A Rule Or Their Own Way

In the spring she decided they would do a thing every evening.

They did it for about a month. It was good for two weeks and then it went stiff, and she could hear her own voice getting brisk about it, and one evening her son asked how long it was going to take and she heard exactly what she had built.

So in the summer she decided they should find their own way.

They found their own way. Their own way was nothing at all, which is what most people's own way is at nine and twelve, and by September there was nothing happening in that house at all.

So in the autumn she decided they would do a thing every evening.

She has been doing this for about four years. Rule, no rule, rule, no rule, every few months, and each swing is a genuine conviction at the time and each one is a reaction to the last one.

Here is what her eldest said in this kitchen about three weeks ago.

She asked what we do in this family.

Not as a complaint. She was not being difficult. She is twelve and she genuinely wanted to know the answer, because a friend had asked her and she had not been able to say.

And her mother said, well, we are quite relaxed about it.

And she heard herself say it, and she has not liked it since, because it is not true. She is not relaxed. She is on her fourth swing in four years and the result of all that conviction is a twelve year old who cannot answer a simple question about her own house.

If you keep changing your mind, sit down and have some toast. Nobody at this table is asking you to decide anything.

The word in the middle of that proverb

There is a proverb about children that most people quote for the promise at the end, and the verb at the front is the part that helps.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.Proverbs 22:6

Train up.

Not control. Not leave alone. Train, which is a third thing, and which anybody who has taught a child anything at all will recognize immediately.

Training is a shape with a person inside it. It is patient, it takes years, and it involves a great deal of repetition and a great deal of adjusting to the actual child in front of you. Nobody has ever been trained by being handed a system and nobody has ever been trained by being left entirely alone, and every parent knows both of those without being told.

You are being given a third option that is neither of the two you have been swinging between. Proverbs 22:6 uses the language of training rather than of ruling or of releasing, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that verb at the front of the sentence, which means the two options you have been alternating for four years were never the only two on the table.

What the swinging has actually taught them

Now the four years, and let us be gentle, because every one of those swings came from love and none of them were lazy.

Each decision was a good decision made against the last one. The rule was made because nothing was happening. The freedom was made because the rule had gone stiff. Every single swing was you correcting a real fault.

But a child does not learn from any one of those. A child learns from the pattern, and the pattern has been: this changes.

You have been teaching a pattern rather than a practice, and you were never trying to. Deuteronomy 6:7 says thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and it describes something continuous and ordinary rather than a policy, and it is the same Spirit who brings a word back to a young mind years afterward, which means what forms them is the repeated small thing rather than the correctness of any decision.

Nothing here prescribes a household

Let us be plain about what is not being handed to you, because a mother on her fourth swing will be looking for the next system and there is not one here.

Nobody is telling you what to do in the evenings. There is no recommended practice, no schedule, and no view about how much structure a family should have. Households differ enormously and this article has no opinion about yours.

You are the one who decides the shape of your own house, and Scripture leaves it there. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, and it is written about exactly this kind of question and deliberately declines to settle it, and it is the same Spirit who leads each believer, which means whatever you choose this week is yours and nobody here is choosing it.