How To Ruin Your Kids.

Anyone who thinks it is not hard to raise kids has never tried to do it well.

I think before I had kids that I had a dream and a plan about how it would all play out. And… as they say in boxing… everybody has a plan until they get hit. Maybe good parenting is learning to roll with the punches, dishing out more than you take until the final bell rings. Without a doubt, good parenting feels like a moving target. Even if we remove all the guilt one feels when comparing yourself to other families on Instagram, your kids own journeys create a constant mine field to be navigated. I find myself constantly on a rollercoaster of a pendulum swing between wanting to spoil them by lavishing on them things they don’t need... to wanting to go postal and put them into a makeshift prison until they become adults. I am painfully aware that being a sinner makes me a suspect parent, thus on any given day l totally blow it as a parent. Some days I want to irresponsibly buy them nerf guns, feed them nothing but chocolate, and help them to skip school so we can go run around Paris together. Much further down in my guts than that, there is also a craving to give them many of the things I did not have when I grew up poorly. I still vividly remember the false feelings of inferiority that came from being one of the “have-nots.” I do not want my kid to have to get his shoes from Goodwill or garage sales so I am tempted to compete against the other parents conveniently located on social media everywhere. Even though my kids are too young to grasp that my spoiling of them is really about me and not them, it’s so easy to get swept away with all that. Unlike G-d, I think that if I give my kids everything they could ever want that it would be good for them. He knows better. He knows that even good things can become bad when given at the wrong times or without reservation.

The pendulum swings. 

Then there are days when my house is run like a military institute and every thing that they do seems like a crime against humanity. We have all these beautiful, well thought-out family plans to execute...that they try to thwart with terrorist type intentionality. They run when they were asked to walk. They decide to have a full on UFC cage match right in the middle of me trying to talk to someone in my broken French. They complain about having to eat a certain food... and then complain about not getting to eat that same exact food on the very next day. They refuse to employ basic manners when meeting people for the first time even after being prompted, threatened, and bribed beforehand. They lie. Then they lie to cover up that lie. If you ever need evidence of the sin nature and how it is born into us, just come visit our house. If you put one toy in between three kids you have a full explantation of the doctrine of the Fall.

There is more than a little theology happening at any given moment at the Corsaut house. 

It would be much easier if we only had to deal with these things once, but after about the 10 or 20 millionth time it starts to get to you. You start googling different forms of discipline to see whether they are legal. Nothing will make you reflect on what your parents did to discipline you like having kids of your own. Things you told yourself you would never do suddenly start making all kinds of sense. We do not do this in France (mainly because of the trees), but growing up in Oklahoma when you got in trouble you had to go pick your own branch to be spanked with. Here Isaac, carry this wood up this hill for the sacrifice, says father Abraham. To make matters worse, if you showed up with some weak sauce limb, you were sent back to get another one. The walk to the tree and decision making at the tree was nearly a nerve racking as the actual swats. By the way, I want to shake the hand of the first parent who thought that little gem up. As an adult I think there might have been some masked laziness mingled into that operation. 

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By the way, I just had to take a pause from writing this to discipline my boys for launching different items across their room at each other like they were in a civil war reenactment. After making a compelling case about the dangers of throwing fastballs across the room at each other and explaining our long standing domestic policy of “no throwing things in the house,” I had to collect my composure before I dished out the justice.

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You have to breathe. You have to preach to yourself all the big truths that guide your parenting. You have to remind yourself how old your kids are. You have to tell yourself in the spaces in between your wife yelling across the house at them that this is about shaping their souls and not merely their outward behavior. We would be be tragically disappointed if we somehow figured out how to make them moral outwardly, but lost their hearts. They just make it hard because there is rarely a pause to get our crap together. It is hard because I have emotions, bad days, poor habits, busy schedules, and a million other things that make my parenting less than optimal.

And if excuse making was an art, I would be Van Gogh.

