Hey, this is Wayne Stender with Celebrate Kids. Hey, before we jump into today's podcast, I just want to let you know that this podcast episode is brought to you by our friends over at Creating a Masterpiece. We just wrapped up an event with Creating a Masterpiece and had some special time with them, and we were reminded of why we love doing ministry with them, why they're such an important part of what we're doing. Dr. Kathy at this event talked about
the eight great smarts and highlighted picture smarts. One of the things Dr. Cathy teaches in 8 Great Smarts is that everyone has all eight smarts. You can awaken these smarts in your kids as they grow and develop, and it enables them to have greater opportunity to develop who they are and understand a little bit more about their identity and also just become more confident in engaging the world because they have smarts
in different areas. What creating a masterpiece does is helps you build smarts in your kids through online training and teaching of how to engage art. And this is coming from a Christian perspective, a biblical worldview. The beauty of what is happening as the instructors are teaching your children is dynamic and they pray over this curriculum. We encourage you to go over to creatingamasterpiece.com and sign up for one of the free demos and the courses. Again, that's creatingamasterpiece.com.
Sign up for one of the free demos and you'll be inspired to engage this with your kid and maybe have a summer program that guides them through some different art projects that they might want to engage. And in that, you'll be awakening the smarts inside of them. Again, creatingamasterpiece.com. This episode's brought to you by our friends there. So let's turn now to the podcast. You know, Dr. Kathy, today in the Celebrate Kids podcast, this daily segment, Facing
the Dark, I want to look a little bit at motivating our kids. And some of this is because I read a recent article in The Atlantic that talked about the wrong way to motivate your child. They note in the article that children often fall short. Many parents' instinct is to take away something that that kid loves to help them understand that they shouldn't do whatever they shouldn't have done again, right? They say that that's the wrong impulse inside of
the article. And now I want to be conscious here. I mean, the nice way to say that kids, you know, have made a mistake or have, you know, done something wrong is to say that kids fell short, but there's really a reality that I think we need to understand. And I like to use this phrase and I don't know if it's a good, like, I don't think this is healthy, but we're kind of raising little sinners, right? That's just kind of the nature of being a parent. You're working with kids. You're a sinner and
you begat sinners. That's just kind of the way it goes. And sometimes their sin isn't just nicely, you know, falling short, right? I mean, we need to really let failure have some weight. I would say even like obstinance or misbehavior or bad attitudes, they need to have a weight in our parenting, especially when we look at it. We can't just say, oh, you fell short in that thing. And then now let's try to help you not do that again by making your life
better in another way. You know, I don't know if that's really a great way to look at this, but I guess that's why I want to ask you this. How do we know when something is just kind of a mindless mistake, which I think a lot of the world looks like, especially when kids are making mistakes or trying out kind of being a kid, you know, that they break the window in the neighbor's house by hitting a baseball there, you know, and we kind of say, oh, that's just a mindless mistake.
Or should that be like a really big deal? How do we know when something is just a kid fell short or when it's like, no, this thing is really important. You need to know this is Yeah, great question. And I can see how you went there from this article talking about just take something away, you know, to motivate them to do the things that are good for them. And I just wanted to say, I do agree that, you know, we're raising little sinners. Now
it's funny, but it's not funny. Now, if they're saved, you know, even a young child, my nieces and nephew came to faith young in life. Now they needed to be discipled just like I needed to be discipled after I trusted Christ at the age of 19. It's no different. You just do it differently. but the sin nature's still
there. But I wanna say to every parent and grandparent, educator who's listening, that if your children have trusted Christ, in fact, at a convention I just spoke at, many parents would come up and they would ask me questions, which is always a delight, such an honor to hear their heart. And before I would go very far into the discussion, I would ask, is your child saved? Like I would not offer solutions until I found
out, is the child who you just described saved? Because if a child is saved, they have the Holy Spirit as a gift to lead and instruct and convict, and they should have a love for God that motivates them to be right and do right in the example of Jesus Christ. It changes us. And we're dead to sin. According to the scripture, we're dead to sin and alive to Christ if we have been discipled. So I do want to put that out there. The sin nature is real and it
does make things complicated. And it's what gives parents hope, right? If five days in a row, the child has made the same mistake, you know, you're not a terrible, and the kid isn't a terrible kid, a pattern of a mistake has rooted and they're gaining something from that, right? When you look, even the mistakes I make or the sin temptations that I am drawn to have something to do with unmet needs. And
I'm trying to meet a need in an illegitimate way. So you can begin to look at the pattern and how do you figure out if it's a mindless mistake versus something that's a big deal? Was it a willful disobedient act to, you know, that your kid is mad at the neighbor who said, don't step on my grass. When you guys are outside, my grass is my grass. Get over in your yard. and your kid is mad at the neighbor for having a boundary and chooses to aim
