04.05.06 The 2nd Key for Adding Value to Your Child's Life

2. Instill the Acceptable Standards when a Child is Still Young

One of the key scriptures that supported instilling appropriate personal standards in my children is from Proverbs 22:15 which says (AMP): Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline [correction administered with godly wisdom and lovingkindness] will remove it far from him. That was howI invested adequate time while my children were still young, to make them understand what standards would be acceptable; and to discipline them whenever they were out of line. That approach was so successful that by five years of age, ‘spanking a child’ had become history as I will explain later.

For Salome’s case, the bible gives us a sneak peek of her sons’ personal standards before Jesus transformed them into humble and meek disciples. We see in Mark 3:17 that Jesus nicknamed them ‘Sons of Thunder’ which some writers describe as being bold and aggressive. These behaviours manifested in Mark 3:17 where James and John asked Jesus to let them command fire from heaven to consume a Samaritan village that had rejected them. I would like to suggest that had Salome instilled humility and meekness in her sons from an early age, their response in Samaria would have been different. They would have advocated for ‘shaking the dust of their feet and moving to another city’ (Matthew 10:14-16) rather than condemning the Samaritans to death by heavenly fire.

A value-adding mother instills the correct standards in her children when they are still young, to avoid negative morals and unethical conduct.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the bible teaches us to train up our children in the way they should go, asserting that they will never depart from it (Proverbs 22:6). Therefore, it is your responsibility to teach the acceptable personal standards to a child and ensure that she or he will display them.