Then get ready, because I’m telling you that.

Your words have an incredible impact on what your child thinks. How many children finally learned how to ride a bike because their parents assured them they could do it if they didn’t give up? Or conversely, how many perfectly normal girls have mistakenly thought themselves fat because their dad jokingly called them “chubby?”

The reason your words have so much power (for good or bad) is that in a child’s world, parents are a trusted source of “truth.” If you say it, it must be true. This is why it is so important that you choose your words wisely.

The Bible reminds us that, “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life.” (Proverbs 10:11a). How would you like your words to be a fountain of life to your kids? Words that build them up instead of tear them down. Words that help your kids see themselves for who they really are: God’s precious workmanship.

I want you to remember that you words have tremendous power. Your words show your kids who YOU think they are. Who you think they are will shape who THEY think they are. Who they think they are will shape their BEHAVIOR and CHOICES. And their behavior and choices will shape their FUTURE.

As you tell your kids that you love them, encourage them to do their best, point out their positive choices, and help them find positive solutions to problems, your positive, encouraging, and uplifting words will shape your kids from the INSIDE OUT and be a fountain of life to your kids today!

A.  Nothing at all.
B.  “That was the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”
C.  “That was great. I’m glad I did it. I should do that again!”

I hope that most of you picked C. If you picked A or B, then I cannot help you any further, and you should put your computer mouse down before you accidentally hurt yourself. If you chose C, I’ve got great news for you. Your words have the power to make it happen.

Positive words from a parent are something that kids want to hear again and again. All you need to do is consistently link these words with a specific behavior that you want your children to learn, such as listening the first time.

Here’s the trick. You need to be aware of EVERY TIME your child does the positive behavior you are looking for. You’ll miss a few, of course, and that’s OK. The reasoning is tried and true: You can’t increase a positive behavior it if you don’t consistently reinforce it, and you can’t reinforce it if are not aware of it. And you won’t be aware of it unless you are watching carefully for it.

Once you see the behavior, immediately give your child what I call focused, positive attention. This just means that you are going to soak your child with warm parental attention while giving her a highly detailed description of the positive behavior that just made the whole thing happen.

Here are some easy examples:

· “Johnny, you did a great job listening the very first time I asked you!”
· “Susie, I just heard you say, ‘That’s OK, I can do it later,’ when mom said you couldn’t go outside right now. That’s a great way of being respectful when you have to wait for something.”
· “Hey, I was just watching you guys play your game and Brandon, I saw you let Michael go first. Michael, I heard you tell Brandon he did a good job. You’re both doing a great job of playing in a friendly and respectful way.”

Your goal is to pour on the focused, positive attention as often as you can. If you do, you will literally be amazed at what will happen. Susie will learn that mom and dad are paying attention to her positive behavior. She will begin to think that listening to mom and dad is fun (how could she not?). If it is fun, she will do it more often. If she does it more often, she will soon begin to do it without thinking. When she does it without thinking, it is becoming a new habit.

Just as I have seen hundreds of other parents do, help your child change her behavior by using your attention to teach her one of life’s most important lessons: Obeying God and treating others respectfully is a lot of fun.

Let your child choose the activity, within reason. If you would like, you can begin your time with a short prayer and then enjoy a fun activity together.  However, as you may have suspected, this is not your average play time. You will be busy sowing some very important seeds.

Watch your child closely during this time and point out his positive behavior, no matter how small. Make it a highly fun and rewarding time for both of you. If your child does something disrespectful, give him one chance to correct his behavior. If he does, tell him he made a good choice. If not, then your special time will be over for today.

No matter how challenging your child is, having a special time several times a week will begin to break the negative behavior cycle by creating new positive interactions that will help offset the negative ones. You will remember that you actually like your child (usually, that is) and your child will remember that his mom and dad are not evil ogres.

