Are We Confusing Authoritative with Authoritarian?

Outside of the Church, there’s a frequent tendency toward permissive parenting – that is, being so child-centric that children are basically “permitted” to do whatever they want. Inside the Church, we often see a pendulum swing in the opposite direction: a child’s unique personhood is often ignored, with children being forced to think like their parents think and to behave the way parents want them to, out of sheer control on the parents’ part. “I’m bigger and stronger, so I will make you do as I wish.”

I absolutely believe that children need to learn to obey their parents even when they don’t understand. This is essential to keeping them safe. It’s also how they ultimately learn to obey God, whose instructions don’t always make perfect sense to us. But this can be done with an attitude of nurture (“…raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord…”) of the unique individuals God has designed them to be. It doesn’t have to be done with the goal of forcing them into a mold.

Parenting and Personality

An important foundation stone here is the recognition of our differences. There’s a tendency to believe and act as though the same response from one hundred different children in similar situations is always motivated by the same intent. But it isn’t. What looks like defiance or rebellion on the surface sometimes is, but it’s sometimes merely childish foolishness or a misunderstanding (which still need to be addressed, but differently). And God is generally more concerned with our heart motives than our outward actions – shouldn’t we be?  Granted, we can’t see our children’s hearts the way God can, but if we’re paying attention, we can often catch a glimpse. Let me give you a couple of examples from my own life to illustrate what I mean.

[Tweet “What looks like defiance on the surface is sometimes merely childish immaturity or a misunderstanding.”]

Personality Example 1: The Interrupter

My husband and I have very different conversational styles. This is evident just from watching us on Facebook! He edits every comment before he posts. (That’s partly because he’s accustomed to posting for work, but it’s pretty illustrative of his manner of communication in general, too.) I always hit enter too soon, and have to go back and edit almost every post for typos. Our oral communication is the same way. He’s slow and deliberate – the kind of person who doesn’t necessarily say a lot, but when he does say something, you know it’s worth listening to. When I talk, it’s more like the verbal equivalent of drinking from a fire hose.

For a long time, we would butt heads because I would interrupt him. He’d get (understandably) frustrated that I was so rude as to interrupt him, feeling like I couldn’t possibly care what he had to say if I was willing to cut him off. Meanwhile I would get frustrated that he was frustrated, because I (usually) didn’t mean to interrupt; I didn’t realize he wasn’t finished!  A major “light bulb moment” for us occurred when he asked, “How can you possibly think I’m finished with my thought? All I did was take a breath!” To which I immediately replied, “Because I could fit a whole paragraph into that pause!” He just stared at me for a moment and then said, “Yeah, I guess you probably could.”

That vividly illustrated the difference in our communication styles. Neither is “good” or “bad,” “better” or “worse”; they’re just different. But we had to recognize them so we can extend each other grace. He doesn’t so readily get frustrated if I interrupt (and if he sees me opening my mouth he’ll say, “I’m not done!”), because now he knows I don’t intend to be rude, and I will wait quietly for longer than I think I need to, because I realize the pause isn’t as long as it feels to me.

At this point you might be wondering what that has to do with parenting. Well, my husband and I are pretty intelligent, reasonably mature adults. We both have a decent amount of familiarity with ideas like personality types, love languages, and familial patterns. I’ve read a lot about various personality typing systems, and he has pastoral training. We came into this thing heavily equipped to deal with differences in approaches to life, and it still took us several years to work this out!

Now imagine that the “interrupter” here is your two-year-old daughter.

She doesn’t have the ability to articulate that she doesn’t mean to interrupt. She may not even be able to understand what the problem is. All she knows is that she tries to engage with you in her childlike way, and you get angry with her, shut her down, and perhaps even discipline her for disrespect – which leaves her completely confused, because she doesn’t understand what she did wrong. Pretty soon, that precious little girl may just decide that Mama doesn’t like her and give up altogether.

[Important side note: I am not saying all interrupting follows this pattern and is unintentional, nor am I saying that interrupting is okay.  What I am saying is that the “why” matters when deciding how to address it.]

Personality Example 2: The Silently Stubborn

Now let’s turn it around and consider another little girl – one who’s the quieter type. I had a little one who struggled to communicate. She had some speech issues, but also struggled in general to keep up with the pace and tone of our household (which is comprised largely of faster, higher-energy people). Whatever the cause, she had a hard time getting her ideas from her brain to her mouth and out. When she was very young, there were a few times she refused to put on her shoes when it was time to leave the house.

On the surface, it looked for all the world as though she was being obnoxiously defiant. She simply refused to put on the shoes; she gave us absolutely no other indication that there was anything at play except that she didn’t want to. But the Holy Spirit nudged me to dig deeper and, thankfully, for once, I paid attention.

We had the wrong shoes.

Not in a “these are the Mary Janes; I wanted the sneakers” sense, but in a real, “these don’t fit; they’re somebody else’s shoes” sense. (Another couple times to follow, it was something slightly different, but the same general idea.) She couldn’t process quickly enough to tell us what was wrong, so she did the only thing she knew to do: she balked at putting on the shoes.

I could have disciplined her for defying me. It would have looked like I was right.

But I would have been wrong.

Because although it might have looked like my daughter was being rebellious, she was actually attempting to communicate, and falling short. It would have been very disheartening to this child, already struggling with communication, to find her attempts at communication considered so unacceptable that they got her in trouble. Did she need to learn some better communication tools? Absolutely! But I had to recognize that her heart was completely different than her sister’s had been several years before when responding exactly the same way to the same instruction.

We Aren’t All the Same!

It’s human nature to assume that what motivates the person beside us is the same thing that motivates us, that he sees the world the same way, that he processes in the same manner and the same order, and that his ultimate conclusions should, therefore, be identical.  But people are all different!

That child that seems to be lazy could be lazy…or he could be a super-literal thinker. (My super-literal thinker struggles to find things, even when they’re in plain sight. I’ve heard other parents say the same thing about children with similar personalities; I think when what they see in front of them doesn’t match the picture in their heads, it reads as “not a match,” and they’re not quick to adjust.) That child who seems to be stubborn about obeying might be…or she may just be incredibly curious about how the world works.  That child who seems to be disrespectful to everyone may just have an innate drive to edit!

Their individual ways of interacting with the world may not always work well; we all need to learn how to temper certain tendencies and/or how to adjust and adapt.  It’s our job as parents to help our children do that!

But if we can see the world (at least a little bit) from their point of view and understand why they do what they do, we can direct them to become the most godly versions of themselves, rather than trying to turn them into someone else (or punishing them for being themselves).

The Bible tells us that the Body is comprised of many members, and it’s important for each part to play its own part well, not try to function as a different part altogether.  Wise parents recognize that our children each approach the world different than we do, because they’re different parts of the Body.

If You Need Help

If we want to help our little eyes become the strongest eyes they can be, and not turn them into ears or mouths or feet, or whatever we ourselves are, there’s a good chance we’ll need help.  It isn’t intuitive to see the world from someone else’s perspective.

It isn’t a Christian book, and I do not endorse everything she writes (I can’t emphasize that enough; some of it is very weird), but The Child Whisperer has been one of the most helpful tools for me in this, and I highly recommend it.  It does a better job than any other resource I’ve seen, of showing how different personalities play out in the nitty-gritty details of everyday life.

For a Christian approach to personality, Positive Personality Profiles is also good, although it doesn’t get nearly as specific about what certain traits might look like in everyday living.

And, finally, if you need more help sussing out personality types, especially among young-ish kids, the Kids Flag Page is a fun way to work together to figure it out.  (I reviewed that here, a while back.)