Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Should Our Kids Just Obey Us?

...I was in the bathroom, and I was just thinking. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He said, "...and lead us not into temptation...". To me, this seems to imply a few things. One being, that God can lead us into temptation (duh right?). Another being, it must be okay for God to not lead us into temptation (second duh), or why would Jesus have us ask God that.
So we see something about our relationship with our Heavenly Father, that I think we can in turn practice with our own children. Children are tempted to do bad things. We as parents, as we get to know our kids, become well acquainted with them and their desires. So then we are left with two main options in training/dealing with them. We can either remove the temptations from them so they don't even have to deal with them, or we can leave them there, and put them in the predicament of having to obey us rather than their own desires.
So what should we do? Both. Just like God does with us. If we as adults can not bear up under constant temptation, we should not expect our kids to. It's okay, and good, to remove certain things from out of their reach. If you do not, you are for one, being a hypocrite, and two, you run the risk of "exasperating" your kids, which we are commanded not to do.