The Need for Real Love, and Living Without It 

Learning to Be a Parent

Already, in Chapter One, you’ve learned a LOT, way more than most people ever learn about parenting. You’ll be learning a lot more. And why wouldn’t you want to? Learning how to be a parent is more important than learning to be a surgeon or rocket scientist, and both of those jobs—just to randomly pick two—require extensive education, so how could parenting not involve a lot of new information and require time and effort to digest and practice it?

You don’t have to consume this all at once. You’re changing lifetime patterns, generational patterns, which is not going to happen by reading a pamphlet. Go as far as you can until you begin to get tired—or overwhelmed—then STOP. Mark where you were in the chapter, and resume later. Relax. This all takes faith, humility, persistence, practice, time, and courage. It’s a big job. But if we really want to learn, it can be a lot of fun.

You’re learning how to be a better parent than you ever thought possible. You are about to change the world—for you, for your children, for your family. As you become a better parent, you will make a greater, more lasting, impact on the world than with anything else you’ll ever do. Anything.

Hope

In The Family: A Proclamation to the World, we learn that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” The family isn’t just a cool idea. It’s central to the Eternal Plan of our Perfect Father in Heaven. The Savior of the world then provided the foundation for the success of this eternal Plan of Happiness, and now we as parents have the responsibility of providing to our children the greatest possible access to the Atonement and the Plan.

Why do I tell you this? To burden you with an even greater sense of duty and obligation? To make you feel bad about your mistakes as a parent? No, I remind you of your responsibilities because they are also opportunities for YOU. At your side you have the Creator of the world, the Savior of all mankind, loving you and helping you gather your children to Israel, where they—and you—will become HIS children through the transforming power of the Atonement.

King Benjamin confirmed this when he said to his people, “Because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you ...” (Mosiah 5:7 - 10)

Very few activities in life will give YOU more opportunities to become a child of Jesus Christ than to raise children in the pure love of Christ—and as a bonus, you help your children become His children too. Now there’s a win-win.

In the previous chapter you learned that almost certainly you’ve already made a LOT of mistakes. And you’re probably asking the horrifying question, “Oh no, have I messed up my kids?” Yes, probably so. If they’re behaving in unChrist-like ways, the cause is not likely to be the mailman or their first-grade teacher. Follow this line of thought:

(1) Children act badly only in response to pain.

(2) The central pain of their lives is not feeling the pure love of Christ

(3) Primarily that is our responsibility, which is not the same as our FAULT—meaning that we can’t be entirely accountable for our failures that resulted from our simply not knowing any better. We’ll be talking about the relationship between agency, freedom, responsibility, and accountability in the next chapter.

Knowing that we have injured our children is a hard pill to swallow, more like swallowing a whole pig.

But relax. THIS—right now in looking at what we’ve done in the past with our children—is where we can demonstrate our faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ. And where we can FEEL the power of the Atonement.

OR

We can fuss and worry and feel guilty, and in effect DENY the Atonement. Our choice.

Alma taught that the Savior would “take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people ” and “succor his people ” (Alma 7:11, 12) Succor means to support, help, comfort, aid. He offers not only to take away your sins, but also to bind up your wounds and take away your pains of guilt for the mistakes you’ve made. The question is, Will you let him do His job?

Ammon said, “God is mindful of every people, whatsoever land they may be in” (Alma 26:37)

Had he been asked, he would have added, And God is mindful of every people, whatever guilt, or pain, or circumstance they might be in.

The Apostle James taught, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (James 4:10) Pray to the Father, with faith in His son, and he will lift you out of guilt, suffering, fear, discouragement, despair. You don’t have to hang on to your guilt and remorse anymore.

Stop what you’re doing or thinking, and FEEL the truth of that. Feel whether it’s true that you no longer have to feel guilty for your mistakes as a parent. You did your best with what you knew at the time, and now you’re repenting of your mistakes. YOUR part in repentance is DONE. If you persist in feeling guilty, you dismiss the Savior’s role in forgiveness, AND you will only become LESS available to love your children, because you’ll be distracted by the pain of your guilt.

It is a pernicious lie believed by almost every parent that the more you love your children, the more you anguish over your mistakes and theirs. Wrong. I have conducted hundreds of seminars where I have asked parents, “Raise your hand if you worry for your children and feel guilty about making mistakes with them.” Every hand goes up. And I pursue it, saying, “Your anguish is a sign that you love them, right?” Every head nods. Wrong again. If we believe that, we’re saying that Christ suffered for sins, but we need to suffer a bit more ourselves. This may be disturbing to hear, but pay attention: You are not the Associate Redeemer. He does not need your help. You’re not qualified.

Christ—the real Redeemer—told us himself: “It is I that taketh upon me the sins of the world; for it is I that hath created them; and it is I that granteth unto him that believeth unto the end a place at my right hand.” (Mosiah 26:23) He atoned for our sins, not us.

The Apostle Paul rejoiced that the Corinthians experienced “sorrow (or guilt) to repentance,” noting that this kind of sorrow leads to salvation, but not the sorrow of the world. (2 Corinthians 7:9-11) In today’s English, guilt is useful only if it leads you to change, and we don’t need any more than that amount of guilt. More than that is an attempt to atone for your sins, and you were not invited to do that. And note that the phrase is, “sorrow to repentance,” not “sorrow to love.” Guilt is intended to lead us to change, whereas it was not designed to help us be loving. Our children don’t need our guilt. They need our love.

President Gordon B. Hinckley said, “Please don’t nag yourself with thoughts of failure ... Simply do what you can do, in the best way YOU KNOW, and the Lord will accept your effort.” (Ensign Nov 1989)

So, no more guilt. Instead, “arise and walk.” (Matthew 9:2-6) You have as much right to arise from the past and move forward as the cripple did when the Savior spoke those words to him: “Arise and walk.” 

Instead of guilt, I offer Hope through our faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As we arise and walk, we press forward “with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men.” (2 Nephi 31:20

Nearly everyone reading this has been in a place where:

(1) A particular problem has become difficult or impossible with an unhappy child. You’ve lost your own sense of peace, the family is in uproar, your marriage is affected.

OR

(2) You are frustrated by an endless series of crises and events that need solutions you simply never learned. You want something better than managing crises.

Or both 1 and 2.

Take a Breath. Parenting wasn’t meant to be impossibly difficult. “Men are that they might have joy,” not endless struggle and anxiety. (2 Nephi 2:25)

You’re going to learn how to UNCONDITIONALLY love your children AND teach them.

1. This is where nearly all parents go wrong—they do one or the other (“love” or teach). Usually not even love—just bribing, pleasing, enabling, giving. When we give children what they WANT, rather than what they NEED, that is not loving. It’s NOT loving just because you put a smile on their face. Cocaine addicts—or phone or video addicts—WANT more of their addictive substance or behavior. Giving them what they want is not loving.
2. Unconditional love is FAR rarer than you might suppose—but you’ll recognize it more and more as we talk about it. (I’m doing it with you right now. YOU are why I do this and have been for nearly 30 years. I quit my former career as a surgeon to do this. Pay in my former job was much better—certainly in dollars, since you’re not paying any dollars at all to hear and see this—but the rewards of what I’m doing now are far more satisfying.

Sometimes during this Training you won’t understand where we’re going. You couldn’t. This is new ground. We can’t learn without walking unfamiliar ground. Keep going. It will come together if you persist.

Obedience Is Not Enough

Just now I briefly mentioned the necessity for us to love and teach, and I mentioned it several times in Chapter One. Unfortunately, because most of us have not feasted from the tree of life, the tree of love, we have NOT known that “peace which passeth all understanding.” (Philippians 4:7) Instead we tend to just teach—it’s the only tool we have. With our children we lecture, command, nag to death, order around, remind them constantly, and speak endless variations on the word “should.”

We’ve been thoroughly taught the importance of obedience, so we attempt to force our children to be obedient to our imperfect and unloving example, while at the same time claiming to be training them to be obedient to God, who IS perfectly loving. It’s pretty confusing for the children.

Obedience is not our primary goal. It’s a tool, to be sure, but obedience simply is not enough, as we discussed in Chapter One. And preaching obedience to our children is not enough, as we saw illustrated in my video call with one teenage girl (Chapter One). You’ve proven that yourself on countless occasions. You’ve commanded a child not to do something—be up past their bedtime, fight with a sibling, whatever. They keep doing it. You raise your voice in anger. They stop—for a while. But then they’re right back at it—a minute later, an hour, the next day. And you keep repeating yourself, over and over. You wonder if they’re deaf. If you find yourself repeating the same thing over and over, it’s not the child who’s being stupid. Clearly commanding obedience is not enough, and by itself it certainly doesn’t lead to happiness.

Obedience IS necessary. The word is found everywhere in the scriptures, but it’s worth noting that it’s the cornerstone of the lesser law, the Law of Moses.

Abinadi, referring to the Law of Moses, said that the children of Israel were “slow to remember the Lord their God” so they were given “a very strict law ... a law of performances and of ordinances ... to keep them in remembrance of God and their duty towards him (so they would be obedient).” And he added that these laws were representations of “things to come.” (Mosiah 13:29-30)

But now the things to come—Jesus Christ, His Atonement, and more—HAVE come, and He gave us a “new commandment,” in His words: “That ye love one another; as I have loved you.” (John 13:34)

Years ago a young woman in another ward came to see me. She said that all she wanted was to be free of her mother, who controlled her every breath. Mom had a firm grasp on obedience. The two of them were inseparable, a word often used endearingly but one that commonly indicates that something is wrong—somebody is usually being controlled. Mom would march—just like a drill sergeant—into church, with her daughter dragging ten steps behind, as though attached to Mom with a heavy chain. After my first visit with the daughter, she visibly brightened up, but Mom refused to let her return and instead pounded the girl with obedience. Weeks later they found her in a ditch. She’d killed herself. She died from people preaching obedience to her in the absence of love—just as the Pharisees did. This is not a unique story.

After King Benjamin had spoken to his people, he inquired of them to know if they believed what he had said. “And they all cried with one voice, saying” that they did believe, by the power of the Spirit, “which has wrought a mighty change in ... our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually.” (Mosiah 5:1-2)

That’s what you want to build in your children, not mere compliance—we can train that into a dog—but rather a thirst to do good, an eagerness to be loving. God does want us only to be obedient—the wind and the waves obey him.

No, he wants us to plant, cultivate, nourish, and grow our own tree of life (Alma 32), and to help our children to do the same. He wants us to become as He is, and then to share the fruit with others, until—because of our efforts—there are trees of life growing up all around us, an orchard of these trees that produce the fruit that is sweet above all that is sweet. That comes from much more than obedience, which serves only to lead us to the tree of life, which is LOVE, perfect love, the love of Christ.

The Power of Obedience Requires Love

We all know that faith without works is dead: (James 2:17) Works are the hallmark—the ultimate evidence—of faith.

AND without faith, works are dead, or worthless. As Nephi said, “after all we can do”—after all our works—“it is by grace that we are saved.” Grace or mercy requires faith in Jesus Christ.

Similarly, obedience is nothing without love. In His mortal life, the Savior noted the exact obedience of the Pharisees and others. These people were so obedient that they paid tithes on the HERBS they grew in their gardens—but then He added that they’d missed the point of life entirely, forgetting “weightier matters” of the law, like mercy—which comes from love—and faith. He said they were like painted tombs, pretty on the outside but filled with dead men’s bones. (Matthew 23:23-27)

In a book by C.S. Lewis, the devil has assigned his nephew to tempt a particular man, and the nephew asked what he should do about the man attending church. The devil said, “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers ... and charity, he is ours. And the more ‘religious’ [he is, in those rigid ways], the more securely [he is] ours. I could show you a pretty cageful [of such men] down here.”

So the Savior gave the Jews a “new commandment,” “That ye love one another; as I have loved you.” (John 13:34)

Just as obedience is nothing without love, so is love nothing without obedience. Love is nothing without obedience to the principles that govern it. Love requires conformity (obedience) to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, repentance, service, persistence. Genuine love naturally produces obedience while also conforming to it.

As usual, Christ showed us the supremacy of love over simple obedience with the example of His mortal ministry. After Jesus had spoken to his disciples, “the people were astonished ... for he taught them as one having authority from God, and not as having authority from the scribes. (Matthew 7:36-37, JST)

How was his teaching different from that of the scribes? He taught them AS the greatest embodiment of love that the people had ever seen, or that ever had been or ever would be. That POWER, the power of his love, is what astonished them. That power is what is meant by “having authority from God,” because it wasn’t his authority—his position or calling—that impressed them. On the whole, the people did not believe He was the son of God. No, they described the power of his love as “authority.”

And so it can be with us as parents. Yes, we were assigned “authority” over our children, but our true authority comes from the power of our loving them, much as we read in the Doctrine and Covenants that the authority of the priesthood derives from the principles of righteousness—love being foremost—the principles that allow us to enjoy the “powers of heaven.” (D&C 121:36) Love leads to power. Authority alone does not.

As we teach our children, they feel safe and nourished. We teach them under the canopy of the tree of life. Without love, we’re trying to teach them in the midst of the storms of life, lost in the mists of darkness. Under those conditions it’s impossible for our children to learn from us. It’s our responsibility to love and teach our children. Notice that in that phrase, “love and teach,” the word “love” is first. Without love, we CAN’T truly teach them anything good. We can only injure and frighten them, and then they can’t feel the love and saving grace of the Savior, whom we are trying to represent.

Christ illustrated the power of love again shortly after his resurrection when he visited the Nephites. He taught them mostly the same principles we all know now, but then there followed a complete peace for more than a hundred years: “And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.” (4 Nephi 1:16)

Before Christ came in the flesh, the Nephites and Lamanites had already received the teachings, prophecies, and revelations of a long line of prophets from the time of Nephi—and before, from the brass plates. But despite all this exhortation to be obedient and faithful, their history is an endless vacillation between righteousness and wickedness, with the periods between the two conditions as short as a few years in some cases.

So what was different after the appearance of Christ? The gospel had been taught before, so it’s unlikely that the principles He taught were significantly different. What was different was that he brought the fulness of the pure love of Christ—as only He could do.

They FELT His love. It transformed them. They passed it on. He brought the tree of life down among them—in all His glory—and they partook of it freely. They didn’t soon forget. They grew their own trees and fed their children, who planted and nourished theirs. And this continued for more than a hundred years, degenerating significantly only after about two hundred years.

As early as the book of Exodus, God spoke against evil and added, “[I will visit] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me ...”

(Exodus 20:4-5) There’s a similar statement in Mosiah (Mosiah 13:13). God does not directly punish children for the sins of their fathers—which would destroy the whole principle of agency and accountability—but he DOES allow children to experience the natural consequences of their fathers’ choices. He simply doesn’t intervene and change those emotional, physical, and mental consequences. In another chapter we’ll talk more about the generational effects of epigenetics—where the choices and experiences of one generation are carried in the proteins that coat and control the DNA of subsequent generations. We pass on what we choose.

We can affect the chemical makeup of our children and children’s children through the evil we experience from others and from our own bad choices. Similarly—and this is my real point—we can affect our children POSITIVELY for generations—by imprinting their epigenome—with the love we feel and the love we give them. Nothing you ever do will be more important than this.

Why Aren’t We Loving and Teaching Already?

In Chapter One, we talked about the necessity of unconditionally loving our children, and how the lack of it hurts them. So, why don’t we just shape up and do this already? Why don’t we unconditionally love them—with no disappointment, impatience, irritation—and teach them exactly how to grow up loving and happy?

Because we don’t know how. There is no blame here. We fail to love and teach—despite doing our very best—because:

(1) we weren’t taught HOW. All through my long education, I never saw a practical class in parenting. Instead I learned geometry, history, and languages—subjects I rarely if ever used again, while there was not a single class on parenting, a subject I would need thousands of times over many years.

(2) most of us have never seen parenting as it could be done. We’re going to learn that here.

(3) Just as we’ve wounded our children with our impatience, anger, controlling, and more, so it is that WE were not loved with no anger, irritation, disappointment, or frustration either. So how could we love and teach, if WE were not nourished consistently with the pure love of Christ.

Oh yes, we really WANT to be good parents, but desire alone is not enough. Many years ago, my 3-y.o. brother fell off a dock into a lake. My mother panicked and stood there screaming and watching her own son dying. Why would she do that?

Because she didn’t know how to swim and was too paralyzed by fear to jump in the water. If she had jumped in, she couldn’t have swum to him, and she certainly didn’t know how to save him from drowning. Did she care about him? Sure. Did she WANT to help? Yes. But she didn’t know HOW.

