Joey and Carla Link
September 18, 2024
I recently attended a rodeo and saw an event that reminded me of parenting. Two cowboys riding their horses were in place beside a chute that had a young steer in it. When the chute opened, the two cowboys’ raced along across the arena, trying to keep the steer between them while the young steer tries to outrun them or slow down to get around them. The job of parents, like cowboys, is to keep their kids corralled between them and their family standards, beliefs and values.
The tough part in parenting is when your kids all of the sudden speed up thinking they are more capable of doing things their own way, rather than the lifestyle you have been training and preparing them for. All teens will get to the point where they will want to do more and experience more than you want them to or think they are ready for. Or, kids of all ages will slow down and get stubborn because they don’t want to do what you are telling them to do, especially when it comes to working on a weakness of theirs. You have to slow down with them to help motivate them to move them along. This can get tricky because if you have 3 kids, they are running at 3 different speeds. This is another reason why having kids who obey you 80% of the time is a very good thing.
This became clear to me when I took my daughter and her almost 2 yr. old daughter to this rodeo. As we were walking around, I had the idea of where we needed to go. My 2 year old granddaughter, however, had no idea of where she was or what there was to see. So Amy and I held her hand to take her to see some animals and different things that we knew she would enjoy. But she had her eye on something else and did both of these things I mentioned. She started running towards where she wanted to go, and when her mama caught up with her and brought her back to me, she got stubborn and wasn’t going to budge.
So how do you keep your kids between you and your spouse? This is where the “funnel concept” comes in. The funnel provides boundaries you put in place to keep your kids fenced in. Kids need boundaries to protect them from harmful behavior until they are old enough or wise enough to do it themselves. The behaviors that go inside the funnel, meaning they need constant supervision are those your child is not old enough to handle, mature enough to handle or just won’t manage them well. If your 3 yr. old won’t pick up his toys when you tell him to, then that behavior goes into the funnel, and every time you tell him to pick up his toys, you have to check and make sure he has put them where they belong. If your 8 yr. old won’t get off the computer when her time is up, then you need to keep track of the time for her and remind her to get off. If your 14 yr. old doesn’t come back from a friend’s house when you told him to be back, then you have to call him and remind him to come home. I hope you see that the person managing the behaviors inside the funnel is you. The better way in the above cases, because it is recurring behavior is to give consequences when your kids don’t bother to do what they are told. Your 3 yr. old can sit through a couple of play times with nothing to do until he decides picking up his toys and putting them away correctly is a better choice. Your 8 yr. old should lose the privilege of using the computer for a couple weeks and your 14 yr. old loses the privilege of going to his friend’s house or having that friend come to yours. Giving consequences is like the cowboys using a lasso to rope the baby steer in and forcing it to their will.
“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.” Proverbs 22:15
When a rod is spoken of here, it is any form of correction that will make your child think twice about repeating the behavior. Taking away the playtime, freedom to play on the computer, going to the friends house, etc.
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