Ten Ways To Exasperate Children

➡ Paul, the voiceover for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses 10 ways parents can frustrate their children. These include overprotection, favoritism, setting unrealistic goals, overindulgence, discouragement, failing to sacrifice for them, not allowing them to grow up, neglect, abusive words, and physical abuse. He emphasizes the importance of understanding, patience, and consistent discipline in raising children. He concludes by encouraging listeners to keep their faith strong and continue to shine their light in the world.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting scriptions, but scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the holy scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be 10 ways to exasperate children. How do parents exasperate children? I’ve just given you a little litany of things that you can read about in a typical book on child raising about how to raise a delinquent, but let me give you my own list here of how to provoke a child to wrath.

I’m going to give you this list rather rapidly, so stick with it. 10 ways. Number one, by overprotection, by overprotection. Fence them in, never trust them, don’t give them the opportunity to develop independence, and deprivation will instill an angry mood. Parents must give children room to express themselves, to discover their world, to try a new adventure, gradually releasing them to live independently, let the rope out. Overprotection frustrates and angers a child. We live in a world where that’s a tendency among Christians. Keep them under your control all the time. You have to be very careful about that, or they become exasperated.

Secondly, you can do it by favouritism. Isaac favoured Esau over Jacob, Rebecca favoured Jacob over Esau, and the sad results are well known. Don’t compare them against each other, they’re each unique. Love them the same, without regard for each, without special regard for each, no respect of persons. If a child feels that you love another in that family more, that is a very, very frustrating experience. Thirdly, you can cause a child to become angry by setting unrealistic achievement goals. Some parents literally crush their children with pressure. Pressure to excel in school, pressure to excel in sports, in music, in any activity they do.

And it literally has little to do with the child, and everything to do with the reputation that the parent wants. This becomes very frustrating when the child has no sense of having reached a goal, no sense of having fulfilled an expectation. It leads to being angry and bitter. And I have dealt with such children. I have dealt with such children who have killed themselves. I think of one girl in particular who killed herself to get her parents off her back. She never could accomplish enough to satisfy them, and she was so angry she wanted to hurt them in the profound way she could, so she took her life so they would have to live with the pain of causing that.

Devastating. You can frustrate your child to anger by overindulgence, by giving them everything they want, by picking up after them always, by allowing them to throw all responsibility and accountability on others. You can exasperate them by letting them sin and get away with it, so they learn to do that successfully. Ultimately, when they face the world and people don’t serve them, and don’t take all the responsibility for them and for their misdeeds, they will get angry and bitter and violent. It’s exactly the kind of generation we’re seeing raised today. Fifthly, you can exasperate your child by discouragement.

And I think that comes in two ways. A lack of understanding and lack of reward, because both of those destroy motivation and they destroy incentive. You must understand your children. Understand what they’re thinking. Understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Understand why a certain thing happened. Why a certain behaviour occurred. Why a certain incident went a certain way. Grant them a listening ear and an understanding heart, and reward them graciously and generously with love. Give them approval and honour and be patient with them, or they get very defeated and discouraged. And that turns to anger.

You can provoke your children to anger, number six, by failing to sacrifice for them. In other words, by making the child feel like he’s constantly an intrusion into your life, constantly an interruption, always a bother. You want to do what you want to do. You and your husband want to go where you want to go. You just farm these kids out somewhere, leave them. Let somebody else take care of them. You’re not about to change your lifestyle. You’re going to do what you want to do. You’re going to have your fun and your pleasure, and the kids are just going to have to fend for themselves.

Leave them. Make them prepare their own meals. Don’t take them places because you can’t be bothered with them, and they will resent your being uncaring, unavailable and self-centred. And it’s one of the things that I’m so very thankful for in my own family is Patricia’s devotion to our children, all the years when they were growing up in the home. Many years when I had to be going and travelling, and she refused to do that because she wanted to be with those children all the time. Number seven. You can provoke your children to anger by failing to allow for some growing up.

What does that mean? Let them goof up a little. Let them make mistakes so they knock something over at the table, laugh it off. They just don’t quite have the manual dexterity yet or the coordination. Give them a little job, and if they do it in an unacceptable way but it’s a little bit of progress, commend them. Let them share some of their ridiculous ideas. Let them plan some silly things to do, and do them, and don’t condemn them. Just expect progress, not perfection. The best of men are not perfect, are not perfect.

The New York Tech many years ago defeated Rensselaer Poly 21-8. In that game the only Rensselaer touchdown was set up by a 63-yard pass play, says the newspaper. On the play there appeared to be a breakdown in the tech defence. The next week when reviewing the films, Tech coach Marty Sanal noticed that the defensive back on the play, freshman John Smith, stood frozen on one spot while the receiver flew by him for the winning touchdown. Hey, Smitty, why didn’t you move? the coach yelled. Said Smith, I couldn’t. My contact lens had just popped out and I covered it with my foot waiting for a time to put it back.

If I had left the spot, I never would have found it again in that grass, and my parents would have killed me for losing it. Now I’m telling you, when you’re in the big game, and you live with that much fear of your parents, you’ve got a problem. Let your kids fail, they’re gonna lose things. Hey I remember when Matt flushed my watch down a toilet. I said, why did you do that? He said, I just wanted to see what it would look like going down. Did I spank him? No. In fact, I wish I’d have been there.

I’d like to see what it looked like when it was going down. Allow for a little growing, for a few experiments. Number eight, you can provoke your children to anger by neglect. If there’s any biblical illustration of this, it’s probably David and Absalom. David spent no time with him, no time shaping him, and Absalom ultimately hated his father with a passion, tried to pull a coup to dethrone his father and take his place. Neglect. And the worst kind of neglect? Lack of consistent discipline. That’s the worst kind of neglect. I’m not talking about the neglect of time and things.

I’m talking about the neglect of discipline. Teach them, discipline them, consistently using the rod in love. Number nine, you can provoke your children to anger by abusive words. You understand that a little child has a very limited vocabulary, and you have a very comprehensive one. Verbal abuse is a terrible thing. A barrage of well-chosen words from your adult vocabulary can cut that little heart to shreds. And what is as devastating as anything are words of anger, words of sarcasm, or words of ridicule. Frankly, we say things to our children we would never say to anybody else.

And then lastly, by physical abuse. An angry child is often a beaten, abused, overzealously punished child, usually from an angry, vengeful parent who only cares that he has been inconvenienced or irritated, not that the child needs correction for his own good. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of 10 ways to exasperate children. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way.

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