Some distance away, I heard the screams. I was 6-7 year older, and I did know how to swim, so I jumped in and dragged him to safety. My brother would have drowned because my mother didn’t know HOW to swim and help him. Why did I know how to swim, but she didn’t? I took lessons at the YMCA—at her insistence, by the way. In the moment my brother was drowning, there was no lack of desire on my mother’s part, but her ignorance would have killed him. And that’s what happens with our children emotionally, spiritually, and even physically. They drown because—as much as we want to—we don’t know how to help them.

In the introduction, I compared this training to putting together a puzzle—a piece of the sky here, clouds there, colored objects, piece by piece until we have an idea what the picture is. Now that you’ve had a little experience, let’s look at another metaphor: 

Learning parenting is also much like putting together a car—from scratch: from iron ore for steel, from unmolded plastic to create uncounted components, from silica to make glass, from copper ore to make wires, from lead and sulphuric acid for the battery, and on and on. We have to learn a lot—about smelting, metallurgy, injection molding, electronics, computers, software, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and more—before we can even begin assembling parts of the car. We have to learn how to make a fire hot enough to smelt iron ore, how to alloy the iron and create steel, how to make plastic, how to find the right kind of sand with silica in it and then how to heat it, add lime, and float the glass on molten metal.

Learning parenting requires that kind of intense preparation—many diligent steps, and coordinating all you’re learning and feeling. So what I’m saying is: Hang on, we’re getting where you want to go.

I’ll describe (1) a principle along with (2) a step you want to take—or need to take—and then (3) I’ll illustrate an example of it—with words or video—and then (4) you’ll practice it in real life. And then you’ll come back for more answers and illustrations, and you’ll practice again. It’s an astonishing journey: seemingly impossible at times but unbelievably rewarding.

One parent said: “I had no idea how little I knew, or how much I was guaranteeing my kids’ unhappiness. Loving and teaching correctly is a different way of living—for ME. It works. Sometimes I still want to pull out my hair—or theirs—but the pure love of Christ is way better than everything else I’ve tried, by a lot.”

The Belief That We CAN Parent

Over the years I have consistently witnessed one belief that stops parents from learning HOW to love and teach better. They believe they already CAN.

Why do we believe that? That we CAN parent?

1. We believe that surely if everybody else is doing it, it can’t be that hard, so we must be able to do it too. We see everybody else HAVING children, but we DON’T see most of the problems going on in the home, so we have no idea what we’re comparing ourselves to. We think, No instructions required. Wrong.

2. We believe we already can parent. It’s a big part of our identity as worthwhile human beings to be “good parents.” Our marriage may not be great, we may have significant questions about our spiritual standing with the Lord, our career may be far less than the success we’d hoped, but we can always point to our children as evidence of our worth.

If they’re behaving badly, we just can’t accept responsibility for that ourselves. So we blame them. We say things like:

“He’s a difficult child.”

“He’s just moody.”

“It’s a rebellious age.”

“We try, but he doesn’t listen.”

“He’s been like this all his life.”

“He has ADHD. We have him on medication, and we’re doing our best to manage him.”

3. Everyone else is proud of being a good parent. We don’t want to miss out on the approval everybody else is getting by admitting that we’re actually pretty deficient as parents.

4. (reason we believe we’re good parents) The alternative would be unthinkably difficult. If we admit that WE are the problem, not them, we’d have to learn something. We might have to do as King Benjamin taught: humble ourselves, be patient, and submit to being taught. (Mosiah 3:19) Nah, too scary.

5. We hate admitting we’re wrong. Life is hard enough without that humiliation, that we’ve messed up as parents. But the price of that denial is high: denying the truth prevents us from choosing to be humble and teachable, so we can LEARN to be better parents.

Bottom line: People usually believe not what is true but what they want to be true.

Earlier we asked the question about why we’re not already good parents.

Now I ask a Second related Question: 

How do we know we’re NOT effective parents?

You wouldn’t be here if you were sure you were.

And you wouldn’t have children affected by:

Whining, arguing, fighting, withdrawing, lack of responsibility, defiance, anxiety, depression, and addiction to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more.

These behaviors result from the pain of not feeling loved, and in almost every case the responsibility for that pain is ours.

THIRD question related to our belief that we can parent:

Why is that belief harmful (To us and them) that we CAN parent when we can’t?

There’s a popular aphorism that states: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

So how is it dangerous to believe we CAN when we can’t? If we’re certain we CAN parent, then when our children act out of pain, we’ll blame THEM, and their teachers, society, and whatever else we can think of. And in the process we’ll never address the real cause: US

Another way of stating that aphorism is that it ain’t the snake you see that bites you. It’s the one you didn’t see. If we deny our role in causing our children’s pain, we can’t do anything to help them. THAT would be tragic.

So, what can you DO about learning to help your child? First let’s learn a little more about our children and about ourselves.

The 7 Common Behavior Problems: The Branches

In Chapter One we discussed the more common behavior problems that make up the vast majority of childhood behaviors that are unproductive, the same behaviors that we find annoying, disappointing, and frustrating. We talked about children who are affected by:

Whining, arguing, fighting, withdrawing, lack of responsibility, defiance, anxiety, depression, and addiction to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more.

That’s a lot of behaviors, and most people—by far—would see them as DIFFERENT behaviors. That perspective is actually one of the huge obstacles in our addressing them effectively because then we have different therapies for depression, ADHD, lack of responsibility, defiance, and for each of all the addictions: alcohol, drugs, video games, social media, physical appearance (eating disorders being a prominent example of appearance addiction).

That’s a lot of different therapies, and it can become very confusing. It’s far more useful to recognize that all these behavior problems are just BRANCHES of the same tree. They’re all related—closely related. How?

They all have the same ROOT. They all spring from the root cause of PAIN. Every child who is whining, defiant, anxious, irresponsible, or addicted to whatever is in PAIN, and their individual “problem behavior” is nothing more than an attempt to express AND reduce their pain. Period. (Let me say it again.) Suddenly all these behaviors are NOT crushingly confusing.

I once stood in front of a convention of 1000 alcoholics and said, “Alcoholism is NOT a disease.” The room became as silent as a tomb, because it’s a foundational law in AA that alcoholism IS a disease. I waited for a moment and said, “Drinking alcohol is a response to PAIN.” I waited, and people began first to nod, then cry, then applaud. They got it—it’s obvious when you see it, but it’s still a very novel idea in the world of addiction and every other unproductive behavior.

In therapeutic circles, you would think the word LOVE was forbidden—it’s NEVER written in a behavioral science journal, never. Therapists on the whole don’t know anything about love—they’re not taught about it, nor have they felt it, so how could they possibly understand that addictive behaviors—which include ALL the problem behaviors are a response to the pain of not feeling loved?

We MUST begin to see all problem behaviors in children as branches of the same tree, united by the ROOT of PAIN. Only then can we begin to do something truly effective about all those behaviors. Ah, but we’re missing something, aren’t we? In trees, there is always something found between the root and the branches. A TRUNK. Duh. Similarly, there is a trunk between the branches of the obvious behaviors and the root of pain. What is it?

Let’s begin with the root—PAIN—and work our way up. Starting with pain, there’s one thing we can count on in every human being—every animal, in fact. If we experience pain, we RESPOND. It’s a reflex. We do whatever it takes—sometimes even taking extreme measures—to REDUCE OUR PAIN. We PROTECT ourselves, and even though there are hundreds of individual ways to do that—the branches of the tree—they are united by a trunk of only a handful of inter-connected behaviors. Let’s talk about those, and we’ll call them Protecting Behaviors—protecting us from pain.

Protecting Behaviors: The Trunk

In Chapter One, We heard from President Thomas S. Monson: “We are strengthened by the truth that the greatest force in the world today is the power of God as it works through man.” (Ensign Nov 2014) The significance of the phrase “as it works through man” cannot be over-emphasized. In great part children feel God’s love as it works through us, their parents. Without the sweetness of the love of God—if we have corrupted the pure love of Christ by mingling it with our anger, for example—our children are not nourished by the fruit of the tree, and they cannot ignore the pain of their spiritual starvation.

Children in pain WILL act out in ways that (1) express their pain and (2) diminish their pain. In the short-term, and especially without the light and love of Christ, pain and fear are the greatest motivators in this mortal life.

Psalms 48:6 Fear took hold upon them there, and pain, as of a woman in travail.

Speaking of the destruction of an entire nation, Isaiah says, “Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.” (Isaiah 21:3)

Pain “takes hold” of us and causes us to “bow down” and “be dismayed.” In our anguish, our ability to discern and make decisions is impaired, and then we tend to simply react. Children —lacking mortal experience with love and difficult choices—especially react to pain automatically and immediately, much as you would react to accidentally touching a hot stove by immediately and unconsciously moving away from the pain in any way you could, regardless of how it looked or affected others.

In Chapter One you heard President Ballard describe how he “could not focus” on the Lord’s work while he was in moderate physical pain. Imagine the utter distraction and confusion of a child who feels emotionally lost and separated from God. Children in pain will use combinations of the following 8 behaviors.

For simplicity I refer to them as Protecting Behaviors, because they’re all used—mostly reflexively—to decrease the root pain of being separated from the love of Christ—from the tree of life. These protecting behaviors are designed to find substitutes for genuine love. Without real love, we are content with any imitation of love.

WHY talk about these? To be clever, to analyze our behavior more meticulously? NO.

Because as we understand these behaviors, and their relationship to pain, and to unhappiness, two powerful things become possible, which we’ll discuss more later:

Consider:

1. Protecting Behaviors help us understand REAL problem, not just the visible problems---the common behavior problems. We don’t just want to put out fires. It’s pain. It’s a lack of love. It’s a lack of knowledge. We can DO something about those, as opposed to STOP a particular sin.
2. Help us spot deviations from the path before they become more easily identifiable, which means bigger and more difficult

The First Protecting Behavior: PRAISE

By PRAISE I really mean the behavior of SEEKING praise from others, not the actual positive comment itself.

When children can’t have the genuine love they need, they quickly learn that it feels wonderful to be praised—or approved of—for doing what other people like. Children wriggle like scratched puppies when they hear the words, “You’re such a good boy/girl,” and they’ll do virtually anything to hear such words. With the passing of years, their thirst for praise increases, and as adolescents they vigorously seek acceptance for being socially popular, beautiful, handsome, clever, strong, and sexually attractive, among other characteristics. Praise becomes a substitute for the love they really want—a substitute for love, or imitation love, and seeking it is a way to protect themselves from the pain of not being loved.

The quest for the satisfaction of approval and praise becomes a central driving force in most children’s lives, in the process replacing faith and looking to Christ. In early childhood they’re understandably eager to do whatever it takes to please their parents and earn their praise. A child will do almost anything for a parent’s approving smile or tone of voice. Then they learn to devote themselves to winning the praise of their peers too. We taught them how.

Their lust for praise largely determines the clothes they wear, how they speak, the way they wear their hair, the music they listen to, and the friends they choose—all deviations from the inspiration of the Spirit they might have received. THAT is the biggest single problem with praise, is that children seek that instead of the lifegiving communication of the Spirit, who would give them direction, purpose, and the feeling of God’s love. This pattern of buying the praise of others then continues through adulthood. Most adults make their decisions with a design to win the approval of others, an approach they learned as children.

Just as important as winning approval—more so—is the avoidance of DISapproval. In the words of a famous sports announcer from a generation ago, “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.” Approval and disapproval are two sides of the same coin, and we use them both to PROTECT ourselves from not feeling worthless and unloved.

This is a dangerous way to live, and examples of it are found throughout scripture:

The Lord speaks strongly against those who “set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion. Behold, the Lord hath forbidden this thing; wherefore, the Lord God hath given a commandment that all men should have charity, which charity is love. And except they should have charity they were nothing.” (2 Nephi 26:29-30)

During the Savior’s mortal ministry there were many Jews—including some of their leaders—who believed in Christ, but they dared not admit it for fear of the disapproval of their peers because. “They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.” (John 12:42-43)

Mormon spoke of those whose hearts were set on the praise of men when he sharply declared, “O ye pollutions, ye hypocrites ... who sell yourselves for that which will canker ... Why are ye ashamed to take upon you the name of Christ? Why do ye not think that greater is the value of an endless happiness than that misery which never dies—because of the praise of the world?” (Mormon 8:38)

Mormon nailed the point. When we seek the praise of the world, we are distracted—often completely—from pursuing the path to the tree of life, the path to Christ. We take upon ourselves the many names of the world, not the “name of Christ,” (which is our stated goal each time we partake of the sacrament) When we love anything—in this case the praise of other people—more than following God, we fall away from the path to the tree of life and get lost, often never to return. Our children are bombarded constantly at school, on social media, in other electronic forums, and even at church to behave in ways that will win the approval of friends and strangers—the “praise of the world.” These distractions lead them away from the path to eternal life.

Praise can tempt us in so many ways. In the first chapters of Alma we read that after extensive war and the death of so many they could not be numbered, the Nephites were humbled, and there was peace in the land, and then—in only TWO years—“the people of the church began to grow proud because of their great riches, fine silks, fine linen, many flocks and herds, gold and silver, and all kinds of precious things .. and they were proud and began to wear expensive clothing. (Alma 4:6)

Does anybody sit in their house, or work in the field, wearing fine silks and holding their gold, all by themselves? With rare exceptions, NO. All these things are designed to help the owner earn—or buy—the praise and approval of other people. That is the goal. By itself, in an ordinary household, gold has no value at all. It serves only to communicate wealth, which then we can use to feel superior to others.

Alma confirms that in the next couple of verses, referring to the riches of the people: “So they felt superior to others and began to persecute those who didn't believe as they did. Great contentions began among the people of the church, with envy, competition, evil intentions, persecutions, and pride.” (Alma 4:7-9)

We in the church understand pride poorly. We think pride springs from the earth from the seed of pride. Not so. Pride is not the primary problem, just as a shifted and cracked window in a house is never the problem. No, if you look further, you’ll find that the real problem lies BENEATH the window—usually a cracked and shifting foundation for the entire house. The foundation shifts, and THEN you see the cracked window secondarily.

Similarly, pride appears like this:

1. First comes the emotional and spiritual pain of not having enough of the pure love of Christ. PAIN
2. Then we use whatever we can find to diminish that pain, to fill the emptiness created by a lack of love.
3. We find that Praise is quite effective in diminishing the pain, at least in the short term.
4. The more praise we get, the prouder we become of ourselves. (The following sung to the tune of nanny-nanny-boo-boo) “I have more praise than you do.” And it’s QUANTIFIABLE. I have more friends on Facebook than you. I have more money. My friends are more visible than yours. My grades are better. I’m a starter on the football team. My girlfriend is prettier than yours.

Pride springs from pain and then the praise we use to protect ourselves. Hence praise being a Protecting Behavior.

Praise is so much easier to earn, and more predictable, and faster, than steadily pressing forward, enduring to the end, where we will hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant (Matthew 25:21). Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34) THOSE are the words we all WANT and need to hear, but we cannot hear them—even as a faint promise—if we are distracted by seeking the praise of others, or avoiding their disapproval.

Children compete vigorously for praise because of their clothing, the model of their smart phone, the number of followers on social media, the group they belong to at school, and much more. The competition is seriously distracting for them. If you have any doubt of the power of that approval, LISTEN to them when they get DISAPPROVAL: for wearing the wrong thing, for saying the wrong thing, for being awkward, whether in person or on social media. End of the world.

Where did children learn this thirst for approval. From US, from YOU. When they were “good”—when they did what we wanted, we smiled, spoke kind words, got all excited, changed our tone of voice, and used flattering words. So then they learned to fight for OUR praise and approval as their parents. And we gladly jump into this game and praise them. Why do we praise them?

1. (In our defense) Partly we praise them because we think it’s good for them. Everybody does it. Every magazine article and child rearing expert teaches us to praise our children instead of yelling at them, but both of those extremes—anger AND praise—miss the point entirely of loving our children and teaching them. Neither one of them is about the genuine confidence that a child feels from feeling the pure love of Christ and following Him until we are filled with the Spirit. I realize that you’re wondering, so if praise isn’t good for them, what am I supposed to do? We’re getting to that. Almost there.
2. (reason we praise them). We love the look on their faces when we praise them. They smile. They LOOK happy, but it’s not the kind of happy God wants for us. It’s temporary. It’s the kind of happiness they have to EARN from us.
3. Because—however unconsciously we do it—we discover that when we praise them, they’re more cooperative, more easily managed. This is a subtle but still powerful form of controlling them that sets them and us up for a trading of praise and temporary “feeling good” instead of focusing on the prize: the pure love of Christ. WE are manipulating THEM to behave a certain way, and THEY manipulate US to praise them. That’s not love.

