What Do You Think? Wednesday

Being a mom is hard. Whether you juggle work outside the home or seek to balance life while caring for children full-time, the work of mothering can make you want to quit, at least temporarily. I know I’m not the only one who may have that momentary thought. Though the calling is full of blessings, we need mothering breaks, but we have to know what breaks are appropriate. The break we take to regain our sense of self, sanity or anything else we may have lost giving ourselves to mothering may be the one to cause us to lose our children’s respect. Like any calling from God, we can’t delegate mothering, put it on hold or simply hope for the best as we take a hands-off approach. Though we recovering strong black women have full lives that may be rich with variety, the greatest contribution we can give to the Kingdom of God is disciples sold out for Jesus Christ. Whether our children are spiritual or biological they must respect our authority in their lives so we have the foundation we need to impart all that God intends for them to have. Read more about this in my latest EEW Magazine article, which begins below:

She was asleep on the couch, taking a short rest in the comfort of her own home. This was her bed for the minute but became her last resting place alive after her 14-year-old son shot her because she forbade him to associate with alleged gang members. In another case, a 15-year-old boy stabbed his father to death as the father tried to physically restrain him from leaving the house to hang with gang members. Both these incidents happened a few weeks ago in Michigan but we too often hear stories like this across the nation where children have taken the lives of the very ones who gave them life. What is it that would make a child kill a mother or a father, the ultimate act of parental disrespect? Barring the child being sexually, physically or emotionally abused or having substance abuse or mental illness issues, perhaps the one reason a child would cuss out, strike at, steal from or kill a parent is simply not respecting their parents’ authority.

“Respect is not given but must be earned,” goes the old adage. Though some of us would like to believe that respect automatically comes with being a parent, that simply is not the case. We see the disrespect with the three-year-old cutting up in the grocery line, the 12-year-old with the attitude at the mall. or the 16-year-old who refuses to come out of the bedroom because of conflict with a parent. We see parents (and we ourselves may) negotiate, ignore or just accept this type of behavior, but this shouldn’t be the case. As our children’s first teachers, no matter how we may have messed up in the past, we have the responsibility to raise disciplined children and that works best when our children respect our authority. We must earn our children’s respect by establishing our authority in their lives. Doing so will curb this ill behavior until it becomes practically nonexistent.

“To discipline a child produces wisdom, but a mother is disgraced by an undisciplined child”
(Proverbs 29:15).

So the key is teaching our children wisdom through discipline and this works in a number of ways: Read more here and please tell me what you think.