Rebellion
This is a serious problem in our society. Grown children raised without a clear understanding of authority, free loading on their parents. We see it everywhere, in rural, suburban, and urban settings. In low, middle and affluent economic classes. Children as old as 30 or (sometimes older) still at home free loading off their parents.
Why did this happen? Well, it happened because parents were told that they should bail their kids out of all kinds of consequences, should not discipline their children with the rod, should extend extra grace and mercy to them. Well, look at them now! Keep extending that grace, and you have a grown man or woman still living under their parent’s roof, rebelling!
It is possible to love your children and discipline them. In fact the Word says that parents who do not discipline their children promptly, do not love them. By allowing young children to run without authority, parents have created adult children with no respect for authority, and adult children who are “handicapped” in society, unable to work because they do not have the self discipline to hold down a job.
We have an epidemic of children diagnosed with AD(H)D, on Ritalin, told that they are unable to concentrate, or sit still. But I wonder just how many of those cases are really POOR PARENTING. If a parent does not train a child to focus their mind, to sit still, to be quiet, how can we send them to school and expect all of them to conform? If a mother allows her young boys (or girls) to run around the house screaming like banshees, never requiring them to sit still, or to be quiet, or to focus on an intense project; HOW CAN YOU EXPECT that they will do this in SCHOOL?
I think parents are doing a PISS POOR job in todays world. And I am afraid to discover what all these rebellious, children who lack self control and self discipline will be like in 20 years. Perhaps they will be free loading off their parents, and when their parents cannot help them anymore, they will turn to welfare, or they will get a job!
So… what do you do when your grown child is still at home? After you have already created that child, trained him or her to be this way? This is my brief idea… i bet it isnt prefect, but it is an idea better than letting them free load their whole life.
1. Apologize. Tell your child that you are sorry you did a piss poor job of raising them. Tell them that you feel responsible for your child’s inability to work, and inability to become independent.
2. Set up new rules. (Oh the thirty somethings are gonna HATE this… they may even leave just to avoid submission.)
(These rules should go something like this: 1. you will submit to your mother and father. 2. you will honor your mother and father. 3. You will promptly begin looking for a job. 3. you will attend a church of your choosing. 4. you will submit to the authority in this house, i.e. your mother and your father, with regards to discipline. 5. as soon as you hold a job you will begin paying rent.)
If any of these rules (except 4.) are broken you will discipline your child. Find a willowy switch, if you have a daughter, the mother will administer “lashings”, if you have a son the father will. The child will submit to the discipline or they will leave. If they know what is good for them they will submit, knowing that they will be better off for it! If your child does not submit, you kick them out. If they will not leave you wait till they leave on their own free will then change the locks, and lock down the house. If they are reclusive and NEVER leave the house, you will find big male friends to escort them out.
Any questions?
step 3. TRAIN your child! Require them to submit, and then USE YOUR AUTHORITY to teach them. RETRAINING is harder than training the first time, but it will save your child from the gates of Hell. You must devote time to them, and require it of them. To teach them. To disciple them. You are starting over, even though the child is grown, if they are willing to submit it is not too late. If they are not willing to submit there is nothing more you can do for them. KICK THEM OUT, CUT THEM OFF. This will not kill your child either, it will force them to grow up. IF your son or daughter leaves, and comes back repentant, require the same rules, and open your doors. If they break the rules throw them out. The loving Father always welcomes us back, but we are not always in His good graces, unconfessed, unrepented sin separates even the saved from the Father’s blessing for a time.
You thought I was radical before, hehehe, bet you didn’t see this one coming from a mile away! Oh I bet I will get all kinds of flack for this post!
If you don’t agree, you don’t need to be nasty. Just state your point, and I promise I will think on it! There may be a better way!
Peace,
Meg
May 25th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
All seems pretty reasonable to me. I would take this extra step though: any child of mine under my roof comes to MY church, and that, at all the meetings.