Special time communicates that your child is important to you -- and that message will slowly seep through your child’s tough exterior. As you strengthen your relationship with your child, there are other things you can do to improve your child’s behavior as well. I’ll show you those in future blogs. But for now, break the negative behavior cycle by showing your child how important he is with two of the greatest weapons God has given you: your love and your time.

You tell Johnny to turn off the T.V. He ignores you. You tell him to turn off the T.V. again. He makes an ape-like noise and continues watching. You raise your volume level, on the faint chance that somehow he didn’t hear you the first two times. Johnny replies, “Just a minute, I'm still watching.” Armed with this new piece of valuable information, you continue to repeat your request, getting louder and more aggravated each time. Johnny starts to argue along the lines of “Why are you so mean?”, and “No other parent in the world makes their child turn the T.V. off.”

Just before reaching the point of insanity, you tell Johnny to turn the T.V. off or you will do it for him. He barricades the T.V. with his body, but using your tactical combat skills, you evade his defenses and get to the T.V. You send Johnny to his room, and he responds with the logical question, “Why don't you go to your room?” You threaten him with the loss of every electronic game known to mankind and he reluctantly sulks off, muttering something which you suspect is probably not a Bible verse.

For some parents, this cycle happens several times a day. Not a month, a day. These parents often feel guilty and blame themselves for doing something (they’re not sure exactly what) wrong. How else could their child have turned out this way? I call this the negative behavior cycle. Everything in this example of Johnny and his mom perpetuates the pattern: the parent's ineffective style of giving commands, Johnny's negative responses, harmful parent/child communication, and the gradual damaging of the parent/child relationship.

A negative behavior cycle can be broken and replaced with a positive behavior cycle. In our last blog, we talked about the importance of your respectful, self-controlled example in setting the stage for a positive behavior cycle. In Part Two, I’ll show you a simple way to interrupt the negative cycle and kick the positive cycle into gear.

Before we can teach our kids how to be respectful, we need to make sure that we are leading the way. One summer weekend afternoon several years ago, I picked myself up off the couch and began my weekly lawn-mowing duties. As I pushed the mower back and forth across the lawn, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. There was my four-year-old son, Luke, keeping perfect pace with me as he pushed his plastic lawnmower (the kind that shoots bubbles out the top) along the sidewalk, his face filled with all the seriousness of a professional landscaper. When I walked, he walked. When I turned, he turned.

When I could stand the inescapable cuteness of it no longer, I stopped the lawnmower, walked over to Luke, and congratulated him on a nice job of mowing the sidewalk. But underneath my joviality, a more serious thought gripped my heart: If Luke is imitating me on something this trivial, how much more will he imitate me in things that really do matter?

If we want our kids to treat each other respectfully, the truth is that we have to begin with our own example. As Jesus reminded us in Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?” Being one who often has the whole plank aisle of Home Depot in his eye, this verse is always a good reminder for me. Social research has found, time and time again, that children really ARE influenced by their parents’ behavior. This means that the way you act with and around them will make them either more or less respectful. You get to choose.

While I am not exactly Father Teresa in this area (or any other area), I set the goal of trying to be respectful in every interaction I have with my boys. Memorizing the Golden Rule (e.g., Do unto others as you would have them do unto you) is a good way to start. If I ask my boys to do something, I remind myself to ask in a respectful way. If I joke around with them, I make sure to joke around in a respectful way. If I ground them for all eternity, I do it in a respectful way (just joking about the grounding for eternity---the American Academy of Grounding recommends grounding for no more than 15 years).

This is the first step in raising respectful kids: Showing them how YOU do it. I think you will find that, over time, this will have an even more powerful effect than your greatest lecture. They say that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. You don’t have to know quantum physics to figure out that your tree should be firmly planted in the field of respect.

“That's it. Off to your room!” Sherry was done with Billy's disrespectful attitude. Like one of his action figures, Billy was transforming from a polite, mild-mannered boy into a why-should-I-have-to-do-anything-around-here future resident of Cell Block 9. “What happened to my little Billy?” Sherry asked herself in tears, wondering if aliens really could inhabit the bodies of 5th grade boys.

