Tag Archives: Bickering Complaining Time Pressure

Bickering, Complaining, and Time Pressure – Part 3

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(We hadn’t realized we never completed a series we started earlier this year! So, here is the final part.) This month I want to finish the response to the questions contained in this e-mail:

“I was just reading your latest Mom’s Corner and was wondering about you addressing something in the future. We are trying to raise five children, ages six years down to eight months, in the way God would want. I am having difficulty with bickering, bickering, and more bickering. The children complain about having to do chores and not getting enough play time because they have to do school. We are homeschooling. I try to explain that we help each other and should treat each other as we would have others treat us. Also of note . . . I feel my time is so divided, especially with twin eight month olds. I don’t feel like I have the time to do all the things that need to be done such as when it comes to getting the children to listen and be kind to each other. I know that this should be the priority, but it seems too hard.” Mom to Five

You can read the first two parts of this series of articles here.

To tackle the complaining about chores, doing school, or not having enough play time, much of what was shared in parts one and two of these articles will apply. In this case, once again, the consequences have to be consistent and effective. The children who complain about chores could be given more chores to do, which is a very natural consequence. However, with little children it can be difficult to come up with additional chores that they are capable of accomplishing since they can do so few chores on their own in the first place.

When our younger children complained about chores or school, I often used chair time as a consequence. Since their grumbles were linked to their desire to play rather than do what they needed to do, the consequence was designed to impact what they preferred to do while at the same time making it counterproductive to complain. If it wasn’t convenient for them to sit their chair time right at that moment, I wrote a note so that at lunchtime or later in the afternoon, the child would have his consequence.

As would frequently happen in our home, a child would likely make an excuse for his complaining, tell me he wasn’t grumbling, or argue about his consequence. I usually started with five minutes of chair-sitting time. When the excuses or arguing began, I said, “The time is now ten minutes.” If it continued (as often happened because the first try didn’t work), I would say, “The time is now fifteen minutes.” We had a couple of times where a child worked his way up to forty-five minutes. However, we felt the consequence was reasonable and so much better than becoming entangled in an argument with the child.

These two verses were the main ones we used with our children concerning complaining and why they shouldn’t grumble. “Do all things without murmurings and disputings” (Philippians 2:14). “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). The first verse is the directive not to complain, and the second verse provides the instruction of what the child’s heart attitude is to encompass.

Something to take into consideration concerning both the children’s bickering and their complaining would be other influences. The more time children spend playing with friends, the more likely that they will be dissatisfied with their sibling playmates. They come to prefer their friends over their brothers and sisters. In addition, they are usually learning negative attitudes from their friends that they bring home and with which they begin to afflict their family members. Influences that cause unkindness among siblings might also be coming from other activities where our children are around other children. Being exposed to the typical child’s foolishness can lead our children to mirror that same foolishness in their lives with their brothers and sisters.

The same problems would go for the amount of time children spend watching TV. TV impacts children’s attitudes toward each other adversely, and it fosters a spirit of complaining when the children are required to do activities like chores and school that take away from TV time.

This mom also indicated that she doesn’t feel like she has time to stop and teach the children when a problem surfaces. She knows, though, the vital importance of investing time in the discipleship process with her children. I want to encourage this mom in the use of a daily schedule so that she is more productive and has time available not only to give her children consequences when they bicker but also to teach them how to be sweet to each other.

With five children, including twin eight month old babies, this mom most certainly has plenty to keep her busy. It is no wonder that she would struggle with time pressures and not think she has time to instruct her children when they are bickering. I firmly believe that a schedule is the key she needs to help her have the time to keep up with her household responsibilities, homeschool her children, and interact with them when they are not getting along well.

Our book Managers of Their Homes has much more information on scheduling and includes a Scheduling Kit (colored squares and sticky tac). Especially for those who don’t think they can schedule, it is designed to make the process as easy as possible. Daily, we receive testimonies about how this book is being used as a tool to transform families. To read some of them, just click on product testimonies at the above link. Even if you haven’t felt you could ever make or use a schedule, if you have a need in your home, I encourage you to consider a schedule as a solution.

Life with little children will bring bickering between them, complaining about responsibility, and time pressure for Mom. We know the importance of raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, so addressing these problems is vitally important. As a mom whose children are much older than the mom who wrote the introductory e-mail, I know firsthand the necessity of praying for ourselves and our children. I encourage young moms to expect the process of discipling their children to be a long-term project and to willingly invest their hearts into it. Then you want to look for consistent consequences that you can give with a loving attitude while evaluating any influences that may be undermining the work you are doing with your children. May I encourage you to be a mom who puts a schedule in place so that she will have the needed time to continually instruct her children in the way they should go. Let us run with patience the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1).