All this is so sneaky, and we do NOT know it’s going on. Hence this discussion.

The Savior talked about the dangers of seeking the praise or approval of others when he said, Take heed that ye do not your alms [meaning “your good deeds”] before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven ... Do not sound a trumpet before thee ... [but do your good deeds] in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:1-4)

NOT because praise itself is bad, but because we cannot stop ourselves from trading it with others, buying it from them, and in so doing, we enter the marketplace where Satan is the stock broker. He delights in our trading. It might be the place where he most enjoys himself. Rarely does he succeed in whispering to us, “Go and kill,” or “Rob a bank.” No, he wins the game when he gets us simply to enter his store, where the things of the world are bought and sold. The Lord says, “Come ye blessed, inherit your kingdom,” while Satan says, “Come into my market, where we will buy and sell together,” and thus our souls are led “away carefully down to hell.” (2 Nephi 28:21)

When we trade, we find ourselves in that great and spacious building described by Lehi: “It was filled with people ... and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine ... and they were mocking and pointing their fingers towards those at the tree of life.” (1 Nephi 8:26-27) There are many attractive stalls, stores, and arcades in that building.

In vision Nephi saw the “nations and kingdoms of the Gentiles,” with all their wickedness. He saw their desires for “gold and silver” and “for the praise of the world.” (1 Nephi 13:1-9) All through the Book of Mormon are uncounted examples of people looking for praise, which is intertwined with the desire for wealth, power, and all manner of evil.

We’ve clearly seen that the Lord warns of the dangers of praise. Now let’s talk more about WHY praise is dangerous and what we can give our children instead of praise. (Told you we’d get there?) This is lifesaving stuff for our kids.

In our society, so many of us seek praise on a regular basis that we’ve come to view this behavior as entirely normal, even commendable. In fact, those who are most successful in acquiring praise—movie stars, professional athletes—are held up as icons worthy of even more praise. So, if essentially “everybody’s doing it,” what could possibly be wrong with it? We’re going to discuss how praise is potentially harmful here. Rather than give you a list, we’ll just dive in.

But before I illustrate each of these problems with praise, let me go on a brief tangent here and tell you a story. It’s a little early, but this story about a real person will help you understand these problems with praise in a way that will make the point more memorable—in real life.

Mark was raised in a “good” LDS home—appearing to be above average in every way. Turns out that appearances are not nearly enough. The phrase “form of godliness” (2 Timothy 3:5) comes to mind. All his life Mark’s father was very active in church leadership, often gone to a meeting of some kind. His mother was also busy—in Mark’s words—serving and doing.

Is that bad? Of course not, but nothing can replace what happens at home.

Mark went to church every Sunday, served in priesthood quorum presidencies, attended seminary. Those are all good things to do, and he did them well. He was obedient. He did well in school, worked hard on his mission, served in multiple bishoprics, high councils. After graduation from medical school, he became an orthopedic surgeon. He made lots of money, married a good member of the Church, and had several beautiful children. Goodness, he was a success in every discernible way.

And then he began to attend church less consistently, then sporadically, then none at all. He became addicted to porn for years. People said he was having a “mid-life crisis,” but that term which ignorantly dismisses and demeans what is really going on in someone’s life. How do you solve a “mid-life crisis?” What is the cure? Useless term. So what was really happening?

When I talked to him, he described feeling pressured all his life, always trying to please people. He said it was like something snapped inside. His marriage was failing. His membership in the Church was wobbly at best. His children were acting out. Most important, he was miserable. He said to me: “I’ve been using porn regularly for years.”

I said, “I don’t care.”

That was clearly not what he’d expected to hear—certainly not what he’d been told by several bishops and therapists. He looked puzzled and said, “Did you not hear me?”

“Yeah, I heard you. I just don’t care about the specifics of your mistakes. Your behavior only screams that you’re in pain. That’s all. I care VERY much about your pain. I care very much about you.”

Tears welled up in his eyes.

He said, “I don’t know how I got to this place.”

“Pretty frustrating, isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded. He could hardly speak.

“Do you want to know where it all began?”

More nodding.

“It all began when you were a little boy, probably 1 or 2 years old. You wouldn’t remember that, but you will remember the words you heard later in life. These are the words that led to where you are now, words you heard from your parents, teachers, and church leaders all your life: ‘Mark, you’re such a good boy.’”

And then he sobbed. He felt the truth of it.

You see, despite all his good works, he had been TRAPPED by the people around him—all of whom “meant well”—with their variations on that praise. Simultaneously (1) he LOVED the feeling of praise, compliments, adoration, AND (2) he felt constant pressure to keep earning it, AND (3) he lived in TERROR that all the approval would be withdrawn, and then he’d be left with nothing but disapproval and feeling worthless.

I explained all this to him, and he nodded his head like a bobble-headed doll, still weeping but now with a much different expression on his face.

Turns out that even though his parents were “anxiously engaged in a good cause” (D&C 58:27), he never knew unconditional love. They smiled and praised him when he was “good” but frowned and lectured him when he made mistakes. I asked him if either parent had ever just sat with him, looked him in the eyes, and asked him how he felt. No. Held your face in their hands and told you that they adored you no matter what you did? No. Laid next to you in bed, snuggling, telling you a fairy tale starring YOU? More tears.

He was certainly TAUGHT the gospel—home, church, seminary, mission. But he had NO clue whatever about the feeling of the pure love of Christ. Without that, he embraced praise as a substitute, as an imitation of love. He worked hard at it, got a lot of it, but always there was the pressure to maintain it and fear of losing it. Praise feels pretty good, but the fear of losing of it feels awful.

It all began with “you’re such a good boy.” He did “good work,” but he was motivated by duty, obligation, and fear. That’s not enough. He really, really TRIED to be good. He didn’t overtly, consciously choose evil. No, he wore out. Earning praise became crushing, so he looked for whatever would temporarily decrease his pain: social media, porn, and avoiding church and all those reminders of how he was failing. He knew all the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” He just couldn’t carry them around anymore, because he’d never built his house upon the rock of the pure love of Christ. He didn’t know what it was or how it felt.

In order to injure a child, you don’t have to hit them or yell at them—just NOT love them purely. Praise is one of the many ways to NOT love them. NOT loving them is anything that leads them away from the path, from following Christ. When we praise them, we are unintentionally encouraging them to follow US, not Christ. We’re leading them to earn OUR praise. Sneaky, and we don’t mean to do it.

As we praise our children, it does not have the effect we think. Young people are reminded often that they are a “royal generation” and that they have been “reserved for this dispensation” for the “gathering of Israel” and the coming of the Lord. Is there anything wrong with telling them that? No, it’s all true, but if they don’t feel the power of love in their individual life, they are left with feeling pressured to succeed but without the tools to accomplish that. So often they are going through the motions, and eventually the motions aren’t enough, and they’re drawn to the noise, the attractions, and the calls of those who live in the great and spacious building. The Nephites went through this cycle again and again, until they learned firsthand the pure love of Christ from its source when the resurrected Savior visited this continent.

There’s a reason that Utah leads the nation both in teen suicide and in the rate of its increase. Our children are distracted by the imitation love of the world just like any other children, but on top of that they feel burdened with mountains of “should” and “should not.” Without love, that burden is crushing. Too often at home they are taught but do not feel loved. We can SAY we love them, but our disappointment and irritation and bribing tell the truth.

We tend to be great at building beautiful walls and windows, so we keep doing that. But without a firm foundation, the walls and windows will crack. Often we don’t build on the Rock of Christ. 

Yes, we talk about Him, we end our prayers in His name, we make promises to remember Him every week. But so many of us simply do not know HOW to build on the rock of His love. That’s more elusive. It’s harder to quantify. You can quantify church attendance, so we do what we’re good at. But often we parents miss what ties all those actions together. We don’t know how to help them form a foundation from which all good works naturally spring.

What happened to Mark, the man I talked to? Oh, I just loved him. I taught him about his life—how he had gotten to this place of discouragement—and about what love feels like. I didn’t need to teach him the commandments. He knew all the “shoulds.” I held his face in my hands and looked into his eyes. Yes, you can do that on a video call.

We did that for some time, and one day he wrote to me and said that he was attending church again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used porn. He’d quit social media completely. He was enjoying his wife and kids. And he said, “I like the commandments now. I like being obedient. I prefer it.” THAT is what love does. As I said in Chapter One, love gives people—notably our children—a REASON to listen to us as we teach them. Feeling God’s love—at first through a PERSON, a remarkably flawed person—gave Mark a REASON to listen to the source of the love: God. He began to follow Christ, the love of Christ, and obedience naturally followed. That is the pure love of Christ in action.

Now, back to our discussion of the different ways that praise is potentially dangerous. Keep in mind that praise is NOT always bad, but in the absence of pure love, its dangers FAR outweigh the benefits.

First danger: The effects of praise are temporary and superficial.

Think about the last time you worked hard to complete a task and then received some measure of congratulation. It felt pretty good, didn’t it? Or you really put together a knock-out combination of makeup, dress, hair, shoes, the whole deal. Then somebody said, “Wow, gorgeous.” That feels pretty great too. In the absence of sufficient pure love, we adore approval—worship it, roll around in it, feast on it, NEED it. But how long does that feeling last? A compliment feels great for a few moments, but the itch soon returns, and then what?

Once the exciting effects of praise wear off—as they always do—we become vaguely aware, again, that something is missing. Then we try to fill the emptiness by earning even more praise—like Mark did, like our children do—but again the effects wear off, so we’re caught in a cycle of always trying to please people, earn their approval, and win their compliments. It’s a trap that never quite lets us go—never lets our children go either.

“Caught in a cycle” is another way of saying “addiction,” and the addiction to praise is EVERYWHERE. Our kids thirst for approval, but again, the effects don’t last. It’s not love. So kids learn new and better “tricks” to earn the same level of praise, and either they (1) stay addicted all their lives, or (2) they burn out and move on to some other form of imitation love, and then another, and another, until they’re trapped in a pit so deep and so narrow that they can’t move. But we still praise them, because we like THEIR approval, and we don’t know how to truly love and teach.

Next problem with praise: It never brings us genuine happiness.

Within the sometimes rewarding fruit of praise there is a rotten core that we’re always aware of but can rarely name. From the time we were children, other people have praised us for doing what? For being ourselves? For speaking up and declaring in a loud voice what was important to us? Hardly. Almost without exception, people praised us for doing and being what they wanted—understandably. They patted us on the head and spoke kind words only on the occasions when we had just behaved in ways that made their lives more pleasant or convenient or entertained. We praise our children when they make US look good or feel good, and they’ve learned that if they behave in those “desirable” ways, we will praise them more.

In other words, children learn at an early age to earn or buy praise—which equates to buying our “love”—and all the rest of our lives they continue to engage in this pattern of earning. This is all quite natural and understandable, but “the natural man is an enemy to God”—as king Benjamin said. (Mosiah 3:19) The natural man cannot feel or give the pure love of Christ. We don’t earn THAT love, the pure stuff. It’s always there. The tree of life is always there. Yes, we do have to walk out of the “dark and dreary waste” of the world and follow the rod to the tree, but we do not EARN it. We simply go where it already flows with everlasting abundance, where it is distilled like the “dews from heaven.” (D&C 121:45)

Next problem: Praise becomes an addiction

Notice that we earn praise, we buy it, it’s superficial, doesn’t make us genuinely happy. We’re getting perilously close to the definition of addiction. Substitute the word “cocaine” for praise: the effects are superficial and temporary, we buy it, and it doesn’t make us happy. Addiction. 

Once they’re addicted, our children continue to use praise for the rest of their lives to achieve a false sense of worth. It becomes a form of trading that leaves them hollow and unfulfilled. They feel pressured—like Mark did—to continue earning our praise and to make us happy.

Praise becomes an addiction. We’ll talk about addiction more later, but for now I offer a new definition of addiction, one that is simple and has stood the test of experience and time: Addiction is the use of any substance or behavior (1) that is used to make us feel less pain; (2) that causes us physical, emotional, spiritual, or social harm; and (3) that we cannot easily give up. Sound familiar? Praise satisfies all those requirements.

We can easily become addicted to praise in just as real a way as we can become addicted to cocaine or any other addictive drug. A friend of mine once interviewed a world famous comedian, and when she asked him what it was like to get all that adoration on stage, he said, “I love it. Problem is, when the performance is over, before I even get back to my hotel, I have to have more.”

People pleasers are addicted to praise, and I can tell you after interviewing hundreds of them, they are in a prison. They can’t ever stop earning approval. And who would ever stop them? We love it when somebody is addicted to praise, because they do what we want. When our children are people pleasers, we refer to them as “the good boy/girl.” “Oh, he/she is such a pleasure to us.” Unintentionally, we are the dealers for our children’s addiction to approval. We want them to work to please us. We don’t mean to, but we addict them.

When people finally get to the place where the effects of praise are no longer effective, the emptiness can become overwhelming—like with Mark. At that point, many people attempt to find relief in other forms of imitation love—power, pleasure, and safety, which we’ll discuss shortly. But the effects of those fade too, and the pain continues to build. Then people—like our children—become depressed or develop panic disorders or ADHD. They act out. All of these behaviors demonstrate that even an ocean of praise—or any of the forms of Imitation Love we’ve learned to use from childhood—can never fill the void left by a lack of pure love.

All these other behaviors are also connected to—and often evolve from—praise. Praise is like a gateway drug. Nearly every child begins with earning praise. They LOVE our smiles and kind words. But then they discover that praise is not enough, they get exhausted, and they give up trying to please us. That’s when they move to anger, defiance, whining, and all the addictions.

Is praise always bad? Is it always Imitation Love? Is it possible to praise people—or receive praise—and not be using Imitation Love? The concept of praise as an addiction helps to provide an answer to these questions. Properly prescribed and used, narcotics can be a benefit in our lives. They’re great for post-operative pain and other conditions where pain treatment is highly desired, even helpful to healing. But narcotics are uniformly harmful to an addict. How can you tell if someone is an addict, as opposed to someone who genuinely needs a narcotic? Easy: If you take a narcotic from an addict, you’ll see all the signs of withdrawal—anxiety, irritability, and a frenetic seeking of the drug.

It’s the same with praise. When people feel unconditionally loved, praise can be useful, healthy, and even pleasurable, but they don’t NEED it. Children who feel loved don’t work for praise. But praise is different for praise addicts. Praise addicts must have their praise. They manipulate people to get it. They maneuver and scheme to get more, and without it they are disappointed, irritated, and anxious. They become pathologic people pleasers, and do we want that for our children? Do we want them trapped in a prison, as Mark was?

Addicts are actually using far more than we realize, because even when we don’t SEE them using, they’re almost always using in their heads. Addicts are ALWAYS aware of when they last used, how it felt, and when they'll use next. The times in between their “usings” are consumed with thoughts of when their next hit is. Their life is consumed with using their drug of choice, even when we can’t see their use of praise, phones, anger, drugs, and more in the moment.        

Another problem with Praise. It blinds us to the needs of others.

Cocaine addicts tend to focus only on one thing: the source of their next “fix” or “hit.” They become so obsessed with their supply that they ignore the needs of their friends, their jobs, their children, and their own health. All addicts are blind to everything but their own needs. In other words, they become very selfish, the opposite of the second great commandment: Love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39)

When our children become dependent on praise, they don’t even know who they are. They know only what other people want them to be. They are a fulfillment of what the Savior said, “He who seeketh to save his life shall lose it; and he who loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 10:34, JST) To paraphrase, “If you look to build up yourself—like with praise—you lose everything.”

Next problem with praise: Decreases cooperation with others, and the Ability to connect

Imagine that you have never known competition of any kind. There has always been “enough,” like the infinite love of God. So when you work with others, of course you freely share everything you know and everything you have for the sake of the common good. Why wouldn’t you? You already lack for nothing.

This might remind you of the condition of the Nephites after the coming of Christ, where “there were no contentions and disputations among them, and every man did deal justly one with another. And they had all things common among them; so there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift.” (4 Nephi 2-3)

But then what do we do with our children? They see us praise them and others when they “do good,” and then they see us NOT praise them when they’re not so perfect. SO they learn to COMPETE for praise. Now they’ll be far more likely to perform in ways that will win more of our praise FOR THEMSELVES rather than working for the welfare of all. It’s poison. Cooperation disappears, directly contradicting the direction of Christ, who commanded, “Be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.” (D&C 38:27)

Next problem with praise. Destroys motivation

This is crazy opposite of what you’d think, because we’ve all been taught that we need to praise our children to motivate them. No.

