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Are your kids compliant or obedient?

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And why does it even matter?

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Welcome to Living Influence.

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I'm your host, Scott Boyd, along with my friend, mentor, Bill Frawl.

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We're doing some series on parenting.

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I want to start this session off with a story of a documentary I watched on Netflix.

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It was called Shiny Happy People.

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It was about kids that had come from legalistic, maybe if not legalistic, just very passion-inducing, stir you up, get you all super excited about God.

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And it talked about these kids were all adults, and they're talking about their lives, and

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And their lives are kind of in a shamble.

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Yes.

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And they rejected their parents' truth, and they're kind of trying to find their own way.

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Some were believers.

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Some weren't.

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It was painful to watch.

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I'll bet.

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Because I started off as a legalistic parent.

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Yes.

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And worked my way out of that, but not after some damage had been done.

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Yeah.

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And so I think it's a relevant topic about it.

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Very topic.

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Very, very much so.

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To talk about, yeah.

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Very much so.

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Thank you for that beginning, because it fits perfectly into what we're thinking about.

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Way back in the hippie days, my wife and I had the privilege of seeing literally hundreds of young adults come to Christ.

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So that was now 50 years ago, right?

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53 years ago.

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53 years ago.

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It's a long time ago.

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Wow.

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What we discovered is they didn't know much about marriage.

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So we did a lot of marriage classes.

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And then we discovered they were getting married and having children, and they didn't know very much about parenting.

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And so they would come to me with all kinds of questions about parenting.

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And what we did is we created a class on parenting for parents with children zero to four years old.

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And our ministry kept growing and they kept getting older.

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And we had to do a class on parenting for children five to nine years old.

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It was a great learning experience for me.

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I spent a lot of time.

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And what we're gonna talk about today was one of the key elements of that time.

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And then, of course, they kept growing.

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And then we did 10 to 14, and then we did 14 to 18.

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And one of the constructs, Scott, that we used that was incredibly informative and fits your story

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is a construct that helps us understand parenting.

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Let's just assume your child is born.

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They're zero years old.

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At that time in the child's life, rules are incredibly important because they protect the child.

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So rules are important because they protect.

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They protect the child.

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Yeah.

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But here's the same child who is now 18,

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Yeah.

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And so what you have is you have these two triangles.

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Let's just say this one is all about rules and then it becomes about guidelines.

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And this one at 18 is all about guidelines.

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With reduced rules.

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So you start with zero guidelines.

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Exactly.

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And all rules.

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Exactly.

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But the goal is to end up with all guidelines and no rules.

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And extensive research has been done on this.

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And it's interesting.

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The pivotal year in the life of a child where they are the most pliable and where they have the greatest opportunity to participate in who they're becoming is nine years old.

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According to all this research, that is the most important development a year in a child.

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And guess what happens at nine years old?

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The rules and the guidelines are about the same.

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So the purpose of the construct is to help us understand something.

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A child will comply to rules as an action of their will.

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will obey because it's an action of the heart.

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And we have to understand that difference in a child.

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Yeah.

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And so that rocks my head because I didn't have that.

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I've always had this.

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negative definition of obedience.

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Right.

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It's all about me being obedient.

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Yeah.

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And in order to be obedient, it's all about my will.

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Ah, thank you.

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And yet...

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Thank you.

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And yet obedience is when I'm...

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trusting a truth, then I know I trust the truth because I act on it.

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And that action is obedience of a trusted truth, which doesn't feel like obedience at all to me.

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You're saying it so well.

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But you're saying it so well.

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So let's stay on that for a minute.

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Obedience is my acting upon the love, trust, and guidance of the one I trust.

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Mm-hmm.

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So back to our original lesson on parenting, and that is the greatest gift you can give your child is to be a parent they can trust.

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Yeah.

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Because when they trust you, they'll be able to act upon the love you have for them.

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When they trust you, they'll be able to act upon the guidance you give to them.

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Yeah, so that's a big one.

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It's like gigantic in parenting.

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Yeah, yeah.

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It's gigantic.

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They'll act on the guidance because they trust it, because they trust you.

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Absolutely.

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Now, let's do that as Christians now and imagine the multiple stories in the Bible of individuals who obey God.

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You know who they were?

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They were the people who trusted God.

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Yeah.

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There are stories of the Pharisees who did everything they could to comply with the law.

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And the legalists in that documentary you watched infected their children with compliance.

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Now, here's a sad reality.

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Compliant children...

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will blame their parents for their life choices.

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Ouch, mom and dad, ouch.

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Yeah.

