to do might be to be like Jesus and turn over a table or two and chase them around with a whip (well, I am being figurative here, but sometimes you just have to respond right away and with great passion!).  But he did that once.  The other  99% of the time he taught them about how to be good and how much God loves them.

And so I do want to be friends with my children.  I think I should try to be as patient with my kids as God is patient with me.  Of course I fall incredibly short of this every. single. day.  I lose my temper, I get cranky, I resent having to deal with the same disobedience over and over again, I get exasperated and burned out and just plain fed up!  But then I remember the phrase from the Our Father, 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who  trespass against us'.  And then I start all over again, trying to be creative and patient.  Pointing out when behavior is less than charitable, reminding children of their duties, telling or reading stories to give them solid moral foundations, praying for them and with them, talking about noble things, exposing them to the good, the true and the beautiful, gently correcting misbehavior, firmly and authoritatively admonishing the disobedient, reminding them that I love them.  Praising them when they get it right.  Working as much as I can on always being close to them.  I especially need to work on this when I am feeling less than affectionate towards one because that child is going through a trying phase.  My kids are not perfect, not by any long shot.  My youngest especially is pretty lippy to me.  But honestly she came out of the womb with a sassy attitude.  She's actually better than she used to be.  Oh my, she was incorrigible!  But she loves me.  She tells me everything.  She is a great girl.  She is slowly learning to be be more respectful in her tone.  She's getting it.  It is unfortunately her abiding sin.  We, all of us, have abiding sins we will have to struggle with all our lives.  Hers is a sharp tongue and an inclination to be bossy.  Good thing she has a lot of other wonderful qualities that make up for that little shortcoming.  Children can definitely be trials!  But a quote I saw by St. Jose Maria Escriva  just the other day serves well for this:

Don't say that person gets on my nerves.  Say that person sanctifies me.

And that is what happens when we parent our children.  We are being sanctified.  I don't want to say, that child is driving me nuts!  How do I control him?  Instead I want to say:  that child is teaching me to love as God loves, how can I show that child how much I love him?

I tell you when I stopped using punishment as a reaction to bad behavior my kids got better and I got better.  Our home became more peaceful.  Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow the atmosphere relaxed, our relationships deepened and there was a lot more joy in every day living (even in spite of crises like deaths and mental illness).  And a home of love, acceptance, centered on Christ, is to my mind, going to raise up saints a lot easier than a home where the parent sees himself primarily as judge and arbiter.