the baseball in that direction, that's a problem, right? That takes a different reaction from the mom and dad than a kid who's learning to play ball and doesn't know what he's doing and accidentally hits in the wrong direction and oh my goodness, the ball hits a car window or hits a dining room window. That's a legitimate mistake. There's consequences because you still could have been more careful You'll pay for the, you know, the window or whatever that's on the parents to help the kid
figure out what to do. But there's a difference, right? There's always a difference, even for us as adults, between a willful decision to sin or to be in trouble versus something that's accidental. And how do you know, again, you look for the pattern. If it happens five days
You know, Dr. Kathy, I think that's great. That's really helpful to think through and process, you know, and the reality for me, and I'm sure it's like this for many other parents, you know, we got grounded and probably as we grew up, we had our bikes taken away if we did something that we shouldn't have done and gone to the friend's house without asking our parents or, you know, our parents parked our car for a week because our grades
weren't high enough, right? There's just realities that I think for a lot of us, that's the way that we were raised is that if you did something or didn't do something, you oftentimes had these things taken away. And I know it's kind of hard to believe that many of us were, you know, poorly behaved in our younger youth, if I could put it that way. It's true, right? But when parents take away things that we like, Is that bad? Is it bad to maybe remove something
that somebody loves? You know, as this article kind of asserts, it's not, you know, that's, that's not the way that they recommend we should do it. We shouldn't take away things kids like to discipline them or to help them build better muscles. Is that a good practice or policy to have or what parameters would you put around that
Yeah, it's a complex issue, and I'm glad we're talking about it. In my book, Start With a Heart, which is the book I wrote that is related to motivation, I begin by saying that all children are motivated. The question is not, how do I get them motivated? The question is, how do I redirect their motivation to something that is healthy? So kids who get into trouble are motivated by the attention they get or the power they feel. or by being king of the mountain with
their peer group. And you were so brave to do that. I can't believe you did that. Okay, so they're all motivated. So how do we redirect their motivation, their desire to those things that are healthy? That's the question of the day. And sometimes taking something away will work. The key is that whatever you take away has to be related to the crime. Okay. So like if you broke curfew because you have the independence of a car or a bike, then locking down the car, the bike makes sense
because it allows you to break curfew easily. And so by taking that away and maybe saying you're required to be at home for seven days in a row, you can no longer for that seven days anyway, break that, break that rule or that expectation. If somebody is, you know, eating way too many Oreo cookies, you know, they get the Oreo cookies taken away and they're not offered one for X number of days or whatever. We could go on and on. But let me give you this
insight, Wayne. There is some research that I remember from forever ago. I'll have to look this up, but I bet there's still valid ideas here, that it's more motivational for some kids to give them something when they're good than to take away something when they're bad. So what you want to be doing is to be motivating new behavior. So one of the ways you motivate new behavior is notice it,
inspire them to want to do that again. So let's say for, you've had some talks with your kids about curfew and they've been consistently running 15 to 20 minutes late. They always have an excuse and you talk about it and say, you know, you've got to watch. We're just going to say to you, no excuse. We're going to expect three days in a row of timeliness. That's
a, that's character quality that you prioritize our expectation. You're capable of, you know, setting an alarm on your watch, standing up to your peer group and saying, I'm going to honor my parents and doing what's right. So I need to leave now. And then what you do, let's say three days in a row, your child's home within five minutes of curfew. Now you reward with something that's good. and maybe on
Friday you give him 30 extra minutes with his friends. Or maybe like if a child was young, and this is one of my favorite things to recommend, actually, if a child is young and they're riding their bike to a neighbor, then after three days of getting home on time for dinner or for bedtime, you surprise your kid by washing his bike. Or you buy him a new bell or a new vanity plate for his bike, because see, the bike is
the issue. So offering him something good when he's good could be more motivating than taking something away when he's bad, quote unquote You know, Dr. Cathy, I love that. I think that's really helpful to process and think through, especially because oftentimes I think as parents, when we discipline our kids, and some of this conversation even might have this caveat that we kind of assume is already happening. And that's that we actually
have a great relationship with our kids. And I think sometimes as parents, it can be natural for us to look at something like an issue and say, well, I don't really want to address that because I think it might strain my relationship with my kid. That might be a thing that I know that they love. And so I can't really engage that thing. Especially I find this we've been like with friends with our kids where our
kids might have friends that might not be great influences on them. And as a parent, it's hard for me to discipline them because I really want my kids to have friends, right? Like that's who they're really belonging with. And if they didn't hang out with that friend, they wouldn't hang out with any friends. And so I can't really discipline them because they're bringing this bad attitude or this behavior home
because of their friends. But it's any number of things, right? I think when we look at discipline, How do we have like that kind of a relationship that isn't just so impacted by, you know, discipline strains or correction strains that happen here? How do we build that kind of a connection with our kids so that we're not losing them while we're I respect the questions. This is not easy. In the best case scenario, we start when they're young.