Many studies have proven that praise leads to LESS of the activity the child is praised for. I can illustrate this by asking a question: Why do children draw pictures with crayons? The answer is actually obvious: Because they WANT to. They LIKE it. Then we come along as parents and say something seemingly positive like, “Good job!” about one of their drawings. We were TAUGHT to say such things. It sounds good, but now, each time the child draws a picture, he has to wonder, “Oh no, will this be acceptable to my Mom/Dad when they see it?”

The inherent joy of drawing is now gone. How sad. They remember how great it felt to be praised for doing a “good job,” but they also remember the many occasions when they did a “bad job” and received expressions of disappointment and frustration. The possibility of a negative result outweighs the possibility of a good one. (Losing feels worse than winning feels good.) So, they begin to back away from anything where they’ll be criticized—like Mark did. They’d rather quit trying—quit coloring, quit doing well in school, quit going to church, quit being kind to their siblings, and so on—than to try and feel trapped by both sides of the same coin: winning approval and avoiding disapproval. Not worth it, so they give up.

How often parents have asked me why a child stops doing a seemingly good activity “out of the blue”—a particular sport, playing the piano, attending church. Almost always the answer is found in the initial praise given by the PARENT. We’re not conscious of the damage we do, but we still do it. Who knew? Again, soon we’ll get to what you can say to your children that is far more productive and loving than giving praise.

Next problem with praise: It lowers confidence.

I know, again the opposite of what you’d think. But if children do something simply because they want to, and they learn to do it well, they can develop a firm confidence in their abilities. If we praise them for that task, however, now they have to consider our evaluation of their performance, and that introduces an unknown factor—a question mark—every time they engage in that task. What a drag for them. Studies have confirmed that after children have become competent at a skill and confident in their ability, adults can easily undermine that confidence with compliments. After the compliments, instead of simply enjoying their own performance, children become tentative and afraid. They look to the adults for approval of what had once been a self-rewarding activity.

We’ll talk more about confidence shortly

Another problem: Praise lowers their standards of excellence and desire to do good.

Most of us have spent our entire lives believing that people must be driven—nearly beaten, really—before they will perform optimally. So we nag, criticize, push, “motivate.” (terrible word, implying that people are too stupid and lazy to do good on their own) But excellent studies have proven that people—including children—are most powerfully motivated by the simple satisfaction of being involved in tasks that are meaningful, tasks they ENJOY, and with that motivation alone they tend to work hard and complete these tasks to a high standard of competence. Who knew?

But when we praise them, we introduce a new standard of competence: not excellence or fulfillment but winning our praise. Now children will often stop working at the moment they have earned our praise, performing at a level inferior to the standard they achieved—or would achieve—with intrinsic motivation. Our children actually perform BETTER when they feel loved and when they’re taught, than they do when they are pushed, even by praise. What an idea! But a proven truth.

ANOTHER evil of praise: Anxiety

When children have the strength of the Lord, when they partake of the fruit that is "desirable to make one happy" (1 Nephi 8:10), then they will “be full of charity toward all, and their confidence will wax strong in the presence of God and distil upon their soul as the dews from heaven.” (D&C 121:45)

But when we praise children for their accomplishments, they become increasingly afraid of doing anything that might lead to losing that praise or—far worse—to actually incurring our criticism. They lose their inner confidence.

From a great many interactions with human beings, I have learned how hard people are willing to work to achieve a feeling of worth. Some people acquire extensive education and expertise. Others rise to positions of authority through the exercise of intelligence, social skills, creativity, management skills, and more. These pursuits give them a feeling of competence, which nearly everyone confuses with self-worth or confidence. Even money is little more than quantifiable evidence of competence.

But I have also witnessed a consistent—nearly uniform—pattern among those who seek competence—and the praise that goes with it. They never have enough. They always need more: more money, more knowledge, more power, more authority, more recognition for their achievements, and so on. Competence alone does not produce the deep gratification of genuine happiness.

If you examine your children carefully, you will see them pursuing competence and recognition for the purpose of feeling worthwhile—in academics, athletics, winning video games, physical appearance, social media influence, even church attendance and rigid and obligated obedience to commandments—and if you understand that competence so often is a counterfeit of confidence, you’ll be able to help them avoid the pitfalls of the former.

To highlight the nature of the counterfeit, let’s examine the nature of genuine confidence.

If you feel unconditionally loved by those who matter to you, which greatly facilitates your feeling loved by God—as we have discussed—you realize that you have the most important thing in the world—you have that which is "most desirable above all things," Nephi said. (1 Nephi 11:22) If you have the most important thing—the pure love of Christ from people and from God Himself—you win. You always win. You’re confident of the value of what you have—and who you are—no matter what happens, because the love you possess—and the happiness that follows—is infinite and unconditional. You become a kind of invincible. As we have previously read, when you are “full of charity toward all, your confidence—real confidence—will wax strong in the presence of God.” (D&C 121:45) You need no external proof—like competence—that you’re worthwhile because you are filled with the pure love of Christ. And we can help our children achieve that condition. That is our primary job.

Let me be even more direct and clear.

Here are the characteristics of confidence:

• It’s a firm, solid faith in the love you have already.
• It’s knowing that your confidence doesn’t depend on success or failure.
• It’s knowing that you’re free to make mistakes without losing your confidence.
• It’s understanding that you’re free to LEARN, rather than being desperate to be RIGHT or avoiding being wrong.
• There is no constant effort to reach some identifiable goal or position.
• It inevitably leads to happiness.
• This is all true for us AND for our children.

What are the characteristics of competence?

• It’s a feeling of strength derived from what you can DO, not an assurance of who you ARE.
• It’s conditional, fleeting, easily lost, undependable.
• You have to preserve and protect it, always fearing mistakes that could remove the appearance of having it.
• It’s a sense of control and often arrogance, which are pale shadows of true confidence.
• It does not produce genuine happiness.

It’s counter-intuitive at first, to see that competence does not produce either genuine confidence or happiness, but it is nonetheless a true principle, one we can learn for a certainty only with practice, only by being filled with the pure love of Christ, which is that thing “most joyous to the soul,” not competence—Nephi again. (1 Nephi 11:23)

We must love and teach our children, which will enable them to feel loved, to be loving, and to be responsible. They will know who they really are—with all their gifts—and will experience a kind of confident joy that cannot be shaken by their own mistakes or by the disapproval of others. Such children are truly powerful, and our role in helping them to develop this quality is unspeakably indispensable.

Objection

Many people object when I talk about the evils of praise, saying, for example, “Oh, but without praise, what would motivate our children to continue doing the right thing?” Another version of that question is, If you don’t keep score and compete, what would motivate kids to excel? There’s that nasty word again: motivate.

Actually, I’ve already answered those objections. When children feel loved and when they’re not in pain, and they’re not afraid, they do the right thing because they simply WANT to. Because they are God’s children AND because doing well is fulfilling and satisfying—intrinsically. AND because without fear they can feel the guidance of the Light of Christ, and—if they have made the covenant of baptism—hear the voice of the Spirit.

Am I saying that performance should no longer be evaluated? No. I’m describing the dangers that come with becoming addicted to positive evaluations as a form of substitute or imitation love. AND in a few minutes I’ll be describing how we can use evaluation as a form of INFORMATION, not praise—with all its pitfalls.                        

A teenager, Rebecca, called to tell me that she was worried about her assignment to give a speech in front of several combined classes the next day. A lot of people would be attending—including her friends and some kids who were famous for criticizing and gossiping—and she was terrified of all the disappointment and disapproval she might get.

This theme runs through nearly all our lives. Without feeling sufficiently loved as young children, we do not have the profound, innate confidence in our worth that produces a sense of peace and joy. The resultant pain is intolerable, so—mostly unconsciously—we tend to labor long and hard to PROVE our worth by the things we DO.

That approach never works. Ever. Why? In part because we’re trying to prove something that’s already true.

I spoke with Rebecca and said:

“We’re already worthwhile. We were born that way. We were born the sons and daughters of God the Father, and we were given the opportunity to freely partake of His love and to “look to Christ and live.” All of us can partake of his love, either in this life or the next. He loves us infinitely. The God of heaven and earth loves us. With that abundance of pure love, what else is there? What could diminish that? The worst thing people could do to us is to offer THEIR flawed and foolish human disapproval—with their limited perspective—which means very little in the face of His divine love.

“Moreover, even as humans, who would look at a newborn and think, “I dunno whether this kid is worth loving. Maybe we’ll wait and see if this kid is worth it. If he proves himself, then maybe I’ll care about him.” Nah, Unthinkable. If you encountered a newborn lying on the ground, you’d immediately take care of the baby, without him doing anything to earn his worth or your love—wouldn’t you?

“We’re doing this all backward. Instead of proving our worth by what we do, it’s far easier, and more productive, and TRUER, if we simply accept our worth from the beginning. We’re worthwhile simply because we’re God’s children, and because some people love us, and because Christ died for us. Then everything changes. Now there’s no pressure to prove ourselves.

“Now, instead of doing things to prove your worth, you can just allow your performance (the doing) to proceed forth naturally FROM who you already ARE. If we could remember this principle alone, we’d quit worrying about everything.”

The day after I explained all this to Rebecca, she called me and said, “I nailed it.”

“The speech?” I asked.

“Yep.” (very pleased with herself)

“Did you notice a difference in how you FELT?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I just didn’t care.”

“Didn’t care about what?”

“I didn’t care about whether other people thought the speech was successful. I didn’t care what people said. I just did my best. I was myself. I already knew I was worthwhile—I remembered what you said to me—so my speech was easy. I was ‘in the flow, baby.’ It was way easier. There was no stress, no fear.”

That was fun to hear and see. By the way, this would have been a GREAT experience even if she had NOT “nailed it.” If she had lost her fear but still walked all over her tongue for the entire speech, and everyone had gossiped about her, it would still have been WONDERFUL. Why? Because she could feel that I cared about how SHE FELT, not how she performed. Her performance will soon be forgotten, but her fearless begins a pattern that is lifesaving.

Help your children to STOP proving their worth with what they do. Teach them to allow their accomplishments to flow from their already undeniable, inherent worth. Teach them to EXPRESS who they are everywhere they go, while simultaneously practicing ways to repent and grow who they are—to make their best selves better. Oh, and remind them that life is supposed to be fun. When they get to that place, worry, fear, and anxiety just float away. I’ve seen that happen over and over.

One Final problem with praise: Praise keeps children from feeling the pure love of Christ.

As we’ve already discussed extensively, praise is earned, and children come to believe that this conditional trading is love—because it feels good. And certainly they’ve seen an endless line of people claim to be loving precisely because they are flattering, as well as others who claim to FEEL loved only because they are temporarily and superficially gratified by the praise and approval they get. So our children sincerely believe that praise is evidence of love, when instead it is almost always a deception, a manipulation, and certainly a distraction from the unconditional and divine love of God freely available to all who come to the tree of life.

Memorize this: As long as we are working for praise, we can’t be feeling pure love, which is both freely given and freely received. We cannot serve two masters, not God and mammon (Matthew 6:24), and not pure love and the imitation love of praise. Our lust for praise fatally interferes with our search for the pure love we need.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

After outlining all these negative effects of praise, am I saying that we should never praise our children? No, praise is dangerous only when it’s used as a form of imitation love, as a substitute for Real Love. If we can avoid using praise in that way, we can give “positive feedback” to our children that is very beneficial. And no, the difference between praise and positive feedback is NOT a fine line at all. It’s not picking at words.

Let me begin by describing some of the differences between praise and positive feedback:

FIRST, TRADITIONAL PRAISE

Up to this point, I’ve been using the word praise in the way that is prevalent in society today—traditional praise. When most parents offer praise, they make statements like these:

• “Great job.” “Nice work.”
•  “I’m so proud of you.”
• “You’re such a good boy/girl.”
• “That’s really great/awesome.”

It’s important to observe some characteristics of this kind of praise, so we can understand its effects and consider something better. In the examples of praise I just spoke, notice that overall

• the parent tends to describe how the child’s behavior affects the PARENT. We do this with our words, tone of voice, facial expressions. (Go through the above four examples of praise and show how they’re about parent: In each case it’s I LIKE) Without meaning to, the parent makes the child feel responsible for the parent’s happiness. Children should NEVER feel responsible for your happiness. How can they learn to be responsible for themselves when you make them responsible for you? Clearly opposite from US unconditionally loving THEM.
•  the parent places a VALUE on the child. When we say things like, “I’m so proud of you” and “Great job!” with enthusiasm, the child cannot avoid hearing the message, “YOU are more worthwhile when you perform to my standard.” The problem with this is that when the child DOESN’T perform to that standard and doesn’t get praised, he or she FEELS less worthwhile, and even if he doesn’t fail, the pressure of potential failure—and being less worthwhile, less lovable—is always there. Listen, this is bad stuff. Certainly not unconditional acceptance.
• the assessments are quite general: good, great, beautiful. Judgments like this don’t help the listener actually learn anything specific from the parent, nothing that would be useful in improving or maintaining future performance. No genuine teaching (loveandteach).
•  the parent expresses personal approval, which the child knows can be withdrawn so easily

This is the praise that has all the problems I just discussed at length.

GIVING POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Instead of praise, positive feedback can be quite useful in TEACHING a child. Some examples:

• “Thanks for all the effort you made to get this kitchen cleaned on time. You made it much easier for me to fix dinner.” (Note my tone)
•  “What you just said showed some thought. Tell me what you were thinking when you came up with that. (Wait for answer.) I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
• “Nice work. You must be happy with how you did this. Can you feel it?”
• “Your grade in this class got better this term. Do you know why? Are you enjoying the class more? Did you study more?”
• “You have every reason to be proud of this. How do you feel about it?”
• “This is great work. You really seem to understand what needed to be done? What did you learn from doing this?”

How does positive feedback differ from praise? Positive feedback

•  focuses on the effort of the CHILD, not on how you feel about it. (Pay attention to them)
• focuses on the value of the specific task, rather than on the value of the child who completed the task
• is specific. It gives your child useful INFORMATION that will help him/her in making future decisions. (Teaching)
• is usually given in private, where the child doesn’t feel compared to other people. (no competition)
• encourages your child to participate in a discussion. (involves, connects)
• is delivered in a tone identical to the tone you give NEGATIVE feedback with. This point is critical. Note that in both lists of examples I gave—of praise and feedback—I said the phrase, “Nice work.” The point is that it’s not just the words that matter. It’s the attitude with which you speak them, and you’ll find it very difficult to fake this. If you say “Nice job” with a light in your eyes and a tone of obvious glee, the child WILL hear this: “You have made ME feel good. You have made ME happy, and I like that.” When you light up as you say, “Nice work,” You’ve made it about YOU, and your child will then feel pressured to keep making you happy, and that is not a healthy motivation for performance. We’re here to love and TEACH, not to persuade them to do what WE WANT. HUGE difference, not a fine line.
• demonstrates a genuine awareness of what the CHILD has actually done. The focus is on the CHILD, not how they did what YOU want, and then they feel cared for.
• there is no APPROVAL that’s conditional. Just loving and teaching.
• is both information and opportunity. This is the single most important description of positive feedback. It provides your child with an opportunity to hear observations, perspectives, and even guidance that he or she might not otherwise receive. It can also involve an opportunity for discussion in which the CHILD can explore additional thoughts or choices. You’re TEACHING, the other half of loveandteach.
• If you get all this, you’ll see that if you use the same tone of delivery, there is no “positive” or “negative” feedback, just FEEDBACK, or—better—INFORMATION. Praise is FILLED with dangers. What our children need is INFORMATION, and with love it becomes loving and teaching. THERE’S THE SUMMARY RIGHT THERE: loving and teaching.

All these characteristics of positive feedback share a common theme. They all indicate a genuine interest in your CHILD. It’s all LOVING. If you remember your child’s need for loving and teaching ALL the time, you’ll instantly know the difference between praise, criticism, and information. We have to avoid the praise of the world, which—as we’ve seen—is severely condemned by the Lord, BECAUSE praise is incompatible with the path back to Him.

