After reading some of my blogs, my friend Karen Cassidy wrote this great advice about parenting:
One of the greatest lessons I learned as a parent is the difference between anger and action.
Many times it seems like children don’t listen to us until we get angry, but in fact that is not at all what is going on. Our anger shows them that we have finally reached the end and are ready to take action.
It becomes so much easier to enforce guidelines and boundaries with your kids when you communicate them carefully, give one warning, and then take action. You can totally skip the anger which is often destructive and isn’t really motivating the children anyway.
A good example of this is bedtime:
You call in from another room, “Go get your pajamas on,” and your child totally ignores you. You call again in a few minutes and nothing happens. You storm in the room screaming and Johnny runs up the stairs two at a time. He didn’t jump to it because you are mad, he went because he knew you were ready to take action.
The Bible doesn’t say we shouldn’t be angry, but it does say God is “slow to anger” and we should be slow to anger as well.
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