“Do Not Provoke Your Children

“Do Not Provoke Your Children

lest they should become discouraged.” Col. 3:21. “Do not provoke your children to wrath.” Eph. 6:4. As we can see, there is something that is called provoking your own children and it has two serious consequences: they get angry, and they become discouraged. One gets angry when one is unreasonably treated, and one loses courage when the task at hand becomes too difficult. However, children need to be instructed; they need to get accustomed to working and being taught both in earthly as well as in spiritual things.

The secret is in doing it right; start at the right age, give them the right amount, for the right length of time and at proper intervals. Nothing comes of nothing. We have to get them to do something, expect something of them, and simultaneously exhort, correct, and chasten them. Otherwise nothing will come of it. “A child left to himself brings shame to his mother.” Prov. 29:15.

If we instruct them too early, if their task is too hard for them, if they have to do it for too long, if we require or expect too much from them, they will become discouraged. If we correct or chastise them too often or too much, they will get angry. It can even lead to a break in the love and trust relationship, or that they harden themselves.

We are mature and experienced and consequently have much more light, or even enormously much more light, and it is therefore very difficult for us to be sufficiently longsuffering. It is very easy for us to expect too much of our children. Our memory is also deficient; consequently we have, for the most part, forgotten how pitiable we were when we were children.

It is obvious that we would like it to go well with our children, and that they make quick progress. We would very much like to instruct them in everything that is good and thoroughly impress it on their minds. However, we depend on their receptivity. Wanting to further the good, independent of their receptivity, is like kicking against the goads. Everything has to be cultivated in them little by little, and by and large also according to the perfect law of liberty. They, as well as we, need time.

We could say that they should not get angry or be discouraged. However, to expect that is to expect perfect victory. It is to expect from children what most adults—in spite of everything they have heard—have not been able to attain for as long as they have lived.

Children are also provoked to wrath if you make fun of them. In the vast majority of cases this is an inadmissible and unacceptable way for adults to amuse themselves, which some adults are inclined to do. On rare occasions, it can be an appropriate way of dealing with a child in the course of his upbringing, but as a rule, adults use it to amuse themselves at the expense of children.