This morning as I was hanging out the washing, I glanced down briefly and noticed a small weed pushing itself out of the icy ground. My first thought was that I needed to pull it out. Straight on the tail of that thought came the whinge “Why do I always have to be the one to pull it out”. Then immediately came the lie “It won’t matter if I leave it a bit longer and just ignore it. It’s not very big at the moment. Besides, I need to hurry and put this washing out so I can get on to the next job”.
Have you ever had thoughts like that?
My mind immediately went to my parenting. When the kids were younger, it was so much easier to just ignore a bad behaviour or bad heart attitude because I always seemed to be busy doing something else and didn’t want to be disturbed or usually I was too exhausted to have to address another issue.
Friends, please, please, please. It is so much easier to address issues as they arise, especially heart attitudes that are not desirable before they get bigger and more entrenched.
One of the heart attitudes I wish I had addressed earlier was the whole concept of preferring friends over siblings to the detriment of the siblings relationship. This would become even more apparent when one of my children would have a friend around who would not be nice to that child’s sibling. A particular friend might come around and during the course of being at our home, start saying some unkind things about my child’s sibling. They would be modelling behaviour that we didn’t wish our kids to exhibit. Destructive behaviour and attitudes can easily be contagious and cause a wedge in relationships. I needed to deal with the wrong attitudes and behaviour before they became ‘larger weeds’ in the relationship otherwise I would soon start to see my child being nasty to their sibling.
Is there a small ‘weed’ in your children’s attitude or behaviour that you are noticing but too busy or too tired to deal with, or just plain hope it will sort itself out?
My encouragement to you is to deal with it now, before it gets bigger and takes more effort to deal with, plus has bigger consequences. Large weeds require more effort to pull out and leave a bigger hole.
I would love to hear what ‘weeds’ you feel are especially needed to deal with whilst they are small before they get bigger.