The battle to parent well rages inside your emotionally spent heart, fatigued mind, and tired limbs… either I am going to read to them tonight or I am not… either I am going to get up early and study the word with them or I am not… either I am going to walk and pray with them today or I am not. Either I am going to change that diaper today or I am not… either I am going to have a meaningful conversation with them today or I am not. 

The cop out is that I will do it tomorrow, but the truth is that you either raise them now or you never raise them. 

A hard truth that I have learned is that there is no good time in my life to be a dad, there is only today. What I mean by that is that there will never be a time when I have my life simple enough or figured out enough or uncluttered enough to do the whole fatherhood thing. I only have today and its minutes and hours are bleeding away. The Lord has been faithful to convince my soul to stop waiting on some day in the future when I have things more figured out and to just get on with parenting business. Trust Jesus and go wrestle with your kids. Side note: I often tell young couples nearly the same thing, namely, that they will never have all their junk together before they are ‘ready’ to get married. Nobody is ever ready to get married or have kids, it is way too hard and complicated and full of curve balls for us to figure things like ‘readiness.' I find there are just those who trust His grace and there are those who trust in something else. Given enough time we will learn whether what you are trusting is enough to carry you through the dangerous curves ahead and the storms that are surely on the horizon. I know more than a few people who had plenty of money or security or ________ for their marriage or kids and still lacked that which was most important to sustain them; Jesus and his boundless, invigorating grace. The other wells have a tendency to run dry. Just sayin'

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Again, I just had to stop writing this to deal with the fallout from Deacon taking a wooden bat to the back of his brothers head. I think that since I JUST disciplined them a few minutes ago that Malachi decided to turn him into the Parent Police instead of tune him up with his fists. Good call by the eldest. Deacon was yelling “I am sorry” on repeat as Malachi made his way to where I was trying to write this in seclusion. Did I already mention that it is hard because you have to do it a million times?

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We knew that moving to France would make things different, but we could never have guessed just how impossibly more complicated it makes raising our children. Raising your kids in another culture just ups the ante and exaggerates every small problem into something that could at any moment sink the ship. You are also aware that they are struggling to adapt as foreign kids so you tend to be more sensitive about how hard you can come down on them with the discipline hammer. It is tough because you know that your kids did not choose this, we did. We choose to follow the Lord and bring them here, but at times they suffer the fallout from that decision and they do not even know it. Granted, there are some things about France that make it somewhat easier to raise kids than in the States, but those are few and far between. For instance, they are growing up without being able to go out with Whitni’s dad and work on the ranch. We hate that. Even without the ranch part, we selfishly miss the childcare and the date nights. They were not able to see our younger cousins finishing up their High School sports careers… which normally would not be a deal… but it somehow is to us while we are here. I was watching the boys do a math program the other day and realized they did not know what a dime or nickel was. That is pretty small, but it makes us aware of all the things our kids simply are not experiencing that we did and we do not know how to compensate for it. On a much more heartbreaking note, the first time we heard Malachi and Deacon talk about Oklahoma and ask if we could go home it nearly killed us.

It is brutal to think they are growing up without their family or our community back home.

We have to walk a fine line between encouraging them and letting them vent. We have to handle things differently here than we do in the States because they face hardships we volunteered them for. I still remember the first time I picked up Chi from school and he was crushed because some kid lashed him with words and labels. He felt stupid. He was visibly messed up. I hated watching him struggle. If I was being honest, I would say I wanted to find that kid and whoop his dad. I am thankful that Chi did not resort to such violence when threatened or attacked. While we have a zero tolerance for bullies and violence, having taught our boys to defend themselves adequately, they need to learn to weather and process the emotional and intellectual attacks of others with grace.

If for no other reason than the fact that social media is not going away any time soon.

