Step Four: A Template for Decision Making
"But how do you know how to make the right decision?" asked a 13-year-old boy living at Sheridan House. He had just made yet another bad decision with some friends at school. His consequence was to cut grass that afternoon rather than play racquetball with the other boys.
His was a great question. Answering that question is part of what Sheridan House is about. We not only give kids the discipline to follow through with the right decisions; we also provide a template for how to make those decisions.
Our previous article in the 12 Steps to Good Parenting series addressed the need for parents to make their no mean no. It is important for the child to learn he must obey rather than argue with parental authority. A consistent disciplinary plan not only helps a child learn obedience but also teaches the child to become self-disciplined. We should never just discipline our children without training them in the process. Discipline is something you slowly pass on to the one you are training (in this case, the child). The goal: to train a child so that he or she eventually learns to say no to self.
Our 13-year-old boy’s question was right on target. It’s one thing to be disciplined enough to follow through on what we want or need to do, but it is quite another thing to know how to make those decisions. Where does one go to learn to distinguish right decisions from wrong ones?
Initially, a child or immature person goes to one of two places when making decisions about behavior. They either cave into personal desires and lusts or they cave into pressure from peers and culture.
The training assignment of the parent is to help the child discover where and how to find the answers to life’s decisions. This is called a philosophy of life. Everyone has a personal life philosophy—a guidance mechanism by which a person makes his or her decisions. Win at all cost; money will make you happy; education is the key to life; do whatever you want as long as you don’t get caught—these are some of the philosophies people live by. And their philosophy informs their decisions.
In our challenging culture, the philosophy of life every child needs is a faith in Jesus Christ, which grows out of a personal relationship with Christ. A child’s relationship with Jesus is allowed to develop and grow when the parents make faith a primary focus and philosophy for parenting.
In Deuteronomy 6:7–8 parents are told to love God and then . . . "Impress them [the principles for loving God] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (NIV, emphasis added).
In other words, living a life for Christ and teaching children about Christ needs to be an overwhelming part of a family’s lifestyle. It needs to be so frequent and natural that it leaves an impression.
One of the ways we worked at accomplishing this task in our own home was to read the Bible every morning at the breakfast table. Because we lived 45 minutes from our children's school, we had to get up earlier so we could spend time together around the table.
While the children ate, I read five or six verses from the Bible, starting with the Gospel of John. After reading, I put a marker in the Bible so I knew where to start the next day, and then I asked, "Does anyone have any thoughts about what I just read?" During two decades of reading they almost never had thoughts or comments. So I tried to talk about the verse I read for a few moments, and then we prayed.
This was just one way Rosemary and I worked at giving our children an intact philosophy of life . . . the foundation for making the right decisions. Decisions they would have to make when we weren’t around to guide them. It’s one thing to give children personal discipline, but what good is discipline if you don’t know what to be disciplined about. Our philosophy of life is the why we make a decision. Personal discipline is the ability to follow through with that decision.
A philosophy of life is the core of every decision a child will make— how to handle sex, how to handle money, how to handle peers, how to handle the Internet. The right answer—What would Jesus do?—comes from laying down a foundation of faith in God as our life philosophy.
If our children leave home without an intact faith in God, they’ll go out like a lamb to the cultural slaughter. Nothing is more important than this lesson.
In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, "We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future."