Bickering, Complaining, and Time Pressure – Part 2

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We are in the midst of a Mom’s Corner series addressing the questions raised in this e-mail:

“I was just reading your latest Mom’s Corner and was wondering about you addressing something in the future. We are trying to raise five children, ages six years down to eight months, in the way God would want. I am having difficulty with bickering, bickering, and more bickering. The children complain about having to do chores and not getting enough play time because they have to do school. We are homeschooling. I try to explain that we help each other and should treat each other as we would have others treat us. Also of note . . . I feel my time is so divided, especially with twin eight-month-olds. I don’t feel like I have the time to do all the things that need to be done, such as when it comes to get the children to listen and be kind to each other. I know that this should be the priority, but it seems too hard.” Mom to Five

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this series, I suggest you read it so that you know what has already been said. This month I would like to move into considering how a mom would deal with the children’s continual bickering on a daily basis. Keep in mind the suggestions from last month, which advised that family time in the Word, having a mindset that raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is a long-term project, and addressing sin in our own lives is the starting place.

I would encourage Mom to be in prayer concerning the problems she is observing in her children’s lives, such as sibling squabbles. This prayer would be during the mom’s daily Bible reading and prayer time and also each time that there is a particular situation that arises. Here is a good verse for Mom to pray for herself: “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad. . .” (1 Kings 3:9). When praying for the children, this is one of many verses that would be powerful: “Lord Jesus, would You teach my children to ‘Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering'” (Colossians 3:12).

In looking back on my mothering with small children, I regret that I wasn’t as faithful in praying for my children and for myself, regarding specific issues, as I could have been. Regularly there were times when I simply dished out the consequence without taking time for prayer either in my heart or with the children. When we pray with our children at these moments, we are beginning the discipleship process of teaching them to rely on the Lord Jesus Christ, to look to Him for strength when we are weak, and also to confess sin to Him. That is every bit as important as teaching them to be nice to each other, and therefore, it is worthy of our time investment.

“Correct thy son, and he shall give thee rest; yea, he shall give delight unto thy soul” (Proverbs 29:17). Obviously, the mom who wrote me the e-mail would testify that her children are not giving her rest or bringing delight to her soul. The solution to that problem is offered her in Proverbs: correct thy son. However, I can also testify that this correction needs to be consistently used if we hope to see it become effective.

That means we must know what we are going to use for a consequence if the children are bickering. When our children were younger, we had two main consequences to use if they were squabbling with each other. The first one was to sit each of the children involved in the situation on a dining room chair with a kitchen timer set for a pre-determined number of minutes. For our younger children, this was usually five to ten minutes, but if there were return visits to the chair in the same day, the time might be increased. We wanted the consequence to be effective and help to motivate the children to change their behavior. If the chair-sitting time wasn’t enough to do this, then it needed to be longer. By sitting the offending children on a chair, I removed them from whatever was creating the conflict between them. In addition, we gained a period of time for cooling off. It was difficult to work through the problem with the children when their emotions were running high, and they were greatly involved in the situation.

The second consequence we used came from this verse in Proverbs: “Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an house full of sacrifices with strife” (Proverbs 17:1). We grind our own wheat and make our bread. My little children preferred the soft inner pieces of bread versus the outside crusts, so I dried the crusts to be used for bread crumbs. However, at one point in our parenting, Steve and I realized that those dry crusts could provide us with a perfect consequence for children who weren’t being nice to each other.

We began having the children who were part of the conflict come to the dining room table to eat a dry crust. We briefly reviewed Proverbs 17:1 with them and explained that we would rather eat dry morsels all the time and have a peaceful home than to eat the way we usually eat, but with strife amongst family members. This was a simple consequence that I could use consistently—as long as I had some dry crusts available. It removed the children from the problematic situation, and it reinforced the Biblical analogy found in Proverbs 17:1.

With my children, I found it was important not to allow myself to be drawn into the children’s excuse making and not let them argue about a consequence. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit” (Proverbs 26:4-5). Each child usually felt that he was right and his sibling was wrong, making him full of excuses for his behavior. The truth was usually that either child could have chosen to be kind, thereby avoiding the problem. I did watch to see if a particular child might often be the aggressor in the situations so that I could be especially vigilant in trying to help him learn to be more loving.

I also used these times to work with the children to help them know how they could have done or said something differently in order to have avoided the conflict. My job was not only to correct my children but to teach them how to be nice to each other and how to resolve their own problems. That meant I told them what each of them could have done to have prevented the squabble or to have ended it once it was started.