so that they understand that it is our role as parents to motivate proper behavior and wise choices. So when they're three, four, five, six, seven, eight, we're on their case, if you will, and we affirm the wisdom that we see them acting upon, and we correct what is unhealthy. Correct is to put it right. Criticize is to point it out. We don't need to be critical. Critical is not of the Lord. To criticize is to point it out. To correct is to
put it right. So if we start when they're young, training them in righteousness and walking them through the kitchen so that they understand the difference between walking and running. And we say to them, hey, be careful, grandma's coming over and she's nervous if you run around. What does be careful mean? That's so abstract. Let me show you what careful is. All right, and you demonstrate it and you define it and you describe it. So you train, discipline and
disciple, same word, right? To disciple our children in righteousness requires training and correction and repetition and definitions and demonstrations and role modeling. And this would be the ideal discipline. It has to do with the training for getting it right. Not the telling and yelling, but the training that takes more effort. We got to slow down. We prioritize them in their heart. Why?
Because, oh my goodness, they're ours. And we get the privilege of helping them become who God designed them to be so that a lack of discipline doesn't get in the way of purpose and productivity and joy and health and wellness and success. And I think, Wayne, you're not gonna be surprised when I say that discipline must be about character. We know, and I wrote about this in the book, Parent Differently, every disobedience is
rooted in unhealthy character, every single one. If children argue and complain and are disrespectful and push back and roll their eyes, they're being prideful. It's a lack of flexibility. It is self-centeredness and selfishness. I can guarantee, I don't mean this to sound arrogant at all, but if you give me a discipline issue, I can show you the character quality that they
need to develop. And that's what I write about in the book, Parent Differently. Discipline has to be about matters of the heart because all of our beliefs cause all of our behavior and it springs from there. You know, as Dr. Kathy was talking, it reminded me of a passage that comes out of 1 Samuel chapter 3, and I'll begin reading at verse 11. And the Lord said to Samuel, See, I am about to do something in Israel that
will make the ears of everyone who hears about it tingle. At that time, I will carry out against Eli everything I have spoken about his family, from the beginning to the end. For I told you that I would judge his family forever because of the sin that he knew about, his son's blasphemed God, and he failed to restrain them. Therefore, I swore to the house of Eli, the guilt of Eli's house will never be
atoned for by sacrifice or offering. This is a powerful passage because in this time period, Eli, he's really a priest. And it's during an era of Israel's judges. It's a period that's marked by moral decline and spiritual compromise. And Eli's sons, Hophni and Phinehas, served as priests but acted wickedly. They showed contempt for God's sacrifices and abused their authority as priests. Eli knew about their behavior, but he
failed to correct them firmly. And as a result, God judged Eli's household, declaring that his lineage would no longer serve as priests. This story highlights the necessity of timely, clear, and firm correction. Eli's permissiveness led to really a disastrous consequence for his family. As parents, we should not overlook persistent misbehavior. Instead, we need to lovingly but firmly confront and discipline our kids to
protect their character and their spiritual health and development. And in doing that, we can help our kids understand that the correction that we give is a correction that comes from the Lord, and they don't have to bear the weight of their sin in the same way that Eli and his sons had to bear, where not even their sacrifices would atone for what the wrongs were that they did. I think correcting our kids actually does give them a bright light to
help them understand how they should live in these different moments. And they're not thrown back and forth by their natural inclinations or desires. So be bold, be firm, be loving, but disciplined. I hope that's an encouragement for you today as we jump into a new week. And I hope this podcast is really an encouragement for you. Dr. Kathy is traveling around the world almost right now, and she is going
to be in a lot of different places. If you'd like to hear Dr. Kathy live, I encourage you to go to our website, CelebrateKids.com, and check out the link that says Book Dr. Kathy. You can see a little bit
of her itinerary there. But if you'd also like to bring her into maybe your homeschool group or maybe to speak to your church or something of that nature, Please let me know, fill out a form, and let's talk a little bit about what we can do to bring Dr. Cathy to speak live to your event and give you courage and hope and encouragement as you're parenting and guiding parents through what is really a challenging cultural moment. I want to thank you for listening to
the Celebrate Kids podcast, this daily episode of Face in the Dark. On behalf of Dr. Cathy Cook, my name is Wayne Stender. We're