A Tender Parent

One of the great challenges for me in parenting is trying to teach kindness.  In particular, I haven’t figured out how to help my six-year-old son to show kindness to his other siblings.  The hardest part is learning out the right way to discipline him when he is being a bully to his siblings. If we are too hard on him, he just sees that as us being mean and says we hate him.  But if we simply let it go, he we never see the need to change.  Finding the balance between the two extremes—helping them feel our love and disapproval at the same time—has proved to be a herculean task for us.  So the question I have been asking myself tonight now is, what do the scriptures teach me about disciplining and teaching love to children? 

               A few scriptures come to mind as I think about this question.  The first is that of Eli in the Old Testament; his sons were clearly out of line and the Lord chastised him for not rebuking them.  The Lord questioned Eli this way, “Wherefore kick ye at my sacrifice and at mine offering, which I have commanded in my habitation; and honourest thy sons above me” (1 Samuel 2:29).  The lesson from this story is that the Lord holds us responsible for what our children do when we have failed to teach them properly.  Simply letting significant negative behavior slide without correction is not acceptable to the Lord.  The scriptures do teach, though, that with correction we give we must be filled with love.  Lehi, to his everlasting credit, was able to teach his rebellious sons “with all the feeling of a tender parent” (1 Nephi 8:37).  Despite the hatred his sons held in their hearts, Lehi never let go of the love in his own.  He pled with Laman and Lemuel to choose righteously up until the final days of his life, saying with all the feeling of his soul, "O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound” (2 Nephi 1:13).  He didn’t let their hatred fill his own soul, but testified even after all of the threats of murder to himself and Nephi by his two oldest sons, “But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have beheld his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 15:1).  He didn’t allow their bitterness to creep into his own soul, but he did chasten and correct them, constantly calling them to repentance.  He patterned what the Lord would teach us in our dispensation, “Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved” (D&C 121:43).  He loved his sons with all his heart despite their destructive behavior, and though he had to correct and reprove them time and time again, he never stopped loving them.     

            I realize that at least one of my own problems is that in a way I let the behavior I want to correct in my son come out in me.  He treats his siblings with disrespect and selfishness, and then I reprimand him without the love in my voice that I want him to have for his siblings.  It reminds me of what happened to some of the people of the church in Alma’s day when the righteous were persecuted.  We read that after enduring persecution, “There were many among them who began to be proud, and began to contend warmly with their adversaries, even unto blows” (Alma 1:22).  In other words, they fought against the negative behavior of their enemies essentially by exhibiting the same behavior towards them.  The gospel teaches us that we must be able to respond to hatred with love, to anger with kindness, to wickedness with righteousness.  I must learn teach and reprove my children, especially when they are at their worst, with the love and tenderness that Lehi so marvelously showed us.