Hi, I’m Shawn Maguire and this is the New Vision counseling.live podcast, OKC Christian marriage counseling episode number 36 this is a place where we help you discover what better looks like for you and then equip you with the tools to create it. Today on episode number 36 we’re going to be talking about is your child’s bad behavior. You’re fault answers to tough questions like these that most of us parents have or have had throughout the years of our parenting journey. You know, I remember when my kids first started misbehaving, well when I first started recognizing it was more than just being an infant, crying out for food or something like that. I kept evaluating my life like, what am I doing so wrong that creates this kind of behavior? I know my son was really young. He struggled a lot with just when he didn’t get his way, he would flip out, he would act out, he would get really upset and then as he got older, I’m looking at these behaviors and like me and why is he so hard?
And you know, there are those times in pairing, which are often when the they, they really do relate back to what we are doing in our lives. But then there’s other times when it doesn’t, it’s just something that’s part of the fall is our kids will have struggles that are just their struggles. But then there’s a lot of times when it is related to the way we relate to our spouse or other relationships were in, or maybe the way we relate to them or their siblings that creates these dynamics of misbehavior. And so it’s really important at the onset to realize we need to know the difference. And that only comes when you’re a student of your child and when you’re a student of yourself and your relationships in your life. And so I want to start by just encouraging you as usual to listen with the years of grace, that these were all being invitations to what you can do better.
Not Focusing on what you’ve done to fail or not live up to the expectations that you have for yourself in the past. To simply realize where you’ve been, what you’ve been through, and not get stuck on any of the past things that you’ve done that you wish you would have done better, but use those as a, as a springboard really to move you, inspire you, and encourage you to do better. Starting today. I say that each time because I know the critical voice in many of our heads, we’ll tend to overwhelm and override the opportunities that God gives us throughout the day and today. I don’t want you to miss the opportunities to really distinguish between what’s yours and what’s your two children’s issues. I know this still happens to me whenever one of my kids acts out or gets in trouble, especially when our kids start to argue with each other.
My wife and I consistently go back and we evaluate our relationship. What do we modeling in front of our kids and one of the elements that we’ve done really well is we taught our kids how to have conflict, how to resolve, how to bring up issues when they come. Something we’ve also done really poorly is have conflict. Teach our kids how to do conflict a lot. Some of those should have been had behind closed doors, not there were yelling and cursing or doing anything like that, but there are just some conversations that we would do better to pause and have behind closed doors or things that we’re talking about that when they get involved, because we’re having the conversation in front of them, they start to get stressed, they start to jump in, they start to act out. And so just being aware of how we live impacts what they do, how they think, how they feel, do they feel safe, but really move you forward in discovering how you can most effectively parent your kids and which issues are related to your behavior or your spouses and which are just on them in the fall and what God wants to do through their life.
So that’s the first thing. No, I can remember a time when I was overwhelmingly connected to my kids’ behaviors, both of them. Anytime my son would act out with rebelling and I’m like, you know, it’s because when I was a kid, people would say, you’re going to get it. When you get old. You know, wait til you get older and you have kids, there’s going to be payback. Or when my daughter started, got her feelings hurt was like, yeah, you know, I’m really sensitive to and I get my feelings hurt and then I want to just perform better and better and better. Instead of just saying, man, that really hurt. I don’t have to be better to be loved. I just need to go to God or go to the people that are loving and I’ll just receive it as a gift. Because what can happen is if you, if you tell yourself, tether yourself so much to the behavior of your children, then the devil can actually use that as a tool or really as a weapon to beat you into paralysis, to beat you into not taking risks to beat you into giving your kids unintentionally a sense of shame, a sense of fear of failure, fear of risk and living out of a spirit of rejection because you keep failing or spirit failure instead of what he wants to give them, which is a spirit of life, spear of hope, spirit of you know that it’s okay to fail because you’re living life and that’s just part of the process of growing and if you are aware of this, then you can battle against your own issues in these areas consistently and realize part of childhood.
There’s a lot of ordinary childhood behaviors that I know personally I struggled with because I like to have a lot of fun. I’m spontaneous, I’m not going. But I’m also in some areas hyper logical when I said the way that I see the world and the way that things play out, which is why when I OKC Christian marriage counseling counsel people, I asked God to give me a vision, you know, whether it’s in Edmond, Oklahoma City, where I practice or where I live on marriage, or let’s say somebody is coming because they’re not married, they want to be for premarital or for single counseling. Ask Them For a vision of where people will go. And then I know the behaviors and what I lead them through today is vital, vital, vital, vital to leading them down the path that God’s got for them. But I need that understanding of kind of where God’s leading them.
So I can do that effectively, uniquely in OKC Christian marriage counseling individual for that person. The same is true of your child. You need to be aware of what’s ordinary childhood behavior and what’s part of their environment that needs to change. So I know that I’ve connected, um, and then I’ve disconnected and times both had been healthy and both have been unhealthy. So the first part of what I’m sharing is I just want you to get, there is no exact science to parenting. There is diligence and studying your situations and your seasons and being aware of what you can bring and what you can take along the way, how you can help them, how you can feed yourself full of love and life. Because a screaming infant, unless you’re being a neglectful parent, likely a lot of times they’re just not getting what they want. They could be tired, they could have a stomach thing going on that you’re not aware of.