Another tip about distinguishing praise from information. One word: expectations. When you praise a child, do you have any expectation that your praise will lead your child to do that commendable behavior more? “Nice job with the kitchen.” Is that flat-toned information, or are you hoping to manipulate them to do it that way the next time? Almost all parents manipulate their children with praise. It’s a trade. We praise them, and they do what we want. Sneaky. But our kids feel the burden of our manipulation, and they don’t like it.

I have seen uncounted adults—like Mark, who we talked about earlier in this chapter—who were crippled by the PRAISE they received as children. They were burdened by it, addicted by it, imprisoned by it—and finally they snapped.

Let me give you an example of loving and teaching, where praise would be used by nearly every parent—unwisely.

My son Rob was an excellent swimmer in high school, winning most local events, many regional events, and qualified for competing at the state championships. He held most of the pool records at his school. He was good. We often had conversations like this one when he came home from those competitions.

Me: You have a good time?

Rob: Yeah. It was a great meet. Ate some pizza. My friends were all there. We played around on the bus on the way up and back. It was great.

Me: How did you swim?

Rob: Pretty well. In one event, I got my personal best time.

Me: That must have felt good. What did you learn?

Rob: Some people are so serious and competitive. Geez, they just can’t have any fun. I’m glad I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m glad you don’t, either. And there was one guy on the bus who was a real jerk, but I remembered that he was just acting out of pain, and I chose to stay away from him.

Me: I’m glad you had a good time.

I did not ask whether he’d won his events, because it didn’t really matter. (winning is about competition, and comparing, and more, not HIM) I asked only if he’d enjoyed himself and if he’d learned anything, because that’s what really matters with our children, that they’re happy and learning. Several days later, a neighbor told me that Rob had won four of the five events he’d entered and had helped his team win the competition. That was an interesting piece of news, but it was not important to his happiness. If a parent elevates winning to a position of importance with a child, that child will look for happiness all his life by earning imitation love in the form of praise and power—and he will not find it. That road has an empty destination.

More examples of loving and teaching, not praise:

Your child gets two A’s on his report card.

The temptation is to say, “Nice job. way to go.”

What could you say instead?

• “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it, when you’re really prepared for a class, and you do well? Can you feel the confidence that comes from that?” 
• “You worked hard for this. Nice to have it turn out well, isn’t it?”
• “I remember last semester you got a B in that class. Did you enjoy the class more this time?” (Real question, not a manipulation)
• “Do you know what you did differently to get an A? What did you learn from that?”

Note that in the examples above, you’re being specific, you’re not valuating your child, you’re genuinely caring for your child and teaching.

Another example:

A child cleans up the kitchen at night and does an especially good job—meaning that she actually cleaned it this time.

Tempting: “Wow, that’s more like it.” (judging, comparing, expectations, tone)

You:   

• “Looking very good. Mom will be grateful to have a clean kitchen to work in tomorrow.”
• “This is nice work, thanks for doing this.” (Tone is even and calm)

Another example:

Child takes the garbage out without having to be reminded.

You:

• “I noticed that you took the garbage out yesterday without anybody asking you to do it. That was a big help to the family.”
• “I saw that you took the garbage out. It’s nice not to have me nagging you, isn’t it? Good work.”
• “Being responsible feels pretty good, doesn’t it? Actually easier than all the fussing, eh?”

Again, when a child does a good job—or poor one—it’s our job to be loving and give them useful information about their performance, rather than commenting on the child’s worth—often done with tone of voice.

I especially encourage parents to avoid use of the phrase, “I’m so proud of you” when reacting to an accomplishment, because our children notice what happens when they don’t succeed in the ways we expect. We do NOT say “I’m proud of you,” and that could only be felt as a withdrawal our pride in them. That does not have a positive effect.

AND when we say, “I’m proud of you,” our emphasis is more on ourselves than our children.

When we simply love and teach them, they create their OWN sense of accomplishment and healthy pride from it. They feel happier and more confident. That LASTS. It’s THEIRS. We sorely need to have FAITH in THEM that this is true. Our primary faith is in Jesus Christ, but it’s notable that HE has faith in our children. HE doesn’t control them and manipulate them. So why would WE?

And we need to teach our children everything I’ve said here about praise, so they understand what we’re doing, and why it’s so different from what everybody else does. Then they’re less likely to fall into the trap of feeling up when they’re praised—but down when they’re not—by people other than you. And they will be less likely to praise people in a manipulative way themselves.

I might comment here that now that you’ve begun this Training, you might consider having your children watch the Parenting Training with you. You decide how much of it, or how long any viewing lasts. But they UNDERSTAND far better than you think—and younger than you might suppose.

I had a conversation one day with a mother from Canada with children ages 3, 5, and 7. They had been watching the Training for a month or so. On this occasion they were fighting in the next room. Temptation: “Stop it.” She didn’t. She picked up her notes from the Training and walked to the door of the room. She found what she was looking for and said, “You guys don’t look happy.” The THREE-year-old: “Oh, we’re just not feeling loved.” They understand more than you think, which is how they succeed in manipulating us so well, and resisting anything they don’t want to do.

This has been a long explanation of the dangers of just ONE of the Protecting Behaviors: praise. Why did I do it? WHY dig so deep into the importance of understanding praise?

1. To illustrate how little we understand of the temptations of the world and of Satan.
2. This particular Protecting Behavior is EVERYWHERE—every page of social media, in every video game, in every classroom, at every grocery check-out stand (a carnival of trading praise—so we need to be more knowledgeable about it.
3. So you can get a taste of how much there is to learn about one subject, and how empowered we can be as we understand it. You really can change the world of your family.
4. So you can get a taste of how much we have yet to learn.

I won’t go into this much detail with the other 7 Protecting Behaviors. We’ll deal with those as we discuss specific Problem Behaviors and in future files on this website.

The Second Protecting Behavior: POWER

By virtue of their age, inexperience, and lack of authority, children find themselves in a position where they are often controlled. As parents we tell them when to get up, when to eat, how to chew, what to wear, and when to study or work, along with a long list of things they are NOT to do. This easily leads to feelings of helplessness and being controlled, which children hate. Without love, they can’t stand helplessness, so they grab hold of some measure of control—power—in any way they can get it. Often they feel like their agency is being taken from them, and sometimes they’re right. They seem to have an internal “injustice Meter” that goes off when they feel like their agency is being restricted. They shout some version of “That’s not fair,” followed by their making some kind of move to take power back for themselves, using whining, defiance, arguing

Children find a sense of power from many things, like when

• They pick on a sibling or peer—bullying.
• They defiantly say “No” when told by a parent what to do. THAT is what the terrible twos are, a transition from pleasing (winning praise) to grabbing power.
• They develop a passion for winning—video games, sports, arguments, the biggest helping of dessert, and more. Winning is not the problem, it’s the sense of superiority and control they get from it.
• They insist on being right.

These grabs for power might seem innocent (if you look at just one), but they are not consistent with faith and love. We cannot have faith in Jesus Christ and follow Him while we’re pursuing power for ourselves. If a child succeeds in getting power early in life, that pattern tends to produce adults who are controlling and unhappy.

All of human history has proven that using power for self-gratification is natural, but again king Benjamin identified that “the natural man is an enemy to God ... unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit ... and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19)

The words submissive, meek, humble, and full of love are not consistent with a lust for power. A screaming or sulking, resistant child is not submissive, meek, humble, and full of love. We might blow off a single such event, but one event so easily paves the way for a second, third, and then a lifetime pattern. All addictions have apparently innocent-looking beginnings.

The Book of Mormon is filled with stories of the Lamanites, Nephites, Gadianton robbers, and Jaredites in long and repeated periods of contention over having MORE, which was always about more power over something: more land, more gold and silver, more power in the government. And these contentions often ended in horrifying bloodshed.

Like any substitute for the pure love of Christ, the enjoyment is real—that’s why protecting Behaviors are attractive and WORK in the short term—but (1) the enjoyment never lasts and (2) it never achieves the condition of sublime satisfaction and fulfillment of genuine love—the tree of life. We cannot stand by while our children become addicted to the often-subtle use of power, which becomes a lifetime habit that does not serve them well.

United States President Lyndon Johnson was superbly skilled at manipulating people for his own power, a trait he learned in childhood. In a private conversation that was recorded and kept in a collection of secret tapes that were later released by his wife, he said, “People think I want great power. [But] what I want is ... a little love. That's all I want.” We use power only when we can’t find love, and the results are never happy.

The Third Protecting Behavior: PLEASURE

We’ve been talking about the ways children minimize their pain of not feeling loved, and there are few things that eliminate pain like pleasure, which has innumerable faces.

Mormon wrote that king Noah “had many wives and concubines. And he did cause his people to commit sin, and do that which was abominable in the sight of the Lord.” (Mosiah 11:2) In only a few years King Noah completely corrupted the word of God and nearly all his people with the pursuit of pleasure. We can’t serve God and the flesh.

The apostle Paul spoke of the world in which our children are now being raised when he wrote to Timothy: “In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves ... lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God ...” (2 Timothy 3:1-5)

Pleasure by itself isn’t bad. But pursuing it to the point where it distracts us from serving God and feeling His love can be fatally distracting. We can so easily pass from healthy pleasure to distracting pleasure—without any alarm going off. Suddenly, we’re distracted to the point of danger.

The more our children use pleasure, the easier it becomes to continue that use, and eventually the pursuit of pleasure—video games, smart phones, pornography, drugs, and more—becomes a distraction and an addiction that can lead our children “away carefully down to hell.” (2 Nephi 28:21). More about that shortly.

The sources of pleasure available to our children are without number:

• Electronics: video games, YouTube, social media, and much more
• Food: Children are often allowed to eat whatever is fun for them with no consideration for what is nutritious
• Outdoor recreation: sports, skateboarding, motorcycles. Obviously children need to be physically fit and to relax and have fun, but the use of these recreational activities often increases to the point that can best be described as an addiction to pleasure.
• Free time is a pleasure. The Lamanites mastered that, refusing to raise crops and herds with hard work. Instead they hunted and fished with their “free time,” and they are described in Mosiah as a “a lazy and an idolatrous people.” (Mosiah 9:12). .With enough of the pleasure of free time, our children will achieve the same lazy result. And if we stood by and watched it develop, we don’t get to be surprised when we have raised a child addicted to video games or sports, with no means of being independent in life.

An over-indulgence in pleasure leads children away from the tree of life straight to the great and spacious building, where they join others who are similarly indulging themselves. Everyone in the building is enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, turning their backs on the tree of life.

An over-indulgence in pleasure leads to an overall selfishness, which stands in direct opposition to our purpose here on earth. Again from Mosiah:

“There was a place ... where the daughters of the Lamanites gathered to sing, dance, and have fun (pleasure).” One day the wicked priests of Noah came out of their hiding places—where they were watching the girls—and carried them off. The secret pleasure of the girls fed the pleasures of the priests, and a war nearly followed. Unbridled pleasure inevitably leads to more serious problems.

The Fourth Protecting Behavior: SAFETY

Most children feel helpless, controlled, and threatened by the controlling and disapproval all around them—especially from their parents. They hate those feelings, so they do whatever it takes to feel LESS helpless, controlled, and threatened—in other words, they look for safety. How do they do that?

• They lie. We ask them if they did their assigned chore, and they say “Yes”—almost reflexively—in order to avoid the consistent disapproval we give them if the answer is “No.” They feel unloved when we scowl and speak harshly, and they’ll do almost anything to avoid that awful feeling—including lie. They’ve also learned that we check up on their performance inconsistently, and they’re willing to lie and take the gamble that they’ll get away with it again.
• They get angry. If we express disappointment or disapproval, they’ve learned that we tend to back down if they get angry enough.
• They avoid us—and others. They might stay in their room, or spend as much time as possible outside the home, or become depressed.
• Anxiety. Many children live in perpetual anxiety. Although rarely do they use anxiety consciously, they’ve learned that if they act afraid or anxious, we become less demanding. We’re less likely to teach responsibility to a child who acts afraid of doing anything. We cut them some slack.
• Fear of making decisions. Sometimes children are just paralyzed with a fear of making decisions or by a generalized anxiety that they can’t even put their finger on. They stay in an isolated cocoon that “protects” them—however poorly. And often we enable them in their fears. “Oh, poor baby,” instead of loving and teaching them.
• ADHD symptoms. Unconsciously, we tend to back off—a lot—from teaching a child who has a “short attention span,” rationalizing that he “can’t help it.” This gives the child a superficial sense of safety. Or we medicate them, and then they have even more reasons to justify their behavior, which makes them feel safer.
• Expressions of worthlessness, like “I can’t do anything right.” We tend to soothe such a child, which makes it far more difficult to teach them to be loving or responsible.

In other words, in order to feel safe, they engage in the very behaviors that are also harmful to them—also the behaviors we dislike.

In many cases, children who APPEAR to be obedient and cooperative—the ones we believe are NOT having problems—are really just doing what they’re told in order to buy safety from their parents. The parents even describe them as “good” or “easy,” but so many of these children don’t feel genuinely loved, just relatively safe. People pleasers do this. They grow up to feel manipulated, alone, unhappy, and resentful that they were imprisoned by obligation and fear all the years of their childhood. And they continue to be controlled by teachers, bosses, spouses, and others. In the process, they feel small and worthless. They don’t feel truly safe. Safety does feel better temporarily than the acute pain of fear, but it’s no substitute for feeling loved.

Another way we often teach our children to pursue safety as a form of Imitation Love is to inappropriately protect them as they interact with other people. If, for example, a child experiences an injustice at the hands of a teacher at school, many of us jump in and save her from the situation. Wrong response and bad for the child. We often give children safety much like we would give them a piece of candy or a pacifier. We make them feel better for a moment, while neglecting our primary responsibilities, which are always the same: to love them, teach them to love other people, and teach them responsibility.

Children are often cheated as we rescue them instead of providing them invaluable opportunities to learn HOW to deal with the injustices and afflictions of living in a world where EVERYONE gets to exercise their agency, even when they’re wrong or inconvenient to us. Children need protection far less than they need love and guidance, and we’ll discuss how this is done throughout the Training.

The Fifth Protecting Behavior: ATTACKING

When children are in pain and afraid, they WILL protect themselves—usually involuntarily, reflexively—and one instant way to do that is to become angry. It works—people do back off when our children get angry—but anger hurts our children.

In Chapter One, we proved beyond doubt that anger is always wrong. There are many more reasons to consider how anger is wrong. A couple to look at:

• Anger is completely selfish—Me-Me-Me—certainly not congruent with following Christ’s example of loving, nor with the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39) Angry people completely distance themselves from the love of God and deprive themselves of the influence of the Spirit. Anger is wrong, and we neglect our children’s mortal happiness and eternal joy when we don’t address their anger every time by loving and teaching them.
• Pride. Every time our children are angry, they’re screaming that they are RIGHT and in a superior position to judge others. The Lord Himself declared, “Beware of pride, lest ye become as the Nephites of old.” (D&C 38:39)

To underline the point, President Thomas S. Monson referred to the apostle Paul’s question, ‘Can ye be angry, and not sin?’ (JST of Ephesians 4:26) [And] I ask, is it possible to feel the Spirit of our Heavenly Father when we are angry? I know of no instance where such would be the case.” (Ensign, Nov 2009)

We’ll be talking extensively in a later chapter about anger and how to respond to it, because it might be the most common obstacle to loving. It’s everywhere, disguised as disappointment, irritation, frustration, annoyance, and more. It’s like a deadly virus, often invisible but the patient is still dead.

The Sixth Protecting Behavior: LYING

We all know that lying is wrong: “Lying lips are disgusting to the LORD ...” (Proverbs 12:22)

That’s not confusing, but WHY is lying wrong? Paul said, “Adopt a new attitude of your mind and put on a new life, which is created in the image of God in righteousness and true holiness. Put away lying and let every man speak truthfully with his neighbor, because we are all part of the same body.” (Ephesians 4:23-25) If we do our own preparation, we all become part of “the body of Christ, enjoying the pure love of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:26-27) But we can’t be “part of that same body”—we can’t feel loved by each other or by God—when we lie, which separates us from each other and from Him. Nor can we be in the “righteous and holy” image of God when we lie.

After Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni, he yearned to share the experience with someone who cared about him. How alone he would have felt keeping this knowledge to himself—alone in all the world.  Having exercised faith in God, he needed additionally to taste the love—the fruit of the tree—of his earthly father. 

