Faithful in Little
Big things are really rare. Most of life is actually a compilation of little things. Parenting is no different. 99.9% of parenting is… little things.
Indeed even most big things are mostly just a bunch of little things put together. Remember the Miracle on the Hudson? The one where the birds hit the engine of this jet plane with a lot of passengers and the pilots miraculously landed the plane on the Hudson and got everyone off? When that plane was on its way down, how many ‘little’ things did they need to do? How many switches did they need to switch, how many dials needed turning, how many things that they had done thousands of times before? That they had been trained to do thousands of times before?
Training and Habits
So let me make the claim that almost every big thing is made up of hundreds of small things, and that our job, as parents is, for the most part, to train those little things? To teach and train and discipline from day to day and hour to hour, come what may?
These little things do two things: they change habits, and they change environments. And they don’t just change them at the moment, but they change them over the years, more and more, growing and growing. Children who grow up with certain habits will help inculcate those habits upon their younger siblings… automatically.
First Time Listening
In my previous post, “First Time Listening”, I proposed that fathers take the radical step of answering their children the first time that they talk to them. That ‘answer’ might involve discipline, it might involve merely the holding up of a hand to tell the child to wait, or it might involve an actual answer. But something happens right away, and we avoid the ‘daddy, daddy’ phenomenon.
Now, consider what this changes in the house. Picture the quiet that it engenders. The ability to think and plan and make good decisions. Even to answer other children’s questions.
Clean up as you go
My wife will no doubt laugh when she reads this, because this is NOT my habit. It was my mother’s habit, it is my wife’s habit, but it is NOT my habit. I tend to be more of the ‘let the mess build up and then do a big job of cleaning it all up, rearranging, etc etc etc.” But suppose it were my habit, and suppose that I had taught and enforced this upon my children. What would be the result?
Well, one thing that would change would be the environment. Individual counters and tables would be clean… which would make any dirty dish stand out. It would be easily noticeable. It would stand out. Which would make it easier to see it and take care of it.
In other words, by cleaning up as you go you would find it easier to… clean up as you go.
Big Things
One of the most discouraging parts of life is looking at your life, seeing areas of failure, and seeing the huge number of changes that will need to take place in order to ‘fix it’, and despairing. Surely there is too much to change!
Here is where the ‘little things’ come in. Suppose you pick one little thing. Perhaps ‘First Time Obedience’. Suppose you sigh and leave the other things alone for a few days while you, your wife, and your older children teach and train and practice and teach and train ‘first time obedience’. (Note: I haven’t yet written that post.)
What will be the result? Well, assuming you have done a good job, you will now have a household of children all ready to obey the first time they are asked. So when you look at the next small thing you need to do, the next small thing you need to teach and train them in, you would find you had children… ready to obey!
Any Order
I remember about the first time I heard Dave Ramsey talking about getting out of debt. He talked about getting out of your smallest debt first. And I complained, saying that surely it made more sense to get out of the debt that had the worse interest. Someone else, I forget who, informed me that Dave’s idea was that by getting rid of the smallest debt first, you would get a feeling of success, which would help you carry on.
That’s an idea. My idea made sense… mathematically. And his idea made sense… psychologically. So I am going to suggest that you start your little things not in ‘any order’, but in any order. In any order that makes sense to you.
If you wish to to get your kids on board and helping, then I would suggest beginning with ‘first time listening’ or ‘first time obedience’. If your house is chaos, and it is keeping you from thinking, then I would suggest ‘clean up as you go’ or ‘always have something your supposed to be doing’.
Are your kids playing each other off each other? Then you can start with the ‘First Parent’ rule.
I’m not saying that you can just start anywhere… I’m saying that you need to look at your situation and decide where to start. What works for Dave Ramsey might not work for me. What works for me… not the rules but the starting place… might not work for you.
Conclusion
I am old, grey haired, and have 25 born grandchildren. I have a LOT of advice to pass out. Give me a coke and sit me in a comfortable chair and I will regale you for hours with advice. But this bit of advice doesn’t take hours. It is: start somewhere. Start with one little thing and get it done. Get it taught, get it trained, make it a habit… and use it to build into the next thing you do.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
and I are having a fun discussion about parenting. She is an advocate of ‘Gentle Parenting’, so I called my philosophy ‘Woodshed Parenting’ for contrast.
Woodshed Parenting: Laying out some of the foundations of proper parenting.
Learning in Silence: An exegesis and defence of ‘Children Should be Seen and not Heard’.
Upside Down Discipline: The woodshed creates tough, moral children.
Parthenogenic Parenting // Podcast Version: What is the role of the father in parenting?
Woodshed Discipleship : Teaching, Training, Punishment, and Pushing.
Not in the discussion, but related: