Train "Em Up! -Part 1

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” –Prov 22:6 (NKJV)

I had an incident occur last week with my daughter that really caught me off guard. Now, for respect of her privacy, I won’t say exactly what she did. I can tell you it was very uncharacteristic of her and I was quite disappointed. Please keep in mind that she is also only 5 years old, so there’s a lot of growing and life lessons to still be learned. I found out about the situation
as I was heading back to drop her off to her mom, so I didn’t really have much time to absorb and discuss the whole thing with her. What I DID have time to do was pray, and boy did God come through on this one! Here’s how everything unfolded:

1. I affirmed her with love. Based on all of the reading and studying I’ve done over circumstances like this, as well as personal experience, I have learned that our kids need to know first and foremost that they are loved. Yes, there may be punishment involved, but flying off the handle with yelling first is not the way to handle it. I explained to her that I loved her very much, but that I was also very disappointed in her.

2. I gave her an acceptable punishment- one that fit the crime. Basically, she is grounded from TV for 2 weeks and she must apologize to the other people involved.


3. We prayed at the end of the night as usual, but I asked her to throw in a request for forgiveness from God as well for what she had done- to which she complied.

This all occurred on a Tuesday night, I would have to wait until Thursday to finish the
lesson. When Thursday did roll around, the only time I brought it back up was to tell her that we were on our way back for her to make her apology and then it would be done from there.