Untangling the Rat's Nest

My youngest daughter has curly hair. Now, I have stick straight hair so it has taken me most of her eight years of life to figure out what to do with her hair. We've finally reached a point where most days her hair looks pretty decent.


Yesterday morning, though, we ran into a snag, actually, it was more of a rat's nest. It took me a good 20 minutes to work the snarls out of the thick hair at the back of her neck. It was a test of my patience and the thickness of her scalp. Needless to say, the end result was a frustrated mom and a sobbing child.


That rat's nest in my daughter's hair shouldn't have degenerated into the sobfest it became. After nearly three weeks of Christmas break, my patience was wearing thin. My youngest daughter has struggled with maintaining a respectful attitude over the entire break. The rat's nest in her hair was the breaking point for both of us. She ended up in her room for 10 minutes while I took a little mommy break.


Neither of us reacted in the way we should have. I absolutely should not have yelled at her for fussing when I pulled her hair, but she definitely over-reacted to the hair pulling. Not my finest moment in motherhood, but not my daughter's finest moment either.


Our morning turned out to be something like that rat's nest in her hair -- a big mess. Frayed tempers and frustrated tears weren't solving the problem either. We needed an attitude change for both of us.


So we sat in our recliner, wiped the tears away and took a new approach. Instead of talking about changing our words or changing our attitude, we talked about what it takes to be a good leader. We talked about the natural leadership qualities that my daughter has. We talked about how a good leader needs to be an encourager, with words and actions. We also talked about how good leaders lead by example.


The tears dried up and we had a good conversation about how God wants us to be leaders for Him. We want our actions to reflect His priorities, and one of God's priorities is for us to treat others with respect. 1 Peter 2:17 says "Show proper respect to everyone." Words and actions are all about respect. When we choose to treat others with respect, we are following God's priorities.


It's too soon to tell if our little chat yesterday morning will have a direct effect on my daughter's actions and words, but when our mommy tempers fray and our children's frustration reaches a tipping point, it can never hurt try something different.

Summer: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

It's inevitable. No matter how polite and respectful you teach your kids to be, they are going to encounter other children being disrespectful -- whether on TV, at school or even at the movie theaters. And they're going to wonder why other kids can talk that way to their parents, their siblings or their friends and they can't. So they will probably try it out on you.

I tend to find that the longer the school year goes on, the more my kids like to try out being disrespectful. They are around kids all day long that provoke the teacher or talk disrespectfully to other children, and that behavior inevitably rubs off on my kids.

Teaching our kids to respect others, especially those in authority is important. If our kids can't respect us or their teachers, then they won't find any reason to respect God's authority. God wants us to teach our children respect because it matters in their relationship with Him.

I love summer because it gives me an opportunity to remind my children that respect is important. My kids are home with me everyday in the summer, and I can teach and remind my kids that respect matters. It shows love for others, and it creates better relationships.

1 Peter 2:17 shows us that God thinks respect is important. It says: "Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor." We want our kids to show proper respect to everyone -- their parents, their peers, their teachers and anyone else they come across. Spend your summer reminding your kids why respect is important.

• Determine what areas of respect your kids are struggling with most. It may be they struggle to respect those in authority or they may have trouble respecting their friends or siblings. Put your focus on the thing they struggle with most.
• Explain to your kids that God wants us to be respectful of others. God created every person that we encounter, and He loves them. That makes them worthy of basic respect. Talk about how having respect for others means that we don't talk mean to each other or take things without asking.
• Have a "respect race" over the summer. On a piece of posterboard, draw a race track or a graph. Put each child's name on a bar of the graph or a piece for the race track. Every time you catch them being respectful, color in part of the graph or move their piece on the race track. The first person to the finish line or to fill in their bar on the graph gets a reward like choosing a family activity or an extra helping of dessert. Have a larger reward for the end of the summer if every child makes it around the track so many times or fills their bar on the graph a certain number of times.
• Set the rules for respect in your home and post them somewhere. Let your kids help set the rules. Talk about the actions that show respect. Make sure they cover things like speech, actions toward others and how to treat others' things. Hold every child that comes into your home to these same rules. Make sure that you are abiding by the rules as well.
• Institute a fine of some sort for disrespectful speech. Controlling the tongue is one of the hardest things for anyone to learn. Most adults still struggle with this. Put a jar out on the counter. Every time anyone in your family gets caught using disrespectful speech (and this includes tone of voice), charge them a set fine. At the end of the summer, decide as a family where you want to donate the money that has accumulated in the respect jar.

Spending your summer focused on fostering an environment of respect will help remind your kids of the need to be respectful when they leave your house, too. While you'll need to reinforce these lessons throughout the school year, setting a firm foundation over the summer makes those school-year lessons easier to handle.

The Respect Pyramid

We live in a world that has lost its understanding of the word respect. Respect used to be a shared value in our communities. Kids understood that parents and teachers were worthy of respect. Parents and teachers understood that they needed to be worthy of that respect. But it seems that in this day and age, respect has become an old-fashioned idea and for kids it has become something of a nebulous concept.

Most of us know respect when we see it, and we know disrespect when we see it, but explaining it in concrete terms to our kids is much more difficult. Much to the mortification of my fourth-grader, I helped out in her class at church on Sunday where we studied respect. The kids have been studying respect all month. Their definition for respect is a great one: Showing others they are important by what you say and do.

The great thing about this week's lesson was how the lesson made a very abstract concept into a concrete one for the kids. It was such a good illustration that I want to share it with you. All month the kids have been learning 1 Peter 2:17, "Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king." They have been talking about showing respect to parents, friends and authority figures. This week they learned that showing respect to others shows respect to God.

To illustrate this, we took small Dixie cups and let the kids write the names or titles of people to whom they should show respect. We took the cups and made a pyramid with them. At the top of the pyramid, I placed my cup, which had the word God written on it. The girls then took turns knocking a cup out of the bottom of the pyramid to show how it affected the cup with God written on it. Every time one of the bottom cups was knocked out, the God cup fell down. The girls really understood how showing respect to their parents or their teachers showed respect to God and how disrespecting their teachers or parents showed disrespect to God.

I thought this was a fantastic illustration to show kids that what they do reflects back on God. It gave them a visual picture that they can think about whenever they are tempted to show disrespect to someone. It make 1 Peter 2:17 a reality instead of just an abstract concept. Try it with your kids and watch understanding dawn on them, too.