Moroni knew all this and told Joseph to tell his father about his experience. Joseph said, “I obeyed; I returned to my father in the field, and rehearsed the whole matter to him. He replied to me that it was of God, and told me to go and do as commanded by the messenger.” (JSH 1:47-50) What if Joseph had previously established a pattern of lying? Would his father have believed him under those circumstances? We can’t know that, but there is no doubt that Joseph’s previous pattern of honesty influenced his father’s acceptance and support. Lying cuts us off from emotional and spiritual connection with those whose support and love we need.

The Seventh Protecting Behavior: ACTING LIKE VICTIMS

Notice that I describe this behavior as “acting like victims,” which includes FEELING like victims. This next sentence is very important: Everyone is victimized from time to time—by hurricanes, injustice, illness—but then we have a CHOICE whether we will FEEL and ACT like victims, or simply respond productively to whatever difficulty happens around us. As I said in Chapter One, much of life simply happens around us, but victims see everything as happening TO them. Victimhood is the belief that we’ve been wronged, that when other people, or simply the laws of nature, don’t give us what we want, we have been treated unfairly.

When children feel unloved, they’re already in pain. Then when they fail to get something they want—or otherwise experience some injustice—they strongly tend to feel and act victimized. “Oh, how could you do that to ME?” Victims whine, also known in the scriptures as complaining or—especially in the Book of Mormon—murmuring.

In the Book of Mormon, Zeniff wrote that “the Lamanites ... [believed] that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem (victimized) ... and that they were wronged in the wilderness (victim) by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea; (victim) And again, that they were wronged (victimized) while in the land of their first inheritance ... [and that Nephi] had taken the ruling of the people out of their hands (victim) ... and [he] took the records (victim) which were engraven on the plates of brass, for they said that he robbed them (victimized again). And thus they have taught their children that they should hate them, and that they should murder them ... and do all they could to destroy them; therefore they have an eternal hatred towards the children of Nephi.” (Mosiah 10:11-17)

This is classic victimhood. What were the Lamanites believing here, and what is the problem with feeling and acting like a victim today?

• Victims have no sense of personal responsibility, which is the “second half” of the essential and eternal principle of agency, the first half being freedom to choose. We can’t have freedom to choose without responsibility for our choice. Without responsibility, agency is simply indulgence and chaos. See D&C 101:78, and we’ll be discussing the details of agency in the next chapter. (I know, so soon. Fun, right?)
• Victimhood denies the eternal principles of forgiveness, love, compassion, kindness, and agency. Victimhood is about blaming, resentment, and selfishness. Victimhood is spiritual death.
• Happiness. Victims are never, ever happy. They’re bitter and resentful, and they’re eager to make everyone around them miserable “like unto themselves.” (2 Nephi 2:27) (Sound familiar? That is Satan’s desire) Briefly victims can be “satisfied” that other people sympathize with them, or that others are equally miserable, but they’re never happy.

As parents we need to understand the insidious mindset of victimhood, which we will address—along with how to respond to it—throughout the training. Victimhood is everywhere, mostly unrecognized. We’ll be talking about this subject again . . . and again.

The Eighth Protecting Behavior: RUNNING

If all else fails in our dealing with pain, we can simply run away from it. Some forms of running would include:

• Withdrawal. Children who spend all their time in their room alone, away from the family are running.
• Avoidance of seminary, Family Home Evening, family prayer, and church meetings. When children don’t feel loved, they’ll do anything to avoid hearing any messages they might interpret as critical—like commandments, family rules, “You should,” “You shouldn’t,” and more. The Lord was talking about running when he said to Israel, “How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37)
• Depression. People with depression often are just running away from the world and all the potential sources of pain they see everywhere.
•  Suicide, the ultimate withdrawal.

The Connection of Protecting Behaviors and The Common Problem Behaviors

More and more, we’ll see how all eight Protecting Behaviors interact with each other, and how each one makes the others worse.

• A child gets ANGRY, for example—ATTACKING—in order to feel safe and more powerful, which are two other Protecting Behaviors. An angry child also tends to LIE about their part in any unpleasant interaction, and to feel VICTIMIZED by others—yet two more Protecting Behaviors.
• When a child acts like a victim—whining—she gets a feeling of power from that as she influences or controls the behavior of her parents and others. She also lies about her own responsibility for any given situation.

I could give examples of the interaction between these behaviors all day, and the more you look, you’ll discover your own interactions. And on it goes, weaving a web of misery. We must get better at SEEING that web and its component parts, or the web will ensnare us before we know what’s happened. Once we’re off the path that leads to eternal life, it becomes so much easier to run into, and stumble over, and be trapped by all the Protecting Behaviors that exist in great abundance in the mists of darkness.

The eight Protecting Behaviors also EXPLAIN the 7 Common Problem Behaviors we’ve mentioned several times. Examples:

• One common problem behavior is arguing or fighting—between a child and his/her sibling, or between a child and you. Such a child is (1) attacking, (2) lying about his personal responsibility for the conflict, (3) acting like a victim, (4) trying to feel superior to the other combatant (worth, or praise), (5) definitely seeking power, (6) wanting to feel safe, and—to wrap it all together—(7) often enjoying the entire experience. 7 Protecting Behaviors at once.
• Screen addiction (phone, video games) involves (1) obvious running from pain and everything else around him, (2) inevitable lying about how long he withdraws into his virtual world (“only” played 15 mins—never), (3) huge victimhood if he’s interrupted in his screen use, (4) seeking the praise of others on social media or in multi-player games, (5) often attacking others, whether in an action video game or on social media, (6) obvious pleasure, and often (7) acting like a victim if any interaction on a game or on social media goes poorly.

It can be quite helpful for you to see the individual problem behaviors—which are obvious—in terms of the many ways they PROTECT our children from pain. Suddenly, we see them as responding to pain instead of just “HAVING” an addiction, or just BEING difficult, or just HAVING ADHD. Those are not useful diagnoses, and we don’t identify them until a child is FAR along the path of protecting and well OFF the path to the tree of life.

We’ll demonstrate the interactions between the Protecting Behaviors and the Common Problem Behaviors throughout the training, not to get all technical—this is not an intellectual exercise—but to help you understand the many factors involved with behaviors that otherwise might seem mystifying to you. If you don’t understand your children, you can’t help them, and with understanding how PAIN leads to these behaviors, and understanding the behaviors, you can identify problems MUCH sooner and address them. How could that be a bad plan, eh?

Pain and Sin

Now, let’s tie all these behaviors into the gospel—thoroughly and powerfully, in a way that will get our attention immediately. All the Protecting Behaviors, and all the Common Problem Behaviors are sins. Period. I say that only to emphasize how unproductive they are, not to increase our guilt about them, nor the guilt of our children. Let’s look at these Behaviors from several PERSPECTIVES to confirm how dangerous, wrong, and even wicked they are.

Briefly, to keep us all on the same page, the Protecting Behaviors are praise, pleasure, power, safety, attacking, lying, acting like a victim, and running.

The Common Problem behaviors are Whining, arguing, fighting, withdrawing, lack of responsibility, defiance, anxiety, depression, and addiction to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more.

That sounds like a long list, but it’s really not. The potential list of individual sins is without end. King Benjamin said that he couldn’t even tell the people all the ways they could sin, because they were, in his words, “so many that I cannot number them.” (Mosiah 4:29) So it can be helpful to identify the patterns of sin, and with these additional perspectives we’re discussing, we can learn to identify sin sooner, so we can identify a lit MATCH rather than wait to identify a grass fire or house fire. With additional understanding, we can repent early rather than late, always a wiser and easier choice. We can help our CHILDREN correct their path earlier, so they can reach the tree of life instead of drowning in the filthy river. These perspectives are that important.

If we see sin only as breaking God’s commandments, we are severely limited in our perspective. With that definition, we can rationalize SO MANY destructive behaviors:

• The Book of Mormon doesn’t say a single word about addiction to phone. Nothing, and yet phone use is proliferating around us at a rate that is frightening. It’s killing the souls of children all over the world at a rate that is growing truly exponentially, not just quickly.
• The scriptures say not a word about “Thou shalt not be depressed,” so we tend not to pay attention to the early development of depression, which is actually obvious in withdrawal, addiction to social media, sulking, and more. We must pay attention earlier, and understanding the Protecting Behaviors helps us to do that. It’s not enough to realize, “Yes, I see the depression now as a problem” when your child is hanging by a belt from her closet door.” And yes, I’ve dealt with that far more than I’d like.

So, Let’s look at the First perspective on how Protecting Behaviors are sins: Sin is the opposite of Good.

Sins are bad. Simple enough, we all agree. We can spot sin more easily if we see its being “bad” as the opposite of “good,” and examine what “good” is. Mormon identified what is good. He said that we can know “with a perfect knowledge” (Moroni 7:16-24) that something is good if:

• The Spirit of Christ tells us that it is.
• It invites us to do good.
• It persuades us to believe in Christ.
• It persuades us to serve God.
• It comes from Christ.

If a behavior or choice is characterized by any combination of those things, it’s good.

So now think about all those behaviors we use to diminish our own discomfort—Protecting Behaviors. Do they make sense? YES, because they do temporarily diminish our pain. But do they fulfill any of the criteria we just talked about? Do they persuade us to do good, believe in Christ, serve God? No, all the Protecting Behaviors serve ONLY our own comfort. They’re understandable but also completely selfish. They are, therefore, bad, and qualify as sins (past the age of accountability). (I’ll assume as we talk about sin that we’re always talking about children past age of accountability to avoid tedious repetition of the phrases, “past the age of accountability” and “sin OR transgression.” And we’ll talk about accountability much more in the next chapter)

Second Perspective on Protecting Behaviors being sins: Our eternal purpose

“Men are that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25) Do any of those Behaviors we’ve talked about lead to real joy? Lasting, eternal joy, you know, the kind Alma talked about, where we are found spotless, where we “sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the holy prophets who have ever been since the world began,” being spotless as they are, never again to leave. (Alma 7:25) Do those behaviors lead there? No. If a behavior doesn’t lead to that kind of happy, it’s a sin. But without the tone ordinarily associated with the word “sin.” No tone. All Protecting Behaviors are entirely understandable. They protect us, briefly, but they’re still not “good” by Mormon’s definition and they don’t lead us to eternal life. They’re wrong. They don’t work. They’re sins. Again, more about accountability and sin in the next chapter—can’t discuss every subject at the same time.

Third Perspective on the Protecting Behaviors being sins: The Natural Man

All the Protecting Behaviors are understandable, even NATURAL. What could be more natural than responding to pain by trying to diminish it?—any pain: physical, emotional, spiritual. We respond to diminish pain reflexively, without even thinking—like jerking away from a hot stove. But we’re not here in this life to do only what is natural. King Benjamin, in fact, declared that “the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been ... and will be, forever and ever ...” (Mosiah 3:19) Doing what is natural will not reunite us with our Heavenly Father.

Did king Benjamin offer a solution? Yes, crazy cool. He suggested that we “yield to the Spirit, and discard the natural man by becoming saints through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and become as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things the Lord chooses to put on our shoulders.” (Mosiah 3:19)

So now we have a new definition of sin. It’s not just breaking commandments that are spelled out. No, sin is anything inconsistent with feeling the pure love of Christ, and loving others with the same love, and being responsible for our choices. Not so complicated now. Now we don’t have to be legal scholars in order to understand what is and is not a sin. Understanding the Protecting Behaviors helps us see sin more clearly—so we can avoid it and repent of it more effectively. How could that be a bad thing?

Let’s summarize what we know so far about the Protecting Behaviors. We already know they’re designed to diminish our pain. But what is their EFFECT?

• They cause us and the people around us to feel even more pain, emptiness, and fear. Brief example: If I get angry, I can get somebody who is criticizing me to back off. But now I’m angry myself, they’re angry, I feel victimized, I lie about my personal responsibility, blabla. And now I’m separated from God—an enemy to God. With anger I protect myself for a moment, but the price is high—kind of like escaping the discomfort of a hot day on a cruise ship by jumping into the ocean. Instantly cooler, and then I drown as the ship sails off to the horizon.
• Because the Getting and Protecting Behaviors make us more empty and afraid, they also inevitably detract in a powerful way from the ability that we and others have to feel loved, loving, and happy.
• Because feeling loved, loving others, and being happy are all fruits of the Spirit, as described by the Apostle Paul (Galatians 5:19-23), anything that detracts from these qualities or abilities would necessarily be against the Spirit, and would therefore be harmful or wrong or evil. These Protecting Behaviors are therefore morally and spiritually wrong. They interfere with our primary purpose for living. They are not to be ignored or excused.
• Protecting Behaviors are the cause of incalculable destruction and unhappiness in this life. They are among the primary tools used by Satan and all those who support the cause of evil. Satan doesn’t have to convince us straight out to do wrong. He doesn’t have to say, “Hate your neighbor and ignore God.” Oh no, instead he’s far sneaker. He convinces us that we’ve been treated unfairly (victimized), after which we whine, complain, criticize (attacking), lie about our own choices, and more. He only has to whisper that we deserve to protect ourselves from others and from pain, and then he might even suggest how—and what he suggests is NEVER faith in Christ or prayer or repentance or loving another person. THAT is how he forges the chains of hell—link by link, one whine at a time, one lie, one moment of anger that we excuse, one feeling of victimhood, a moment of power, a hit of praise. He’s very sneaky with this “under-the-radar” behaviors, and if we don’t see them, before we know it we’re drowning in some lonely location out of sight of the tree of life.

All the many activities that God has designated as sins are nothing but Protecting Behaviors, single or in combination. Sin is a response to pain. And no, I am not looking to excuse sin by blaming it on parents or anybody else. I repeat, I am not looking to excuse sin by blaming it on parents or anybody else. We’ll talk much more about sin and accountability later in this chapter and in the next chapter. It’s that important.

I AM suggesting that understanding how pain leads to sin gives us a clarity and simplicity of understanding that maybe we didn’t have before, and with that understanding we can find additional power to do at least three things, all of which contribute to our returning to our Father in heaven:

First benefit of understanding how pain leads to Protecting and sin

We can now better understand Why God Has Given Us Commandments

As we understand pain and Protecting Behaviors, we now have a new comprehension of WHY God has given us the many commandments He has. Many people are discouraged or overwhelmed or irritated by what they perceive as the endless list of demanding and restrictive thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots found in God’s commandments, and that attitude is one of the major factors that contributes to their distant or difficult relationships with Him. Most people don’t like being around someone—including God—who is constantly telling them what to do or not do.

That increasing distance between people in God is a real problem in the world—perhaps THE problem. Statistics show that young people around the world are flocking in droves AWAY from organized religion, including the restored Church, in great part because of their aversion to that long list of commandments.

To so many people, God often seems like an egotistical dictator, meddling in far too many of their affairs and seemingly bent on taking all the fun out of life.  

But an understanding of the pure love of Christ can give us a very helpful insight into the nature of God, and into the motivations behind His commandments, which can bring us a closer relationship with Him.

He has told us what his goals are in his dealings with us. It’s not a secret. He said, “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39) The great Father of us all, the Creator of the universe and author of the Plan of Happiness, is pre-occupied all day, every day with helping YOU and your children

He is EAGER to bless us. He is our Father, His own favorite description of Himself.

The Savior addressed this subject directly when he said, “If a son asks his father for bread or a fish, is there any father who would give his son a stone or a poisonous snake instead? (NO) So if you, being wicked and flawed human beings, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to His children who ask Him?” (Matthew 7:9-11)

Again, he is EAGER to bless us, but He has never promised to bless us with ease or comfort, much as we would wish it so. He has promised to love us always and to teach us, and He has directed us:

• to have FAITH in His love, to hold to the rod and to FEEL His love and the healing that comes from it. (No matter how much He loves us, we can’t FEEL it unless we have some faith in it. We can’t see the light of the tree of life if we turn away from it and walk into the mists of darkness.) His love and the pure love of Christ are indistinguishable. They are one in their work and their love.
• to feel loved unconditionally by one another. To be one. And the love of our brothers and sisters—and our parents—helps us feel HIS love.
• love each other unconditionally, purely, with the pure love of Christ.
• love Him. (entirely different verb. To love another person is to care about their happiness without wanting anything in return—unconditionally—important definition. We’re not in a position to unconditionally care about God’s happiness. Loving him means to revere, to listen to, to honor, to obey, to follow, to draw close to Him and allow the arms of his mercy to enfold us)

So in all of His instructions to us His goal is not to satisfy some egotistical urge to control us or to keep us from having fun. His primary goal is to teach us HOW to follow the four directions I just outlined, directions intended to help US achieve our mortal and eternal happiness. And, just as important, he teaches us how to AVOID all the behaviors that would detract from these directives and goals and that perfect happiness that follows. Pretty sweet of him, yes?