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You know, this whole theology that creates the ideal Christian family, that models the ideal Christian life for the world, is not a healthy theology.

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One of the major reasons a child acts out that we often interpret as rebellions

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is not rebellion.

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A child is acting out because they're searching for acceptance.

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It's critical to good parenting that our children begin to participate at even two years old.

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with guidelines.

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Let me give you a simple example.

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Children actually are born with taste.

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Yeah.

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They really are.

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Yeah.

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They're born with taste.

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Yeah.

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Even like the food they like or don't like.

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Now, a parent will say, well, you're going to eat it because it's good for you.

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The kid doesn't like it.

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Yeah.

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The kid's trying to tell you something.

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I love eating, mom and dad.

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I don't like that.

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Yeah, but you're going to eat it because I told you you're going to eat it.

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You're going to comply and the child gags on it and eats it.

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What if the parent was wise enough to say, honey, I don't know why, but Susie hates carrots.

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What if we didn't feed her carrots?

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There's like 10,000 other things we could feed her.

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And so that's a silly example, but you know what?

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It fits all the way through because you'll notice something in a child, especially in little girls when they get to be 4, 5, 6, 7, they really, really like to dress themselves.

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They really like to wear things.

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And I don't know why it happens, but at least in my daughter's,

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they often choose to wear things that don't match.

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Yeah.

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They're not aware of style.

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They just like to wear certain stuff.

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Yeah.

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Why don't we let them?

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Why don't we learn to let our children's tastes be something we develop instead of something we squash because it isn't the way I would dress them or it's not the food I would feed them.

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See, it's like, to me, learning this dynamic in family is critical.

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This conversation takes me into shame as it works.

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And so the ability to let your children choose things that you don't like can trigger your shame because of how you will appear.

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What happens in that family where sin management or legalism is the theology—

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Looking good is the key to godliness.

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Yeah.

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And that's tragic.

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Or looking good is the key to me feeling okay about my identity.

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Exactly.

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And I would like to just say, not true, not true, not true.

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But that's the majority of us.

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So we have this child, and I'm not saying this is the perfect model, but what Grace and I did

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When our children turned 13, we celebrated them at 13.

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And they got to choose a restaurant where they would like to go.

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And our son chose a barbecue place.

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And our daughter, Wendy, she has a taste.

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So we ate at the penthouse on the bank for her 13th birthday.

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Yeah.

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And what we did in those birthdays is Grace and I came prepared to tell our children at 13 how much we love them, how appreciative we are of who they are becoming.

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We want to honor everything we could imagine in affirming who they are, their taste, their dynamic.

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And I'll talk about all that in a minute.

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And then at 13 years old, we said to our children, now we're going to tell you very simply that we only have five rules for you as a teenager.

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Everything else, every other decision, you get to participate in the choice.

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Yeah.

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And the five rules?

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Five rules were very simple.

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Most of them had to do with dating.

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Dating.

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As a teenager, rule number one, you won't date anyone more than two years older than you are.

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Okay.

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My daughters were attractive young women.

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I didn't want some 21-year-old guy messing with my 15-year-old daughter.

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Right.

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Just be honest.

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That was a rule.

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Yeah.

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Rule number two is that until you're 15, if you date, you'll only date in a group.

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Mm-hmm.

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Dating is important.

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At 15, you'll start a single date.

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And I would modify this a little bit now, but then it made a lot of sense.

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I said to them, you need to let us meet the young man.

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That was too young.

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My daughter, Wendy, she brought these guys over and they...

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They were like scared to death.

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Yeah.

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I probably should have waited that they were 18.

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But anyway, I'd modify that a little bit.

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And one of the rules, it sounds corny, but it was a rule, you had to be on a team.

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We realized that growing up,

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Yeah.

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Teams are essential.

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Learning how to work with people.

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Yeah.

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Learning how to work with people.

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And so, son Bill, he went on the tennis team, became a very good tennis player.

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Wendy was on the track team.

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She ran in those days the 400, the 440, now it's the 400.

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And she was cute about that.

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I go to sports events.

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I'm a yeller.

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You were one of those dads.

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I'm going to be one of those dads.

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Yeah, you participated.

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So she would say to me, Dad, please, please don't come to my track meets.

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Please don't come to my track meets.

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And I would go, and I'd sit up in the stands, and it was the cutest thing.

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She'd get on the line, and then she'd look up to find me.

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I knew what she was doing.

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It was wonderful.

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And our daughter Joy is a lot like her mother, not very athletic.

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And so she struggled with being on a team.

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And then one day she came to me, and she said, Dad, is choir a team?

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So that became her team.