We worked with our children in helping them recognize the sin in their lives in relation to the bickering that had transpired. We wanted them to be able to repent of their sin, confessing it to the Lord Jesus and to the one they had offended. We were teaching them to go to their sibling and ask his forgiveness for whatever they had done wrong.

When our children were little, we went through this process over and over again—consequences and teaching, consequences and teaching. Because the children were young, it sometimes seemed like we weren’t making very good progress in these areas. However, with each advancing year and a backward look, we could see that, step by step, the relationships were improving. The older the children became, the fewer conflicts there were between them and the fewer consequences that were needed.

Dealing on a daily basis with the bickering that can go on between siblings has a way of wearing a mom down. She needs to be dependent on the Lord Jesus Christ and be proactive in teaching the children how to avoid or resolve conflict. As we work with our children in these areas, we are following directives of the Word to bring our children up in both the nurture and the admonition of the Lord.

Bickering, Complaining, and Time Pressure – Part 1

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Recently, I received a request for a Mom’s Corner. Since it asks questions that come up fairly frequently, I thought the e-mail would make a good Mom’s Corner introduction.

“I was just reading your latest Mom’s Corner and was wondering about you addressing something in the future. We are trying to raise five children, ages six years down to eight months, in the way God would want. I am having difficulty with bickering, bickering, and more bickering. The children complain about having to do chores and not getting enough play time because they have to do school. We are homeschooling. I try to explain that we help each other and should treat each other as we would have others treat us. Also of note . . . I feel my time is so divided, especially with twin eight-month-olds. I don’t feel like I have the time to do all the things that need to be done, such as when it comes to get the children to listen and be kind to each other. I know that this should be the priority, but it seems too hard.” Mom to Five

There are three key areas that were addressed in this e-mail that I believe any mom with more than one child will experience. The first has to do with how one deals with continual squabbling between siblings, especially young ones. The second question involves children who complain about having to work and do school. The final one is the mom’s issue rather than the children’s problem, but having children and homeschooling certainly compounds the struggle this mom is experiencing of time pressures.

The heart and root of the children’s difficulties can be nicely addressed during family Bible time. As the family is in the Word every day, Dad can draw the children’s attention to Scripture that applies to the problems at hand. In Steve’s Dad’s Corner this month, he is discussing this same e-mail and how Dad can be a part of the solution. He is giving dads ideas of how they can use family Bible time to help their children spiritually. It is important for Mom to be communicating with Dad the struggles she is seeing in the children’s lives because she is the one who is around the children the most, and she is aware of what is happening in the hearts of the children.

While I believe family Bible time is the starting place for attacking the heart issues that cause both bickering and complaining, we still need to know how to deal with it every time it happens in daily life. A key ingredient in this process is what we, as moms, do with our thoughts when we continually have to face sibling squabbles and a child’s complaining. We have two choices concerning our thoughts. Will we be filled with anger, self pity, and worry? Will we take our thoughts captive? “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

One way to take our thoughts captive is to have correct expectations. Expect that raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4) is a long-term process. It is going to take time, consistency, perseverance, prayer, and just plain hard work. Don’t expect that you focus on the problem for a week and then have children who no longer are unkind to each other. Instead be grateful for each situation that arises and the opportunity it affords to pray for, disciple, and correct your children—all important aspects of raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. When this is our mindset, it is easier to patiently respond to the situations that arise with the children throughout each day.

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). As mothers, bringing up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is part of the spiritual race that is set before us. We must address the sin in our own lives, and then run that race with patience.

If we are regularly angry with the children over their wrong attitudes, then that is sin in our hearts that we must address. They are simply mirroring what they observe in us. “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:31-32).

These verses not only tell us that anger is sin, but they also give us an antidote, which is particularly applicable to mothers, for that sin: kindness and tenderheartedness. When a mom is correcting her children for their bickering or complaining, if she will pull the child to her, hug the child, and put a few kisses on him before she begins to deal with the child’s problem, she will find her heart softening toward the child. It will help her not be angry with him and be able to gently admonish him, giving any necessary consequences without being harsh.

Are we crying out to the Lord Jesus for victory over the sin that we know is in our lives? We are dependent on the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. “Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:12-13). It is through the Spirit that we take our thoughts captive and mortify the sin in our lives.

There is much more that I would like to share regarding the questions posed in the introductory e-mail of this article. The starting place is family time in the Word that takes Scripture and makes it applicable to the daily problems our children are facing. The next step involves Mom’s expectations of her children and her determination to see this project as a long-term one, which she tackles with perseverance and patience. She has to take her thoughts captive so that she isn’t dwelling on the negative. Then Mom wants to look into her own heart to evaluate whether there is sin in her life that might be contributing to the children’s sin. May we be women who use every difficulty we face to turn our faces to the One Who can help us, Jesus Christ.