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Tag disobedience
Teenagers, Sass, and Life That Is Truly Life
“Are you going to help me or not?” I snapped at Daniel, our fifteen year-old-son. He’d been asking for the past hour to go to a friend’s house. I kept dodging his request while also badgering him to enlist his…
One of Our Biggest Parenting Mistakes…
One of our biggest parenting mistakes is to try to get kids to behave right for the wrong reasons. It’s a good thing to want our kids to behave responsibly and to internalize the value of responsibility, but parents tend…
What’s Your Child Really Saying?
It was the first warm day of spring in Minnesota, which usually means MUD. The ground was still soggy from the snow melt, but the air was clean and fresh and the flowers were just beginning to peek through the soil. I was outside with two of our three kids...
“How Do I Get My Kids to Do What I Want?”
“No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot control another person’s behavior. You can only influence it.” ~Dr. Scott Larson from “When Teens Stray” Parents often ask us, “How do I get my kid to do what I want…
Do Warnings Teach Kids to Be Less Responsible?
When dealing with a misbehaving child, many parents follow this pattern: instruction, warning, warning, last warning, really strong last warning, angry explosion!! When we stretch out our instructions into multiple warnings and don’t follow through, it teaches our children to…
What to Do When We Blow Up
As hard as we try to parent like God would, we are human, and sometimes we mess up. We lose our cool, we speak harshly, or sometimes we even blow up at our kids. See how one mom handled…
Did God Spank Moses?
The story of Moses at the burning bush is (thanks to Cecil DeMille and Charlton Heston) one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament (see Exodus 3 & 4). But have you ever read it as an example…
When Kids Act Up, Don’t Try to Be More Patient…
There are certain time when kids seem especially prone to “pushing our buttons”: after Christmas, after birthdays, summertime, and the list goes on. Kids have trouble figuring out “sharing patterns” for their stuff, everyone’s jazzed on sugar and tired from disrupted…
How Would Jesus Discipline?
We have raised our own three kids who are now in their twenties. Through personal experience, as well as working with countless families, we have learned that not every child responds well to spanking. When we spanked our intense son…
Don’t Punish Your Child’s Nervous System — Understand It!
There are challenging kids, and there are “over-the-top” challenging kids. If standard parenting approaches just don’t work, or if you resonate with one or more of the comments below, you may well have an above-average challenge with your child. If…