4 Ways You Might Be Ruining Your Child’s Life

Here are four ways you might unintentionally ruin your child’s life.

Running Their Life

You can be ruining your child’s life by running it. What I mean by that is you might have them at soccer practice twice a week and every Saturday for the game. On Wednesday night, you might drag them to AWANAS. The child’s calendar might be so full that they feel like they’re in a cage and running in a hamster’s wheel.

Search and Rescue

How strange it must sound to a lot of parents when I tell them that we gave our children the freedom to fail. In other words, we weren’t about to do a “search and rescue” every time a crisis came up. If parents bail their children out from every possible situation, they’ll never know how to deal with failure and to solve their own problems. If they do fail, they might fall back on their parents, even after they’re grown, because their parents had always rescued them out of every predicament, whether it was the child’s own making or not.

Drill Sergeants

If being a “search and rescue” parent is one side of the ditch, the “drill sergeant” might be the other one. Fathers are commanded to not provoke their children to anger (Eph. 6:4). So even if you get the children to do something by using high-pressure tactics, if the child doesn’t do it as a decision within themselves, it will only be like being in the service. Once boot camp is out, so are they.

The Dominance of Screen Time

The dominance of screen time can include far too much television, way too many video games, and too much time spent watching videos. Parents would not knowingly poison their children, but they are allowing their minds to be poisoned by what is entering their minds via cable or satellite TV, the Internet, DVDs, and the multiplicity of violent video games.

Conclusion

Parenting children is intentional, and it takes a lot of hard work as well as experience, time, education, and also a lot of patience. We can so easily ruin our children’s lives if we’re not careful. Hopefully, these four risks will allow you to not repeat the mistakes that many other parents have already made. Unfortunately for some, it is now too late with their children.