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That became, it was so cute to me because I'm such a, I like sports and all of that.

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And I'm thinking, okay, yep, yep, choir's a team.

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And Joy joined the choir and we went to their first concert as a freshman.

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And she left an important point out of the concert.

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We went to the concert and unbeknownst to us, our daughter Joy did the solo at the concert as a freshman.

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And we just sat there crying and looked at each other.

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Where'd this all come from?

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The rules were important, but something more important than the rules, Scott, were the guidelines.

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Sitting with our children, it opened up a relationship to where they would sit with us and talk with us about whether they can do that.

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One of the rules was very simple.

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If you're out,

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You can't change locations without telling us.

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I wanted to protect them from group nonsense.

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And our daughter Joy was a master at a cute little thing.

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She's still a beautiful girl, of course, and a Windy.

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And I could tell when she called me whether she wanted to go with the group or not.

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I could tell by the way she asked me.

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And she'd say, Dad, the group is wanting to go to whatever.

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Can I go?

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No.

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My dad says I can't go, which was her way of saying to her friends, I don't want to go either, but I'm using my dad so I don't have to go.

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What was it for?

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It was to protect them.

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Mm-hmm.

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But we sat with our children and amazingly had conversations.

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And you know what we learned to do with our kids is we learned to, in guidelines, when they're violated, there are consequences.

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Mm-hmm.

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You know, there are consequences to violating guidelines?

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Yeah, just like there aren't violating rules.

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But the difference is the child gets to help decide what the penalty is.

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Scott, I'm going to tell you, all three kids were harder on themselves than we would have found.

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Wow, that's interesting.

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All three kids.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Whatever the penalty was, they jacked it up more than we would have.

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Yeah.

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Now, what's that all saying?

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What's that all saying?

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What it's saying to me, could I understand as a parent that probably my greatest assignment in parenting is the maturing of my child?

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That might be my greatest assignment.

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But nobody matures without obedience.

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Mm-hmm.

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And so what's happening with children who are taught to comply, they never grow up.

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Yeah.

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I got another question.

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Okay.

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Because you used obedience, but you used obedience differently.

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So I would also think nobody matures without freedom.

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Amen.

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Which is, to me, freedom is a byproduct of obedience.

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Okay.

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Tell me more.

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When I choose to trust—

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I am depending on God or somebody to help me

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get free.

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Because I understand innately as a human being that the reality of sin keeps me in bondage.

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I innately know that.

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You don't have to sit down with your children and teach them that lesson.

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They innately know that.

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Well, how do we free them from that reality?

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Any person, parent or not, child or not, any person who

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When we trust God and act upon who he says we are, we experience freedom.

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As we both teach God, one of the critical evidences of grace is the freedom.

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Mm-hmm.

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In the life that we live.

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Yeah.

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One of the evidences of sin management, which we'll get to in our next lessons, is that I stay in bondage.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, so I think when I hear you say the key to maturing is obedience.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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Beneath that is, okay, for me to understand belthrall right now, I have to construct a different definition for obedience than compliance.

296
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Absolutely.

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Because if I said the key to maturity is compliance…

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That's like, no, that's not going to mature them at all.

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At all.

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It's going to keep them in bondage.

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It's going to keep them in bondage.

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And so when you say obedience, obedience is acting on something that I want to begin to trust.

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Yes.

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Acting on something that I think I can trust.

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Yeah.

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And then… Acting upon something that I actually do trust.

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That I actually do trust.

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Yes.

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Maturing is beginning to take action and then discover the result, which then turns this truth that I'm beginning to trust into a conviction.

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How in the world do we experience grace?

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Yeah.

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Through trust.

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Through trust.

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That's how we experience grace.

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So I got a question for you.

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Okay.

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Can you write out these five principles?

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We move from these five guidelines.

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So we move from rules to guidelines.

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Could you write out the five guidelines?

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Sure.

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Okay, so here's what we're going to do.

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If you type guideline.

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In the comments, we'll send you Bill's five guidelines.

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For teenagers.

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For teenagers.

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Absolutely.

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And that'll be a wrap of Living Influence this week.

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We appreciate you watching.

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And don't forget, we have a book coming out in December, Living Influence, How Knowing Who You Are Changes Everyone Around You.

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It's written by Bill Frall and John Lynch.

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I know you're going to want to get it.

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And we'll give you more details as they come available to us.

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We hope to see you next week.

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Thanks again for listening to Living Influence.

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We appreciate you.

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We'd love it if you'd go to livinginfluence.com, contact us, and send us an email.

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We'd love to know what you're thinking.

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See you next week.