According to Dave Ramsey 13.6 million Americans are still paying of credit card debt from the 2009 holidays. That doesn’t include the number of Americans that are accumulating more debt for 2010. I know in many cases things are charged and debt is incurred out of a heart of love. Parents who love their kids and want them to have a “merry” Christmas decide to throw down the Visa rather than say no. It’s hard – as Dave Ramsey likes to point out we are no match for the professionals that market this stuff. Add to slick marketing the cultural pressure and we are in trouble. Now put on top of all that, a parent’s desire to give their child good things and it’s nearly impossible.

"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Luke 11:11

 We could easily read a verse like this in Luke and find ourselves (incorrectly I believe) translating it, “which of you fathers (or mothers), if your son (or daughter) asks for an X-Box (or I Pad), will give him/her a pair of jeans?” We love our kids – we want to give them the best. We want them to be “happy” especially during Christmas. And that is a GOOD thing!

When we teach parenting one of our more popular seminars is The Three Most Important Things to Teach Your Child. We’ll talk more about them in the future, but they are 1) to love God 2) to obey you (the parents) and 3) to have self-control. The first two are taken directly from the bible where loving God (according to Jesus) is the greatest commandment and in Ephesians 6 where children are given a direct mandate to obey their parents. The third item, self-control, is obviously spoken of many times (Prov 16:32; 25:28, Acts 24:25, Gal 5:23, 1 Tim 3:2, Titus 2: 2,5,6,12, 2 Peter 1:6) but isn’t as obvious a choice for the top 3 things to teach a child. We are convinced of the importance of teaching this particular character quality. Often parents will ask, but how do you teach a character quality like self-control. Might I suggest Christmas time could be a great place to start?

One of the principles we teach concerning self-control has to do with exercising that control regardless of your situation. In other words it’s easy to have self-control when everything is going good. I’m pretty good when I’m rested, I have money in the bank, and Kelli’s happy. But real self-control takes place when I’m tired, money’s tight and Kelli’s irritated with me. How do I act then? The same is true with your kids and their training. Teach them to have control regardless of their circumstances. During the Christmas season emotions are on overload. They are being influenced by the same marketing wizards that out match you. They have a culture convincing them of all the things they need. Schedules this time of year are hectic and kids are often operating on too little sleep. Winter weather can mean more sick kids in the home. And if your family is dealing with a deployment, or a recent death, or any family struggle those emotions are multiplied. So who could blame the parent that can’t say no to an emotional child standing in the store begging for an X-Box? Can I let you in on a little secret; parenting is hard! But our kids need us to stay strong and to do the right thing.

Tana at 12 months old (the Bionic Man) and today at eighteen

I remember when Tana was less than a week old. I was coaching football at Centralia High School. All of a sudden I see Kelli flying toward the football field in our van in the middle of practice. Through tears she filled me in on the phone call she had just received from the doctor. They were worried about Tana’s heart; so much so that we needed to immediately drive him to Mary Bridge Children’s hospital NICU, the intensive care unit for newborns. I won’t bore you with the details of our next eighteen months; suffice to say it was a scary chapter in our family’s story. Every six hours, without fail, for eighteen months, we had to give Tana Inderal for his heart. They thought he had a condition called long QT syndrome. Had he ultimately been diagnosed with that particular ailment it would have meant no strenuous activity – he would never pass a physical to participate in things like athletics. If you know Tana today, you’d know how unfathomable that thought is. Obviously he wasn’t diagnosed with long QT and ultimately his heart was healthy. But I can tell you; during that time it was difficult to discipline him. On a regular basis we were hooking him up to a Holter Monitor so he looked like the Bionic Man (I’m really dating myself). Every night he slept in our bed with us because we were fearful his heart might suddenly stop. We couldn’t let him run too much – we weren’t even supposed to startle him with a surprise birthday party. If this was going to be his life, how could we possibly withhold anything from him? But we had to make a conscious decision. If he was going to be “challenged” for life, we weren’t going to cripple him twice by withholding discipline and teaching him the same self control that we were teaching our other children. When our kids are hurting it can be extremely hard to keep our expectations high, but we must! Train your kids to have self control even if it’s hard – in fact train self control especially when it’s hard. Someday they will thank you for it.