Putting a leash on Enzo

As much as I would like for this title to be true, it is not ideal. Although, I will no longer have to worry about him climbing into things and eating everything that looks remotely edible (like his liquid cold medicine). I realized that no matter how high I put things to keep him away, he always manages to get to them.

We may not actually have a physical leash on Enzo, but we do have an imaginary leash on him. As parents we are trying our best to train Enzo up to be a man of God. But, how exactly are we modeling ourselves for him? I've realized that we "help" him do so much that he's becoming too dependent on us. For example, during mealtimes we hardly have him eat on his own because we just don't want to deal with the mess and having to clean up after him. So, as a result he's never really perfected his spoon/fork skill...or chopsticks skills. But, he is a champ at eating sandwiches and mac n'cheese, those he can eat on his own with minimal messiness. And then there's brushing his teeth. Yes, at age 3 we still help him brush his teeth, because we can't trust him to do it properly. Lately, he's been much better at it though, he's learning to rinse and spit with accidental toothpaste swallowing here and there. It's a work in progress, I know.

Today's devotional was about trusting our kids with more responsibilities and the importance of failure. I loved how Rick Warren worded this: "Part of bringing out the best in your kids involves allowing them to fail. Our tendency is to protect our kids from failure; it's natural. We want to protect them from mistakes. We don't want them to feel bad. If they do fail, we want to bail them out quickly so they won't suffer. But what we're doing is preventing them from learning a valuable lesson. Everybody fails; nobody is good at everything. The key to this has nothing to do with not failing in life; it's learning how to rebound from a failure. When you don't give kids the opportunity to fail, you are saying to them, "You're not competent, and I don't trust you. You can't handle it, so I'm going to do it for you." That approach keeps kids dependent upon their parents." This got me thinking to myself, how many times has my parents allowed me to "fail"? Growing up in the Asian culture, the word failure is not even in our vocabulary. We needed to work really hard at not failing at anything. If we were anywhere close to anything that were a potential threat of "failing" (whether it be an extracurricular activity like youth group, or a friend who is a bad influence) we would be forbidden from it as a preventative. All of this leashing caused me to be afraid of failure, and if I ever failed at anything it hurt my self-esteem to the maximum, because it only caused my parents to bear down on me even more...yelling, hitting, name calling..etc. Very quickly I learned to blame/cast responsibility of my failure onto someone/something else.

"The Bible says this in Galatians 6:5: "We are each responsible for our own conduct" (NLT). When your kids fail, don't let them blame anybody else. Why? Because we must all learn that we are responsible for our own actions. That is a desperately needed truth today, because we're living in a nation of victims. Everybody is a victim! It's all somebody else's fault! But the Bible says we're each responsible for our own conduct. We're far better off trusting our kids too much than we are trusting them too little." Isn't it funny how sin works? From the very beginning where Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent...generation after generation we are still blaming others for our failures and differences. You would think that after all this time God would just be fed up with all this and just demolish this little blue and green marble that we live on and be done with it. But, He loves us way too much to give up on us. Despite our childlike behaviors He forgives us and continues to let us fail and then picks us up afterwards.

So working towards that goal of building our boys up to be men of God will eventually be something that they have to learn on their own. We have to learn to relinquish our leash on the boys to God. Trusting that whenever they fail at something they'll be ok because their mommy and daddy will be there to help them up again...readying them to fail again. Not only does our boys require this, but we as their parents need to fail too. Only then will we all learn that our God is perfect and that we need Him. Don't you just love how our God is constantly looking out for our needs and humblings us?! I know I do! :)