In that moment I wanted to fix it. I wanted to short circuit the process so he did not have to struggle. I was ready to become one of those parents who give out participation trophies. I was already getting my tools out to build a bubble around him, as though insulation does anything but delay and amplify the struggle. Instead, I opted to coach. I asked him how he was going to respond. I asked him how Jesus would respond. I asked him whether we should pray for that kid and see what is going on with him. I tried to encourage Chi to see that he is blessed to be able to speak, read, and write in two languages. That the school has lots of kids who need Jesus. He represents our family there.

He is there for the glory of G-d and that has never been a simple or easy business.

It did not make me hate watching him struggle any less though. In a different domain, we learned that in Malachi’s second year of rugby that he would be playing with the big boys. He is six years old, but this year he would be playing against boys as much as two years older. That may not mean a lot to you, but let me tell you, there is a large difference between the bodies of boys who are six and boys who are eight. He is also still new to rugby and it’s in a second language, so I braced for the worst. I even slightly tried to convince him to give another sport a try, but he refused to relent and his only intention was to be on the rugby field. His size and age guaranteed that this year would be a long ride on the struggle bus. I hated it for him because I was hoping that for all his struggles at school that sports could maybe be a place where he could find some success and confidence. NOPE. It’s really hard to do that when you are getting smoked by older kids while getting yelled at in French. I know it is kinda weird, but I wanted to download into his brain all the things I know about sports and education so that he could coast through. I wanted to jump into some of his classes and games and fix it for him, but I couldn’t. After some time of reflection and prayer for him, I found that this is a better way. The better way is that he learns to play with bruises like I did and learn the hard and often repeated life lesson that there are no short cuts to character. There is just faith and hard work like what drives the farmer to get out of bed every morning and plunge seed into the ground with mingled hope and callouses. He has to learn to put sweat equity into things. He has to learn to deal with haters. I want him to be inoculated, not insulated, from the world. It is important for me to learn that not all protection actually saves my kids.

I think we all know the kid who got everything given to them, and was guarded from consequence or suffering, and who as an adult could easily be confused for Hitler. 

Today, the easy way for me to ruin my heirs is to not let them suffer through the hard stuff. I mean, if a wild boar attacks my kids, I am going to spartan kick that pig to death. I feel uniquely prepared and well built for such boar attacks being from Oklahoma. They are few and far between though, and the real battle is letting my kid go through enough adversity that it challenges him in the depths of his being, but not allowing anything so hostile that it breaks his soul. Who is wise enough to make such calls? I can tell you that I am crazy impatient when I watch them walk slowly through the furnace of trials with nothing more than my distant shouts cheering them on.

I doubt very few of us would say we want to ruin our kids, but when we do not discipline the way the Lord does and when we don’t let adversity play its role in maturity then we are doing just that.

When we become helicopter parents who hover over our kids trying to keep them from touching everything, we have to question what world we are actually preparing them to enter. We need to ask questions about whether our spoiling or imprisoning of them is more about shaping their hearts or trying to fix something wrong with us. It is so easy to fail at parenting because you have all this unaccountable authority and many of us are writing the rule book as we go. 

On the other hand, when I flip the script over to my life, I find that G-d loves me better than I have ever loved my kids.

G-d is loving me the very way one would not dare to imagine. The way only a Sovereign G-d can love. My fatherhood is a candle and His is the Sun. I can pull a couple levers every now and again, He controls the very cords which bind the universe together. He clothes the grass and feeds the birds and shepherds Colby Corsaut to trust His rod and His staff. He understands that not everything good is good for me today. G-d loves me enough to withhold that which might be to another a prize but to me a poison. He spartan kicks the boars that come to rip me to shreds and at the same time He exposes me to all kinds of risks that will go equally bad if I choose to navigate them without Him. He does not yell one liners to me as I walk through the furnace, He goes into the furnace with me. He comforts me when I am down trodden and lifts my head when the cloud of depression descends. G-d constantly makes me look foolish in my pride yet gently corrects my honest ignorance. I have learned all the best things about being a parent from my Father in Heaven and it is incredible how far I still must go.

Thankfully, His grace is not in short supply.