Smarter than the man in every way
Children know who really wears the pants in the family. Well, that’s an antiquated figure of speech. Actually, in most families, both the father and the mother wear pants. But you know what I mean. You’re fortunate, even rare, if either the father or the mother has real authority (not just power) in the family. Many children have as much authority (not just power) as their parents. They run the family as well as they can, poor dears.
Ironically, as you’ll read on Mom Is Teaching, parenting requires giving your children progressively more authority. Hopefully, by the time they really are smarter than us, they’ll at least be humble about it.
But for now, when they are not yet as smart as us, we need to protect them from themselves. We need to prepare them for a world where a tantrum has very little power. We need to prepare them by not giving in to tantrums now.
Other than that, is there anything beneficial in submitting to the authority of another? What if they aren’t smarter or wiser than we are? I heard a Bible teacher say, with almost a straight face, that the Apostle Paul commanded wives to submit to their husbands precisely because women are superior to men. If wives didn’t have someone to submit to, all that superiority would go to their heads. What self-control it must take to submit oneself to someone who usually has no idea what’s going on? I can only imagine. My wife knows, though, from personal experience.
God understands the benefits of humility. That’s also why he gave us children. When they’re too little to understand the idea of submitting themselves to someone else, when they’re too little to understand the idea of someone else, period, they’re already forcing us parents to lower ourselves, sometimes literally and physically. My legs are getting sore this week from picking up my son from off the floor.
September 26th, 2007 at 9:18 am
About women being superior to men- that is supposed to be a secret…lol.
Really though, God gave the harder job to men- they are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Any man who loves his wife like that, will most likely experience his wife wanting to whatever she can to please him. Submission follows love.
November 21st, 2007 at 10:40 am
[...] her life. I’d always been an invincible kind of gal. A friend of mine puts that love for my kids this way: ‘It’s like having your heart walk around outside your [...]