I have come to the conclusion that no matter whether you raise your children to believe that you are the All-Seeing God-Parent, or that you are a sin-filled, fallible Human-Parent, that your children will ALWAYS think of you as the PERFECT PARENT!
My father raised us kids to believe that he was the all-knowing, all-wise, God-parent. Did he do it on purpose? i don't know. I just know that that is what we all thought, and that he actually vocally took pride in it at times. So as I grew older I vowed that I would NEVER do that to our kids. Our kids would KNOW that Bob and I are most definitely IMPERFECT, full of sin, full of weakness, and that one of the reasons Heavenly Father places the human in a family setting, is so that we can live together, come to know each other's weaknesses, forgive each other, over come our weaknesses AND OTHERS' weaknesses, and just "hold hands and love each other anyway"!
So, that is exactly what we did. We taught our kids - practically every time we screwed up: "see? we mess up too. we make mistakes too.... NO ONE IS PERFECT!... so you should never listen to satan's discouraging thoughts he tries to put in your head that you just can't match up, and you might as well give up, because you'll never be perfect. Of COURSE you'll never be perfect! NONE of us are!"
We have taught all three of our kids this since the day they were born. I have taught them that especially - because it took me decades before I came to fully understand the power of the Atonement - and how the Atonement can apply in our lives. I still don't comprehend it 100%, but I do enough to know that there is no sin that is too big that the Atonement won't cover. There is ALWAYS HOPE in CHRIST.
Well... evidently it doesn't matter that we taught them that. Our oldest daughter has recently run away from home and she is fully convinced that she can never be as perfect as her parents are - specifically as perfect as her mother is. Somehow she got it into her head that she is past hope, that the Atonement will cover everyone else on earth except her, and that somehow WE expect her to be perfect!!!
What!?!?!?!? That is 100% opposite from all that we have ever lived and taught her!! How could she possibly believe that?
I don't know. All I now it that it didn't seem to make any difference that we taught our children that we are not perfect. Because, I guess, in a child's eye, you - the parent - will forever be "perfect".
Maybe it's just something that comes with with being born into this world, to a mother and father???
Maybe it's something that we just assume, deep down in our spirits, because, after all, we did just come from heaven, where our Mother and Father there ARE perfect.
I thought I'd do our kids a favor, by helping them learn early in life that their parents are far from perfect, and that perfection was never something that was expected of them. Evidently, there is no such thing as teaching your kids that you are not a perfect person/parent.
I don't know about any of you, but I find comfort in knowing that we are all sinners, and that we are all trying to endure well unto the end, and that we are all "in this together".
My father raised us kids to believe that he was the all-knowing, all-wise, God-parent. Did he do it on purpose? i don't know. I just know that that is what we all thought, and that he actually vocally took pride in it at times. So as I grew older I vowed that I would NEVER do that to our kids. Our kids would KNOW that Bob and I are most definitely IMPERFECT, full of sin, full of weakness, and that one of the reasons Heavenly Father places the human in a family setting, is so that we can live together, come to know each other's weaknesses, forgive each other, over come our weaknesses AND OTHERS' weaknesses, and just "hold hands and love each other anyway"!
So, that is exactly what we did. We taught our kids - practically every time we screwed up: "see? we mess up too. we make mistakes too.... NO ONE IS PERFECT!... so you should never listen to satan's discouraging thoughts he tries to put in your head that you just can't match up, and you might as well give up, because you'll never be perfect. Of COURSE you'll never be perfect! NONE of us are!"
We have taught all three of our kids this since the day they were born. I have taught them that especially - because it took me decades before I came to fully understand the power of the Atonement - and how the Atonement can apply in our lives. I still don't comprehend it 100%, but I do enough to know that there is no sin that is too big that the Atonement won't cover. There is ALWAYS HOPE in CHRIST.
Well... evidently it doesn't matter that we taught them that. Our oldest daughter has recently run away from home and she is fully convinced that she can never be as perfect as her parents are - specifically as perfect as her mother is. Somehow she got it into her head that she is past hope, that the Atonement will cover everyone else on earth except her, and that somehow WE expect her to be perfect!!!
What!?!?!?!? That is 100% opposite from all that we have ever lived and taught her!! How could she possibly believe that?
I don't know. All I now it that it didn't seem to make any difference that we taught our children that we are not perfect. Because, I guess, in a child's eye, you - the parent - will forever be "perfect".
Maybe it's just something that comes with with being born into this world, to a mother and father???
Maybe it's something that we just assume, deep down in our spirits, because, after all, we did just come from heaven, where our Mother and Father there ARE perfect.
I thought I'd do our kids a favor, by helping them learn early in life that their parents are far from perfect, and that perfection was never something that was expected of them. Evidently, there is no such thing as teaching your kids that you are not a perfect person/parent.
I don't know about any of you, but I find comfort in knowing that we are all sinners, and that we are all trying to endure well unto the end, and that we are all "in this together".
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