Here is one more snipped from The Elijah Company resource guide that I couldn't resist sharing with you. It is from the article "Identity Directed Home Schooling" . . .
Frustrating a child
When a child becomes resistant, resentful, or obnoxious, and we parents are tempted to label them as rebellious and disrespectful, we should ask ourselves, “What’s really going on here? Is there something God has placed in this child that we are not respecting and encouraging? Is he struggling with a sense of destiny that leads him in a different direction than the direction we are trying to make him go? Is his way of being a person different from our way?”
At this point, three types of trust are critical. First, we must trust God—trust that He knows what He is doing, trust that He has put this “seed” of identity and destiny in our child, trust that He is capable of bringing that seed to fruition, and trust that He will “clue us in” about who our child really is and whether what we are dealing with is identity-related or is truly rebellion.
Second, we must trust ourselves—trust that all of our effort to be good parents and give our children a nurturing, Christian upbringing will ultimately be rewarded, even though we made plenty of mistakes.
Third, we must trust our child, and this is the hardest kind of trust to have. It is also very humbling, because this kind of trust requires us to relax our parent roles where we are “large and in charge” and become more like older brothers or sisters in Christ to our sons and daughters. We must trust that all the good and godly input we gave over the years actually lodged in our child’s heart, and is really in there, even though we can’t see any evidence of it.
We must also trust that our child has a deep enough relationship with the Lord to actually hear from God and respond to Him, even though that response may be expressed in foolish or immature ways. When we start trusting our children’s relationships with the Lord, we allow them to have more and more say in who they are and what they want to do with their time, and we begin respecting their individuality.
By the way, I forgot to mention in my Favorite Homeschooling Resource post that the authors of this resource guide have compiled their most popular articles into a book called "I Carved The Angel In The Marble".
I highly recommend it! In my humble opinion, it is one of the best homeschooling books out there. I will post more about this book later.
Dee
We are a homeschooling family raising 4 boys in Virginia. This blog is mostly about anything relevant to raising boys or homeschooling in general - but every once in a while I can't help but add some nonsense from our daily life.