But again, on the flip side, it could be maybe you need to change the formula. Maybe you need to do something that is different. Maybe you need to get them down for her nap brings snacks. I don’t know, something like that to move them forward. Just really important to do that. You know, when your kid starts school, man, it is so hard because you hear the way their peers relate to them and it’s not always very kind. Especially for kids go to schools where there’s bullying’s not is tolerated, or social media if they’re in high school and junior high, really just contaminates their environment where they’re constantly compare. It’s so hard not to own their behaviors, good or bad, because if you own the bed, if you own the good, you’re going to own the bat. If you own the bad, you may or may not own the goods depending on her makeup.
So some of the behavioral, yeah, sure, it’s copied from you and it’s the way that you think. It’s the way that you feel. But remember, don’t discount the child’s individuality and the negative influences their peers or their culture can have on them. Because when you do that, then you remove a whole entire part of who they are and you, you kind of become a little bit bigger in their world and in a healthy way that God wants you to be. God always wants to be the God. He always wants to be the world for your kids. So just, it’s really helpful as you navigate this journey, especially if you love your kids and you really spend a lot of time thinking, praying, moving in these areas of being the best parent, the devil can trick you a lot to own more than you should own more than you, than what’s healthy.
So think about it. Have you ever had a situation where one of your kids has talked back to you and you thought, man, that’s just like my wife, you know, you know, if you wouldn’t talk back to me in front of the kids, the kids wouldn’t do it. And you get, you actually get mad at your wife instead of your child because you, you can just see that. Or have you ever had one of your kids just totally ignore you and then you’re like, you get mad at your husband, you’re like, you know, that’s because you ignore me. The plumbing has been leaking in our kitchen faucet for two months and I’ve asked you three times a week for two months straight and you’ve done nothing about it. And then you can blame your spouse for that. Now, the reality is both are true. Both are true.
It’s so true. One of the ways that your kids are young to see how they’re learning and growing to kind of stay in tune is watch the way that they play with their friends. Watch the way if they have dolls, play with their dolls, action figures, watch the way that they respond to video games with their self talk that they do out loud. Watch the way that they make effort in sports and other activities. You’ll you’ll learn a lot of discovering your strengths as a parent and your weaknesses as a parent by the way that they kind of live life. You say, well, what does that have to do with anything I don’t understand? Great question. Well, in parenting we all have a native way that we move towards. For example, I natively naturally move towardsOKC Christian marriage counseling structure towards behavior modification that if I ask you to do something and I give you a directive, then if you don’t follow through then there’ll be a consequence.
That’s not hard for me to do now. Some consequences are hard, especially with my daughter because my heart just melts and it feels like I’m getting the worst consequence and there’s times when my son, it’s the same thing, but my wife was raised very differently. I was raised in a structured, consistent environment where I knew where things were, what was going to happen next. My mom was reliable, faithful. My wife had the exact opposite experience. And so this is where a part of you, knowing who you are and understanding your story and how it relates to your life, how you, the way you were parented affects the way that you live. And it will absolutely affect the way that you parent. Because my wife is very unstructured. Naturally, it requires profound effort, lots of books doing with friends, group Mes, Facebook chats, all these different elements to get her to stay consistent.
And so she, she brings a lot of these resources and people into her life and she knows that about herself. And so for her, a lot of times if the kids are not in a structured way, we know that relates back to kind of the way that she does things or when the kids are like, my daughter is very structured and we know that she gets that from me and so we both can lead intentionally and those different areas. Realizing that even good parents, none of us will be perfect. We all have room to grow. You know? I know in mn and Oklahoma City where we live and where we practice, we see a lot of families and family counselling, parenting, OKC Christian marriage counseling, where they really want to do a great job. They really do and they’re just torn apart because their past limitations and beliefs are affecting what they will go for in their parenting experience and the greatest times or when we have two people that come from different environments, one hyper structured, one that just had a lot of fun and maybe even bigger call that sometimes chaos that are available to change.
Then the kids get the best of both worlds. They get a structure and they get somebody who knows how to have a great time that lives in the moment. Somebody has had a plan for the future, and it really is capitalizing on those strengths and determining what kind of parent you guys are, what kind of parent that you guys bring to the table, and how that impacts your kids. You know, I talk a lot about Edmund in Oklahoma City
because I really believe in this part of the Bible belt. We’re sheltered and we’re blessed in a lot of ways that a lot of you guys, you may live in a a California where people don’t share your values. You may live in a New Jersey, New York, you may live in a Colorado part of Colorado, where is outside of Colorado Springs, where people live very different lives than you and they’re not conservative and so it’s harder for you and I just want to encourage you. God has a way that no matter where you’re at, he loves you. He loves your kids. He’s for you, for them. And so embrace this time because it is a window of time. Your kids will absolutely age out and this time we’ll be gone. So I’ve given you some ways to really consider how to evaluate and I’ve hopefully encourage you enough to accept God’s grace, that it’s okay to make mistakes along the way.
It just has evidence that you’re making effort to love your kids well because you care. You listening to this podcast is evidence that you care about your kids. And if you found this podcast helpful, I’m going to go over some behaviors that some ways that kids do copy your behavior and the next podcast is a part one of two. There’ll be a lot more specific ways and hope you found that helpful. Well share this with others. It means a lot to me when you go on Google and you rate and review us because we really do one a mushroom out. We want to have an impact on so many lives. And when your review us on Google at New Vision OKC Christian marriage counseling got live, it gives other people and understanding that what we do actually makes a difference in your life and it can make a difference in their lives too. So thanks for listening to the New Vision calcium.live podcast, a place where we help you discover what better looks like for you, and then equip you with the tools to create it.