Do You Want to Reduce Resentment and Rebellion in Your Home? | Episode 560

Resentment and rebellion is rampant in our culture, uh, and, uh, parents struggle with this all the time.

So if you are feeling that there is resentment and rebellion in your children, you are not alone.

Uh, but there are some ways for us to combat that and to, to approach it.

And I wanna talk about the one concept of what I call relationship math, and it is this equation it, it, that states R plus R minus R equals R plus R.

And if you're at all familiar with math, you would say that there's, there's no solution to that, or that the only solution is zero.

But I want to change it from math terms to this.

It really stands for rules and regulation without relationship leads to resentment and rebellion.

And so to the degree that resentment and rebellion is in your home, or you're seeing it in a friend or a neighbor in your community, the other side of the equation is almost always true, that the rules and rebellion and the relationship are out of balance.

And it's not that one is present or the other is present.

We have rules and regulation.

We have a relationship, but are they in proper balance? And, and so in my book, uh, Parenting with Influence, I, I use this concept of the, the struggle between control and influence, and how early in the child's life we have more control and less influence.

But a- as we progress through their life, we move from a control, which is a rule and regulation, to more of an influence, which is the relationship part.

And so it takes us, a, a, a balancing act as the parents to gradually move from one to the other as the child has more capacity for a relationship, more capacity for a response to, yeah, your, uh, influence, your words, your guidance, your coaching.

And so, uh, our problem is this, and we have all made this mistake.

Whenever we feel our child being rebellious or our child being resentful, we resort to more rules and more regulation.

We tighten down the screws, so to speak, and, a- and that actually just fuels the resentment and rebellion even further.

And so, uh, the moving from a re- a rules-based management to a relationship-based management is what we must do.

And it's not done just by turning the switch and you, you change from one to the other, but it is a handing off of changing from rules to relationship.

Now, imagine this.

You're learning to drive a car, and we all have learned to drive an automobile or operate some e- equipment.

And at first, we, w- we first start out with rules and regulations to learn how to, to do those things.

So, uh, as we were learning to drive, they say, "First, put your foot on the brake.

Then insert the key.

Then start the engine.

Then put it into gear." Uh, uh, you know, or, you know, I left out some rules.