Ever been there? Where you’ve tried every trick in the book and nothing seems to work? You’ve reasoned, given second (and ninth and tenth) chances, counted to 10, sent them to their rooms, called the National Guard, and even spanked on occasion. When nothing worked, you cycled through the same list again, this time louder and longer. You had always hoped that once the labor pains were over, things would get better from there. You never dreamed they would get worse.

You want to keep the kids, but you want them to lose the attitude. Is that too much to ask for the person who gave them life and an early supply of dairy products? Or if you are a father, you single-handedly supplied their last name. Perhaps you feel like Rodney Dangerfield, pulling at your overly tight collar and grimacing, “I don’t get no respect!”

The purpose of this blog is to help you change all that. I will show you the best strategies available for teaching your children how to obey God by treating their parents, siblings, and peers with respect.

· Listening the first time.
· Expressing angry feelings in a respectful way.
· Being flexible when they don=t get their way.

But first, we have to redefine our definition of biblical discipline. Making discipline biblical does not mean quoting a Bible verse while you scream at your child. Proverbs 22:6 summarizes the biblical approach to parenting: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Part of that training includes providing appropriate negative consequences for misbehavior, to be sure (Proverbs 29:17). The problem is that this is all we usually do. It is like trying to build a house with just one tool. It may be a good tool, but adding few other tools to your tool belt will make the job much easier.

What are the other tools you can use to teach your children to listen and be respectful? There are two. First, Proverbs tells us that the corrections of discipline are the way to life and that wisdom brings rewards (Proverbs 6:23, 9:12). You want your children to learn that listening to mom and dad and treating others respectfully is fun! These behaviors are not only a natural outgrowth of their relationship with God, they are also the best way to make friends, build a healthy self-concept, and enjoy fun privileges. Obeying God is not a bummer.  It's a blast!

Secondly, you can teach your children how to handle daily situations in a thoughtful and respectful way. Remember Proverbs 22:6 (“Train a child in the way he should go . . . .”). Most of us don't really know how to do this, so . . . we don't. In future blogs, you will learn how to teach your children to listen the first time, be respectful, and handle conflicts effectively.

There you have it. Three approaches for teaching your child the value of obeying their parents and treating others respectfully: 1) building your children's skills at handling everyday situations respectfully, 2) teaching your children that positive behavior brings great results, and 3) providing effective negative consequences when negative choices are made. That’s biblical discipline in a nutshell.

The psalmist wrote, “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” (Ps. 127:1). But it sure helps speed up your housing project when you are using the right tools. Begin today to think beyond merely using negative consequences to change your child's behavior. Using all three “discipline” tools (positive skill building, positive reinforcement, and negative consequences) will help your children learn that obeying God and listening to mom and dad are some of the best choices they will ever make. In my next blog, I’ll show you how you can lead the way.

I know what you’re thinking: Welcome to my world.

It seems like such a simple idea:  Let’s teach our kids to be respectful.  Yeah, and why don’t we teach them quantum physics at the same time. Well, take heart.  In this and coming blogs, I’m going to show you some effective ideas for how to turn this ship around.  Today, we’re going to start with understanding why being respectful is so important.

Why is it important to be respectful?  Ephesians 2:10 reminds us that each of us are God’s workmanship, hand-crafted to know and serve him for eternity.  Each one of us is valuable enough to God that he chose to die for us, to ransom us from our sin.  Not only are we valuable to God, we are valuable to our family.  How do you treat items that are incredibly valuable?  You treat them with respect.  Jesus instructs us to treat others as we would have them treat us (Luke 6:31).  Similarly, 1 Peter 2:17 tells us that we are to “show proper respect to everyone.”  Anyway you want to look at it, God wants us to treat each other with respect.  This is an important lesson that every child needs to learn.  In coming blogs, I’ll show you how.