Hardness of heart will destroy your relationship with your children.
Hardness of heart is:
- believing that being short tempered and easily angered is just a normal ‘mom-thing’ and excusing it because everyone else does it too.
- focusing on making sure you look good to everyone else at the expense of truly relating with your kids.
- continuing to justify your extremely, overly busy life because of the desire to meet or exceed the expectations of others.
- choosing to think of yourself and your schedule as most important.
- choosing to focus far more on rules and making your kids learn to obey than on teaching grace and making sure they know they’re loved.
- having the mindset that your kids just “figure it out” and when they fail, because they will, rubbing their nose in it.
- being unteachable will destroy your home.
- being prideful.
- tearing your kids down with words.
- blame shifting and excusing your wrongful actions because they deserved it.
- wasting inordinate amounts of time comparing and contrasting your home against others’ and making the judgement that “theirs is worse” or “theirs is better” and allowing yourself to become puffed up when you’ve beat them out, or depressed when you don’t quite measure up.
- lacking genuine sorrow over the harsh ways you treat your kids.
- responding with defensiveness, contempt, or uncontrolled emotion when someone tries to correct you.
- expecting your kids to say sorry first when you refuse to demonstrate it yourself.
- lacking genuine sorrow in your apology and following it up with “but….”
- demanding your kids be perfect because their obedience directly correlates to your identity.
- thinking more of what you deserve instead of what you can give.
- treating your family with contempt when they don’t give you what you think you deserve.
- expecting everyone in your home to be able to read your mind and getting upset when they don’t/can’t is an absolute way to destroy your home.
- focusing more on being right than on becoming righteous.
- solely thinking the picture perfect image, and other people’s perceptions is what equates a successful home.
- giving the cold shoulder, silent treatment, slamming of doors, using sarcasm or the rolling of eyes to let those in your family be aware they have done, or are doing, wrong.
- treating your kids as though they are in the way and making sure they know there are far more important things you could/should be doing.
- the refusal to humble yourself to ask for their forgiveness will destroy the relationship
- believing the idea that an adult repenting to kids is just ridiculous.
- believing that because you have the title of parent now means you’ve got it all together and no one can tell you otherwise.
- giving time out after time out, or grounding your kids for incredibly lengthy times, because you just can’t stand to be in the same room as them.
- disciplining out of anger.
- discipling without restoration.
- implementing the “do as I say, not as I do” rule, teaching lessons or life truths you yourself have no intent to live by.
- magnifying the weaknesses and minimizing the strengths of your kids, while magnifying the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses of yourself.
- withholding affection until they ‘clean up their act.’
- assuming you know exactly why they’re acting a certain way because you know them better than they know themselves.
- twisting their words, withholding or expounding parts of the details, and telling white lies to make your side of the story come across in your favor.
- forming concrete opinions about their deficiencies/shortcomings and drawing the conclusion that they will always be that way.
- seeing their problems as only their problems.
- justifying your wrongful actions because “they’re just kids.”
- using the line “I am doing the best I can” to excuse your own shortcomings/wrongful actions/sin.
- preserving your own well-being at the expense of your kids.
- spending more time trying to find an official clinical diagnosis to explain away their behavior issues than looking in the mirror to address your own.
- believing that sharing with all of your friends the dumb things your kids do is not actually gossip or slander because they don’t even know what those words mean yet, or better yet, justifying it because you birthed them. No matter how old they get you have full liberty to say whatever you wish to whoever you wish about whatever you wish because you’ve earned that right.