Although at times God’s commandments might seem endless and complicated, they become simple, unified, and delightful in their purpose when we remember that they exist only to help us achieve the joy our Father desires for us. Let’s apply what we’ve just learned about pain and sin and His love for us to some of the individual commandments we’ve been given:

• Thou shalt not steal. Why? So other people will never be inconvenienced by the loss of their property? To preserve social order? So God won’t be irritated? No. God wants us to avoid stealing because with each act of forcefully taking from another human being, WE become a little more selfish, we walk farther from His love, away from the tree. WE become less happy—and that is what God wants us to avoid.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery. Why? Because your neighbor might resent your sleeping with his wife? Or because it might hurt your wife’s feelings? Not primarily. Adultery’s primary evil is that it is so selfish, because it puts us right in the heart of the great and spacious building or lost in the mists of darkness, where we drown in the filthy river. Adultery’s punishment is that we can’t feel the pure love of Christ and genuine happiness.
• Thou shalt not kill. Why? Because a life is taken? NO, actually, that’s not the reason. Everybody dies. We came here to die. Death is not the primary problem. We’re told not to kill because by the time we get to that sin, we’ve become so astonishingly selfish that we are utterly incapable of feeling God’s love or of seeing the light of the tree of life. Not killing is for OUR benefit.

All of God’s commandments are intended as a roadmap that will take us back into His presence and enable us to become like Him, which is what we all want most. This map points out the behaviors—the sins, the Protecting Behaviors—that will make us blind and deaf and miserable. How kind, how generous, and how loving He is to provide us with all that guidance and warning—just like road signs that warn us of danger. And how grateful we could be for every word of counsel we receive.

Without the commandments it might seem that we would have a freedom of sorts, but actually we’d be lost. We’d be left to our own devices, to learn by trial and error what works and doesn’t work, and that is a slow and painful way to learn.

I said we’d discuss several benefits of understanding pain, Protecting Behaviors, and sin. We just discussed one, Now, a

SECOND Benefit of understanding pain and SIN and Protecting Behaviors:

We can Repent better

With this understanding of pain and Protecting Behaviors and sin, we have a more productive PERSPECTIVE for helping our children to repent—and of course a better perspective for repenting ourselves.

Again I emphasize that explaining how pain leads to sin is NOT an excuse to sin or to blame other people for our bad choices. NO. Understanding pain is a powerful way to EXPLAIN sin in a way that we can BETTER REPENT. It always comes back to repentance. No matter what the REASON is for sin, we still have to repent.

It is a certainty that seeing sin as a result of pain is far more useful than the alternative, which would be that men are just wicked and beyond hope. If that’s the case, of what use is love? Or teaching? Or the Atonement. No, we need to understand WHY men sin, and then see how that understanding will help us repent and help our children do the same.

We sin—we protect ourselves—to relieve our pain.

In the General Handbook of the Church, as of 2021, we read: “Most people who have thought about suicide want to find relief from physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual pain. Such individuals need love, help, and support from family, Church leaders, and qualified professionals.” In the next paragraph the role of “loved ones” is mentioned, which could include any concerned person. (General Handbook, 38.6.20)

The Handbook continues, saying, “It is not right for a person to take his or her own life. However, only God is able to judge the person’s thoughts, actions, and level of accountability.”

This profound and new statement has implications that affect all of us. Notice that people thinking of suicide are described only as seeking relief from PAIN. This is exactly what we’ve been saying about all Protecting Behaviors and all sin. People sin because they’re in pain. We can learn to find ways to choose NOT to sin, but that requires love, knowledge, and practice. That is the entire purpose of this training, to better equip us to repent and even to avoid sin.

I recognize that the Handbook and other places on the Church website mention only suicide as a way that people respond to pain, but that reference to suicide does not exclude all other sin. Is suicide somehow a transgression or sin that is different from every other? NO, it’s not. Suicide is just ONE of an infinite variety of wrong choices, one that is contemplated only when all the other means of pain relief—the Protecting Behaviors—have failed to work. Nobody just decides to kill himself or herself. Nobody. Before that time arrives, those people have felt unloved for many, many years, and endured the pain of separation from the pure love of Christ, living well outside the shade and nourishment of the tree of life. They’ve responded to their pain with anger, victimhood, withdrawal, lying, hiding, acting like victims, whining, seeking praise and power and pleasure, and using one or more addictions for a very long time before suicide ever entered their mind. Suicide is merely the last hope for pain relief for people who have failed to find anything else that works.

For that reason, it is no great stretch at all to rephrase what is written in the Handbook: “All people who stray from the path of righteousness—using anger, lying, victimhood, running, praise, power, pleasure, safety—are seeking relief from physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual pain. Such individuals need love (that’s the first thing, pure love of Christ), help (loving and teaching), and support (loving and teaching) from ANYONE who has the pure love of Christ and knowledge of the gospel to offer.”

With children, it is hoped that that support would come from parents. That’s why we’re here talking together.

And WITH all the help we offer, still everyone has to have faith and repent. Nobody gets to skip that step. (Okay, children under eight, but if you’re listening to me, it’s not likely that you’re six.)

Aaron, one of the four sons of Mosiah, taught that man “could not earn anything of himself except through the sufferings and death of Christ in atoning for their sins, and through their faith and repentance ...” (Alma 22:14)

The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the greatest single act—or series of actions—in the history of the universe, but in order to benefit from it, we have to have faith in Him and repent as well as we know how. I suggest that you hear that again: In order to benefit from the Atonement of Christ, we must have faith in Him and repent.

Now, you could say that sentence with a tone of voice that communicates that repentance is an obligation or burden: “We HAVE to have FAITH and REPENT.” Or, you could say it with an entirely different perspective on repentance, like this: “Through His Atonement, Christ offer us eternal life—the kind of life He lives, holding nothing back, and ALL he requires of us is our faith and repentance. That’s all, as opposed to much more. He offers us the universe, and He requires only the widow’s mite—whatever level of repentance, however small, we can muster while doing our best. Faith and repentance are all he asks, and the difference between MY puny faith and repentance and His eternal rewards is called grace, or mercy. “By grace we are saved, after all we CAN do, however little.” (2 Nephi 25:23)

Repentance is never finished, so let’s get to it and do it as well as we can. We’ll NEVER earn grace or eternal life, but we certainly can prepare better for receiving it. As we understand the source of our emotional and spiritual pain, and understand the Protecting Behaviors that inevitably result from the lack of pure love—we finally gain the first shreds of power with which to eliminate the unproductive behaviors that have held us captive and caused us so much misery for a lifetime. Eliminating those behaviors and attitudes is called repentance. What remains is a profound and lasting peace, happiness, joy. There is no greater human accomplishment.

Earlier I told you the story of Mark, the accomplished professional trapped in a prison of pain, withdrawal, pornography, and more. As he experienced the pure love of Christ first from a person, then from the Father and Son, his pain disappeared, as did his need to use any of those Protecting Behaviors. He lost His need for sin.

God has given us repentance as a GIFT. Ezekiel quotes the Lord, who says, “Repent and turn from all your transgressions, so wickedness will not be your ruin.” (Ezekiel 18:30) He does not say, “Stop sinning, because you annoy me.” No, He has given us repentance—which is fulfilled in the Atonement of Christ—so WE won’t be miserable.

Unfortunately, repentance has often been associated with some very negative connotations. What does one repent of? Traditionally, we say we repent of evil, wickedness, sloth, sin, filth, and the like, so if we’re considering the possibility that we might repent, we also pretty much have to admit that we’re evil, wicked, slothful, sinful, and filthy, and most of us aren’t that eager to have those words tattooed on our foreheads.

And there’s another HUGE problem with the idea of repenting. Whatever behaviors we’re using to relieve our pain—anger, victimhood, over-eating, shopping, video games, phone addiction, whatever—usually those behaviors (one or more) are the ONLY source of pain relief we have. So when somebody—anybody, including God—says, “You need to repent of THAT behavior,” all we hear—however unconscious it might be—is this: “Even though you’re in pain, and have been for years, possibly all your life, now you have to give up the only thing that has ever given you relief and simply have faith that there is something better.”

Are you hearing that? Repentance is the process of giving up our pain relief, which would leave us in a condition of unremitting, intolerable, continuous pain. Little wonder that so many of us—including our children—respond unconsciously to that instruction to repent with, “Are you kidding me??!!” We can’t imagine just giving up our pain relief.

So when we hear a call to repentance, we usually take one of two approaches:

• We find it so daunting, so discouraging, even frightening, that we don’t even begin. If we’re doomed to fail, why invest and waste all that effort, only to experience the inevitable pain? Why bother?
• We begin with a less-than-optimistic attitude—repentance hasn’t made us happy before, after all—so when we hit our first few speed bumps, we interpret our stumblings as confirmation that we couldn’t possibly succeed. Then we quit. This is what happens with every addict. They all QUIT, but it’s uncomfortable, so they treat their pain by using again. Stuck, often for years, sometimes forever.

But what if we can completely change our perspective of repentance? What if we remember what we’ve discussed, that sins are just Protecting Behaviors we use in response to pain? What if we see some evidence—just a seed, mind you, like the seed Alma talked about planting (Alma 32)—some HOPE from a credible and immediate source (like a loving human being) that we could actually ELIMINATE the pain that is the root of all our sins? Then finding love and light would be the goal, not just STOPPING our pain relief, or our sins. Hmmm, finding love and light might become a possibility, a light in the darkness, a distant glimmer that will lead us out of the mists.

But finding love is no small thing We have NOT found it to this point in our lives, or we wouldn’t be stuck in pain relief, right? But somebody comes along, like a parent or mentor or leader, and says, “I’ve been to the tree—not just read about it, not just quoting it to you, but BEEN there. I’ve tasted the fruit, just like Lehi did, and it’s pretty great. Let me share a little of the fruit with you, and then you can choose whether you want to follow me to the tree.” Oh, we could wrap our heads around that kind of repentance. So could our children. A great many people have done just that.

Understanding Protecting Behaviors helps us get to the ROOT of our sins—pain, lack of love—instead of just whacking away at the leaves of the weeds in our garden. Better understanding leads to better repentance, much like President Nelson saying that “good inspiration is based upon good information.” (Ensign May 2018). So is good repentance.

And no matter who or what caused our pain, we’re still back at the solution, which is to have faith in Jesus Christ and to repent. This entire training is about helping us to better understand HOW to understand our pain, how to find the pure love of Christ, and how to repent in a way that we BETTER feel His love and can share it with those around us. And then we become the children of Christ. (Pretty good outcome, yes?)

PARENTS can supply an indispensable ingredient to aid the repentance of their children. LOVE. Perfect love casts out fear, pain (1 John 4:18)

NO more do we say ONLY “Don’t live on your phone,” Don’t use porn,” “Don’t lie,” “Say No to drugs.” They already KNOW that. No, they need the ABILITY to make another choice.

THEN a child can repent. Repentance is VERY difficult without something to replace the Protecting Behaviors (the sins).

All of this discussion of pain and protecting behaviors only gives another PERSPECTIVE on the gospel. The gospel doesn’t need improving, but our faith in it and ability to follow Him DO need help. Any doubt about that? Take a look at the world, or your own family, and you have proof. Search the scriptures, search out the best books, learn more. Not learn more commandments, but learn more about HOW to keep them. THAT is what we’re doing here.

Now that we remember that sins are only Protecting Behaviors, we can richly supplement and even transform all the following words (and their associated guilt and shame):

• Evil
• Wickedness
• Sloth
• Sin
• Filth
• Guilt
• Shame

with concepts far more productive, such as:

• Seeing that we’ve been wounded by the lack of pure love from childhood, resulting in pain and emptiness and fear
• Understanding that our sins (our Protecting Behaviors) are largely a response to our emptiness and fear
• Learning how to fill our emptiness with the pure love of Christ from one another and from God
• Accepting responsibility for changing our pain and choices with far greater power—also called repentance

That latter group of expressions doesn’t seem nearly so scary, does it? Let me emphasize several things about this supplementation of words like wicked and guilty:

• This is a refinement of perspective only, or an offer of a different perspective of sin and repentance. This is not an attempt to sidestep our need to repent. We can’t sidestep repentance and still expect mercy to satisfy the demands of justice.
• Both perspectives are true—repentance AND healing the pain. We need both. Sometimes one more than the other, or a mixture of both, and we can use the best mixture for the situation.
• Another perspective of sin and repentance is offered because we as human beings are generally frail, weak in faith, and susceptible to terminal discouragement when a task appears to be too difficult. If we can see something potentially discouraging in a different light, we can often tackle it with enthusiasm. As long as that “different light” (or perspective) is still true—as long as it doesn’t deny the truth—then it is also quite useful isn’t it? Sometimes we need a way to see our sins, in a way that encourages us to approach repentance, rather than feel discouraged and defeated. Again remember the story of Mark, the orthopedic surgeon from earlier in this chapter. He’d been told to repent of his sins MANY, many times—by family, church leaders, therapists, and more. He KNEW that he was sinning, and that it wasn’t making him happy. But all that knowledge made NO difference. He needed a different perspective. He needed someone to love him and offer him a way out of his pain, and eventually he then CHOSE to be obedient and repent because he could feel the sweetness of the fruits of repentance.
• There is no denial here of anything God has ever said about our acts being evil, wicked, slothful, sinful, and filthy. All these terms are still true, just not useful in some situations and with some people.

Now we have demonstrated in just one way how an understanding of pain and Protecting Behaviors—especially how they are related to sins—is an enormous asset in the process of repentance, primarily because this understanding makes repentance far more palatable and possible.

And it keeps getting better. An understanding of Protecting Behaviors also gives us an immediate understanding of how to repent. What a blessing that is, because for most of us the how has always been a source of great frustration in repentance. We’ve known that we should repent—just STOP doing that bad thing—but how is that done? We’ve known that we should give up our greed, lust, hatred, and so on, but how do you do that? Make a New Year’s resolution? (laughing) Make a promise that we really mean? We all know how well those work. Do we simply promise not to do bad things and never have bad thoughts again? Who hasn’t tried that and failed? Every addict has given up his addiction hundreds of times, each time promising that that was the LAST time.

But look at what happens with an understanding of the pure love of Christ and the Protecting Behaviors that follow a lack of it. We can flow through a sequence of thoughts like this:

• Protecting Behaviors are sins.
• Protecting Behaviors (and therefore sins) are a response to pain, emptiness, and fear.
• Emptiness and fear result from a lack of the pure love of Christ in our lives.
• Pure love eliminates fear (John said perfect love casts out fear—1 John 4:18), as well as the pain that always precedes fear. 
• As pain and emptiness and fear are eliminated, we simply lose our need for Protecting Behaviors, as well as our need for sin. In the presence of God’s love, sin is not only not permitted, it’s not needed.
• The love of God is the greatest power for eliminating sin.
•  In the process of repentance, divine love—from one another and from God—is our greatest tool.
•  In repentance, self-control and choice are also important (more about this shortly).

With the perspective of sins being Protecting Behaviors, we can have both freedom of mind—no more confusion and unnecessary guilt—and the actual means for repentance. What a gift. Whereas repentance often has been a great drudgery for many of us, we can now see it as a great potential joy. As Paul said to the Galatians,

The deeds of the flesh are obvious: adultery, sexual sins, uncleanness, indecency, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, contention, jealousy, anger, conspiracies, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, partyings, and so on. And those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, kindness, and self-control. There is no law against those qualities. (Galatians 5:19-23)

Paul is encouraging us to lay aside the burden of our anger, jealousy, and other Protecting Behaviors, and to take upon ourselves instead the lightness of love and joy. Not a bad exchange, and we can facilitate that exchange in part as we enhance the concept of sin with the understanding of pain and Protecting Behaviors.

Putting Pain and Repentance All Together in One Package

Now that we understand sin as the Protecting Behaviors that reduce our pain of not feeling loved, we now have the means to address ALL sin. I told you about Mark, earlier in the chapter, lost from the Church, trapped in addictions, and lost to the tentacles of self-loathing. He had heard “Just repent of your sins” THOUSANDS of times. Those commands only increased his self-loathing, which made him feel even less worthwhile and lovable, which made his pain worse. Ironic, isn’t it, that all the well-meaning calls to repentance actually led to his being MORE addicted. He even said to me, “The more people tell me about repentance, the more I use my addictions.”

But once Mark felt loved, the cycle began to break. Feeling loved, he felt less pain and therefore less NEED to diminish his pain, which meant less need to sin. He came to embrace the commandments as a path to happiness, instead of hearing them scream that he was worthless.