Discipline is definitely a lost art in our modern, ungodly age, and indeed, we are seeing the fruits of it in the lives of our young people.
How I fear what the next generation will look like…
*Rand shudders here.
Take care,
Rand
May 25th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
hehehe… i am with you! *shudder*
I havent seen Rev Ed in a while! I wonder if he stopped reading!
Meg
May 25th, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Those are some awesome points Meg, you're totally right, I wonder what the heck goes into some parents heads these days in regard to how children are being brought up.
May 25th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
I'm still around, Meg. Just getting into my busy season, so I don't get much reading time these days. Don't think you're getting rid of me that easily!
In basics we agree here. But if you're thinking of beginning discipline with a switch to a "child" in his/her 30's, it'll never work. For one, it's assault. For two, any offspring with even a tiny bit of maturity will walk out before anything like that happens. True, that's the goal. But you really don't have to go to that extreme to accomplish it.
But discipline needs to begin far earlier than that.
May 26th, 2005 at 7:05 am
ABSOLUTELY, discipline NEEDS to begin far earlier than that. And really, I think any adult child WITH maturity woudl stick around for the switching. Or they would just behave and not get one! But in reality, I would hope they would leave and grow up. A parent may have already failed, and now the child is plenty grown enough to fix himself. But from experience, it is FAR easier to get trained by another person whom you wilfully submit to, than it is to try to train yourself. So if they had any sense they would try to learn from their parents this time around.
Meg
May 27th, 2005 at 5:05 pm
It all starts with a self-centered laziness. The great crime of our society is that we have ingrained into everyone their rights to have leisure before hard work.
Plant the kid in front of the TV so you can play on the computer or hang out with your buddies, plant the kid in daycare so both can work to buy more and better toys so we have better time off work.
Some parents are so lazy that they won't even confront their kids when there are problems. I even know of parents who are so uninvolved that they don't even bother to see their kids are building bombs and storing machine guns to take to school. Ask the folks in Columbine about that one.
I know of a couple (I'll call them my ex-tenants) who were so lazy they wouldn't even wear clean clothes or bathe often. They let their 3 year-old daughter run around the whole house almost naked and she was brought back to the house by neighbors on more than one occasion having gone outside and accross a busy street. They are so wrapped up in their own little selves that the only time either one of them had any motivation was when it was to scream at the other (in front of the kid) over eachothers laziness. You can just imagine how much fun we are having to get them to clean up the apartment now that they have moved out.
We let the world "educate" or kids without even bothering to find out what sort of abominations they are being exposed too. The devil has always counted laziness to do much of his work. None of us wants trouble, wants to stand uip and say "no more" or "you shall not pass!!" or merely "get up off your lazy butt"!!!
Guilty as charged.
June 20th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
I don’t recommend following the verses that tell us to eat unruly children (Ezekiel 5:10; Deuteronomy 28:53, 57; Jeremiah 19:9). One needn’t follow Weight Watchers to recognize how much excess fat that would involve. Nevertheless, you can put the fear of God in your offspring by reading them these verses. Our oldest son, Matthew, didn’t open his mouth for a week after the night I turned up the hot water on his bath and started slicing vegetables into the tub.
Assuming the child isn’t too demonic, and only occasionally misbehaves, you are nonetheless allowed and obliged to beat the stuffing out of it with a rod. No less than three verses in Proverbs tell us so (23:13-14; 22:15; 13:24). That’s almost as many verses as those that tell us how wretched we women are. Harry and I hang a rod on a wall of every room in our house, and that has an amazing deterrent effect. Nonetheless, Harry is compelled to remove and use the implement at least once or twice a day. Surely you didn’t think my husband’s beautiful biceps came from a weight room. Not only does Biblical beating result in children that will rarely interrupt your cappuccino with whining, but it also ensures your boys will be of the Hardy, rather than the Nancy, variety. The latter would be too painful. A pelvis thrust against a welt hurts just as much as one thrust against a disfigured nose. Just ask Michael Jackson.