Day 22 :: Expectations
2012
Communicating with our children about expectations.
I touched on this a little bit in the post about teamwork, but it is important enough to have its own post – it’s simple and yet complex: in order for our children to meet our expectations they need to know what the expectations are.
The simplicity in communicating expectations to children lays in the fact that I believe most children desire to please – they just don’t understand what, exactly, they are suppose to do; in terms of behavior, attitudes, actions and speech.
And this is so extremely hard because the most powerful way to communicate expectations to our children is to simply live it out before them. If we desire for our children to tell the truth, they ought not to ever hear us tell a lie to another person. If we desire for our children to speak with love to others we need to season our words with love, and seek forgiveness when we are short tempered and harsh. And so it is in all areas; we ought to be working hard to be that which we are telling our children they should be.
Communicating expectations to our children also proves to be hard because it requires great self restraint on our part. I love this quote from For The Children’s Sake;
“Exercise great self restraint! It is easy to keep giving extra orders, loading up the child and turning him into an obedient robot. We must show that we are mature enough to stick to the lines which are right, and that we don’t merely boss the child about for our convenience Parents should seek, prayerfully, to become worthy leaders with understanding, wisdom and love.“
I find it easy to lay out expectations for my children – to let them know ahead of time what the game plan is, what is expected from them, how they can communicate a problem, etc. That type of stuff just comes easily to this over-planner.
Where I struggle with communicating expectations to my children is sticking to what I have communicated to my children when other people have a different opinion and make me feel like I should have higher – or much different – expectations of my children.
It’s a fine line I haven’t quite figured out; we don’t wish to offend others and yet no one else knows so intimately my children and what they can or cannot bear. It becomes tricky because when others have confronted me {and it’s happened only a few times} that they think my children should be doing more or doing differently it has always been “in the moment” and I need to think quickly through what they are asking of my children; and often what I battle with is that I want to uphold an image of myself.
And that’s where the quote I shared above speaks so loudly to me; we need to be prayerfully seeking to become worthy leaders, exercising understanding, wisdom and love - it is us as parents before God seeking to raise our young ones to honor Him and while we need to love others passionately it is the wisdom that comes from God that will guide and direct our family choices and the expectations we then have of our children, not the expectations that others try to put on our shoulders.
Day 22 of 31 Days of Communicating With Our Children. Click here to see all posts in this series.