Instead of hearing blame and shame, he heard the voice of the Savior, like on the occasion he saw the faith of those who brought to him the man with paralysis, when he said, “thy sins are forgiven thee.” (Luke 5:20)

Preventing Sin

We have talked at length about understanding the role of pain in generating sin. It’s just as important to understand the role of pain and protecting behaviors in PREVENTING SIN.

The Nephites proved the role of love in preventing sin after the Savior came, when they had faith in Him and in His love, and as a result experienced complete peace and joy for more than a hundred years—which we mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Alma taught that the Savior would “take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people” and “succor his people” (Alma 7:11, 12) When Christ came to the Western Hemisphere after His resurrection, He took their pain, he loved them, and He healed their wounds. He taught them mostly the same principles we all know now, but then there followed a complete peace for more than a hundred years: “And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.” (4 Nephi 1:16)

The Interacting Effects of Real Love and Self-Control 

When you or your children are filled with that love which is “"most desirable above all things." (1 Nephi 11:22), other inconveniences and injustices—when people are inconsiderate, when they fail to do what we want, and even when they attack us—are easily tolerated. Imagine that you’re sitting beneath the canopy of the tree of life, filled with His love. In that setting how much would you be affected by the critical words of another person? It would seem like an errant dry leaf setting in the middle of your picnic blanket. The other person’s lack of love would become a minor event. When we feel unconditionally loved, every inconvenience becomes relatively insignificant. We lose our need to respond with any of the Protecting Behaviors. We lose our need to sin.

How we react to other people is largely determined by how unconditionally loved we feel and not by their behavior. Without pure love, we’re starving to death, and then every stress can seem overwhelming. Children who are raised without unconditional love WILL be severely affected as they attempt to find happiness in the absence of the most essential ingredient for emotional and spiritual health. If that lack of love is not corrected, a child will then become an adult who feels empty and afraid, and who will respond to others in unproductive—and unChrist-like ways.

But is there more to us than our past experience? If you’ve received no true love as a child, does that mean you are absolutely doomed to use nothing but Protecting Behaviors as you interact with other people all your life? No. We’re not sticks and stones, which can only be acted upon, as Lehi described. (2 Nephi 2:26) We almost always choose to exercise some measure of self-control. Even when we don’t feel sufficiently loved, to some extent—which only God can know—we can still choose to withhold our Protecting Behaviors and make efforts to remember Him (as we covenant to do every week) and be loving.

I re-emphasize, however, that our ability to choose is greatly affected by the love we have, and eventually we can lose our agency, as apostles and prophets have taught us, and which we will discuss in the next chapter. Most people raised without love—the real thing, not just intermittent kindness that enables or manipulates—simply cannot choose to be as loving as those who have been loved unconditionally, anymore than a starving man can choose to run as fast as a healthy one.

For years I found it very difficult to split oak logs with an ax. And then I discovered a maul, a tool that enabled me to split oak quite easily. I initially made a choice to split logs with an ax—no one made me use it. It was the best choice I could see at the time—better than a shovel or my bare hands. A maul would have worked much better, but I didn’t know it existed. After learning about it, I was able to make a better choice.

In a similar way, we always have choices about how we feel and behave, but if we don’t have experience with pure love, Protecting Behaviors—sins—may be the only choices we can see in a given situation. Yes, the light of Christ is available to all, but if we’re distracted by enough emptiness and pain, we cannot FEEL it. And even after the healing balm of love—or repentance—has been DESCRIBED to us, even if we see it with our MINDS as a choice, we may still be incapable of MAKING the loving choice, because we don’t actually have the love to give. Loving exists to us only theoretically or intellectually, but not in practice. As we find love and feel it, we’re better able to make new choices—loving, happy choices. We’re better able to repent.

Alma spoke of how love is essential for our earthly happiness and our eternal life when he said, “I wish from the inmost part of my heart ... that ye would hearken unto my words, and cast off your sins ... and humble yourselves before the Lord ... [and] be led by the Holy Spirit [to be] humble ... having the love of God always in your hearts, that ye may be lifted up at the last day and enter into his rest. (“rest” being eternal life) (Alma 13:27-29)

So what is required to receive eternal life? Alma says it clearly: Humility, faith in God, repentance, the love of God. (baptism and Holy Ghost are assumed)

I emphasize again that understanding how pain leads to sin is NOT meant to be an excuse for us to continue in sin. No, this is an EXPLANATION for our behaviors, intended to help us repent and regain the path to the tree. Even when we feel unloved and unhappy, it is always OUR responsibility to learn what we can do to change our choices, and as we make wiser choices we will find the love and happiness we seek.

At this point, many people ask, With each decision we make, what is the relative influence of self-control compared with the amount of love we feel? Exactly how strong is our ability to simply choose a loving behavior even when we’ve experienced relatively little love? To what degree can our will power overcome the obviously crippling effects of insufficient Real Love?

The General Handbook states that “only God is able to judge the person’s thoughts, actions, and level of accountability.” (Handbook, 38.6.20) Even we could know, the answer wouldn’t change the fact that we always need to do all we can to increase both our self-control and the love we have. Both factors operate in a synergistic way—they support and nourish one another and create an effect much greater than either could do alone. (1) We can exercise self-control and make a conscious choice to find love, a process we’ll be describing in more detail in chapters to come. (2) As we find more love, we make better decisions.

Other than love and self-control, there are other factors that contribute to our behavior? Elder M. Russell Ballard said, “When he does judge us, I feel he will take all things into consideration: our genetic and chemical makeup, our mental state, our intellectual capacity, the teachings we have received, the traditions of our fathers, our health, and so forth” (“Suicide: Some Things We Know, and Some We Do Not,” Ensign, Oct. 1987, 8). I won’t address these other factors—other than the traditions of our fathers, which includes how they have loved us or not—simply because they make no practical difference to us. Although the questions about genetic factors, for example, are fascinating and provide stimulating conversation, the answers wouldn’t change the fact that at this point we can’t alter our genetic structure. We’re left with making the next best decision we can toward having faith, repenting, and both finding and giving the pure love of Christ.

Giving Up Protecting Behaviors: Being Reborn

Despite the enormous advantages we’ve described thus far for abandoning our Protecting Behaviors, many of us are still quite attached to them. We’ve been using them for so long that they’ve become like old friends. We’re comfortable with them. We can hardly imagine life without them. We’re certain that if we didn’t diligently protect ourselves on a continuous basis, we’d feel naked and intolerably vulnerable.

One day I talked with a woman who had been angry and controlling and “right” all her life. As I described what it would be like to give up her Protecting Behaviors, she finally screamed—literally—“But you’re suggesting that I give up who I am!!”

I said, “That would be a shame. Right now you’re angry, alone, and miserable. Almost everyone in your life hates being around you, and you’re in constant conflict with them. What a shame it would be to give up all those treasures.”

Her life was a wreck, but it was a familiar wreck, and the thought of changing it to something unknown was understandably terrifying to her. Most of us fear repentance for that reason, because we’d have to give up our only means for pain relief—and because we are ashamed and don’t want to face that.

In truth, however, when we give up our Protecting Behaviors, we don’t give up who we are. We actually find out who we are. Protecting Behaviors are just reactions to emptiness, pain, and fear. They’re not who we are. If you accidentally touch a hot stove with your arm, you might violently back away, thrash your arms, twist your body, and shout incoherently. If I took a video only of your reaction, not your touching the stove, I could easily make the case that you were insane. But your reaction to pain—physical or emotional—is not who you are. It is only when you eliminate your pain and fear and protecting behaviors that you and others learn who you really are.

Most of us have been responding to emptiness and fear our whole lives, and for that reason we really don’t know who we are. I have received hundreds of communications similar to this e-mail:

When I watched The Pure Love of Christ Parenting Training, I realized that I’ve been empty and afraid my whole life, and I’ve used Protecting Behaviors almost constantly. It’s been an endless round of trying to protect myself, control other people, and find relief from my disappointments and irritations. I became exhausted. Now that I’m understanding myself and other people, and as I feel loved, I don’t need Protecting Behaviors as much, and as those are going away I’m discovering who I really am. I like what I’m seeing.

You may have noticed that many of my examples describe adults, not children. Why? Until WE parents understand love and pain and sin, how can we possibly do anything meaningful that would help our children?

As our lives are changed through the power of love and the Spirit, not only do we discover who we really are, but we are reborn. The Bible describes the sequence nicely:

• It is through love that we are reborn unto God. John says, “Let us love one another, because love is of God, and every one who loves is born of God, and knows God. Whoever doesn’t love God can’t know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)
• When we are sufficiently changed by love and the Spirit—when we are reborn—we lose our need to use Protecting Behaviors (to sin). “Whoever is born of God does not sin because the nature of God stays in him. He cannot sin, because he is born of God.” (1 John 3:9) Also, “Whoever is born of God overcomes the world.” (1 John 5:4)

That is a crazy cool sequence that John describes, confirming everything we’ve been saying to this point about the relationship between love and sin.

1. We NEED the experience of being truly loved by other human beings, and the experience of loving them.
2. That pure love of Christ, being from God, enables us to be born of God and to know Him.
3. When we are loved and loving and born of God, we lose the need to sin and overcome the world.

Wow, cue the trumpets.

And then everything changes. As Paul taught:

• “If any man lives in Christ, he becomes a new creature. In Christ old things die and everything becomes new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
• “Put aside anger, rage, ill will, evil speaking, and filthy talk. Don’t lie to one another, seeing that ye have gotten rid of your old self ... and have become a new person, who is made new ... after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:8-10)

What would you give to achieve that condition? You’re on that path right now.

3. Help us be more tolerant of mistakes of others

Quite some time ago, I said there were three benefits extending from understanding how pain leads to sin. We covered the first two: understanding why God gives commandments, and how we can better repent.

The Third benefit is that we become tolerant and accepting of the mistakes of others.

Eliminating Our Anger at the Behavior of Others—Drowning Story

Imagine that you and I are in the Bahamas, where we are enjoying a pleasant lunch, a warm tropical breeze, and the soothing music of a live band as we sit together by the side of a pool. We’re having a perfect day, but then some knucklehead in the pool starts splashing you—first on your shoes, then higher up on your pants. You can’t see who it is because there’s a deck chair between you and the person in the pool. At first you ignore it, but eventually you begin to get wet and irritated, and finally you get up from your chair to say something to this idiot who’s being so thoughtless. As you stand up to look over the chair that’s in your way, you see that the man splashing you is drowning. He’s only splashing you because he’s thrashing and kicking in the water to keep his head from going under.

Once you saw that the man in the pool splashing you was drowning:

How long did it take for your anger to go away?

It happened in an instant.

How much effort was required on your part to eliminate your anger?

None. With a single moment of understanding, your anger simply disappeared.

Not only did your anger disappear, but you developed an immediate desire to help him.

In one second, you moved from irritation to acceptance to CARING about his happiness—love.

That’s an astonishing change, all from a moment of insight.

Did you require anything from him before you were willing to help him?   

No, you were willing to help him freely, unconditionally.

How does all this help you accept and even love the people in your life, including your children? When you can see that the people around you who are behaving badly are just drowning, it will completely change the way you see them, the way you feel about them, and the way you respond to them. So let’s compare the drowning man to the people in your life, especially your children:

The drowning man was splashing you.         

Other people often inconvenience you, treat you badly, and fail to give you what you want

The drowning man was splashing you not from a primary desire to affect YOU but merely trying to keep his own head above water.

Your children and others are not trying primarily to hurt or inconvenience you but are trying only to keep their own heads above water, emotionally speaking.

The drowning man was using his arms and legs to keep his head above water.

Other people are using Protecting Behaviors to keep their heads above water

The drowning man behaved insanely only because he suffered from a lack of air.

Other people behave badly only because they are empty and afraid due to a lack of pure love, which is every bit as important to their happiness as air is to the physical health of a drowning person

The drowning man was doing everything he could to survive. His behavior had nothing to do with you.

Your children are doing everything they can to survive. Their behavior has nothing to do with you.

Once you saw that the man in the pool was drowning, your anger vanished immediately and without effort. How could you reasonably be irritated at someone for drowning? They’re not drowning TO you.

When you see your children as drowning, how can you continue to be angry at them?

You were angry at the drowning man only because you didn’t know he was drowning. 

You respond poorly to people who are behaving badly only because you don’t understand or remember that they’re just drowning.

With the drowning man, not only did you lose your anger, but immediately you reached out to help him (love him).

With understanding, not only do you lose your anger at children who are behaving badly, but you immediately want to give them the love they need. In the Book of Mormon, Moroni wrote an angry letter to Pahoran, the chief judge, blistering him for not giving the armies more men and supplies, and even threatening Pahoran with the sword if he didn’t repent. But then Moroni learned that Pahoran was DROWNING—that wicked men had taken over the government—so immediately he changed his feelings and marched to help the chief judge.

Telling a drowning man to “stop it” would be very foolish, even unkind.   

When we demand that our children simply stop fighting, arguing, whatever, it’s like telling a drowning man to stop moving his arms and legs. “Just drown quietly.” Absurd.

This is huge subject, that we try to get our children to STOP a “bad” behavior. Almost every parent does it every day: Stop it, slow down, don’t run, get off your phone, stop yelling at your sister, blablabla. Stopping their behavior is called CONTROLLING.

Let’s look at an example of controlling vs loving. Meat here

(A mother, Amanda, writes)

“My six-year-old and eight-year-old fight with each other all the time. They argue about everything, and pretty often their arguments degenerate into poking and hitting.”

I’m thinking, “No way!! Two children fighting? Over use of the phone, who gets the game controller, who gets the best seat in the car, whose job it is to clean off the table, who gets the biggest piece of cake? Hard to imagine.” (Not hard, you’ve all seen episodes like this.)

Amanda:

“I’ve told them to stop it a million times, yelled at them, and punished them, but they’re still arguing and hitting each other whenever they get the chance. How do I stop this? It’s making me crazy. I’m beginning to wonder why I had children.”

To all of you: Do you recognize the frustration in this woman who is trying her very best to be a great parent? She WANTS to do this well, but she doesn’t know HOW. Almost none of us do. The answer to this problem—with the fighting kids—is VERY similar to the answer I will be giving YOU to nearly every problem demonstrated by any child. Why? Because the root problem is the same.

So even if you don’t have two children who argue and hit, you DO have a child addicted to phones, or a child who cuts herself, or who is depressed or hyper-active. Again, multiple problems, but same root, so you’ll learn from every example we discuss.

Now, back to Amanda—the mother of the two young gladiators. She wants to STOP her children fighting. THAT is her goal. HUGE mistake. Most of us spend our entire parenting lives trying to control our children’s behavior. Two problems immediately come to mind:

1. We’re trying to stop them from relieving their PAIN. Doesn’t work. Amanda’s kids fight with each other for power because they have nothing else—no pure love from Mom, certainly.
2. We try to stop their behavior using OUR own anger and controlling (power). Nothing loving about that, so our children feel even MORE unloved, which worsens the root problem, the trunk, and the branches—all the addictions, cutting, depression, and on and on.

It’s understandable that we wouldn’t LIKE these BEHAVIORS—they’re no fun, but when we express our DISAPPROVAL of the behaviors and of our children, they can hear that only as “I don’t love you.”

Sometimes we say things like, “I’m angry at your behavior, but I love you.” Ridiculous, no child believes that lie. Watch their face sometime when you’re claiming that you’re angry at only their behavior. They’re crushed. They’re crying for help with their behavior, and you are angry at their behavior. Awful for them.

When children behave badly, we lecture them, yell at them, punish them, beg them, bribe them, take them to counseling, and even drug them with prescribed medications. All those things sometimes produce temporary control of a misbehavior, but all those controlling actions never produce the genuinely loving, responsible, and happy children we really want.

Another way to say this is that WE—the parents—behave in ways GUARANTEED to NOT achieve the results we claim we want (happy kids). In our defense, in the absence of US feeling the pure love of Christ and giving it to them—we UNAVOIDABLY keep using the same old, counter-productive tools—which, of course, produces the same old, lousy results.

Children can be pretty inconvenient: they whine and cry; they make demands and pout; they’re often disobedient and irresponsible; they don’t listen; they get angry and fight with each other; they sulk and withdraw from us, and they make an incredible amount of noise. Inconvenient.

And their behaviors can also be SELF-DESTRUCTIVE, and here we get very clever when we control them, because it’s “For THEIR OWN GOOD.” We claim to be helping them not to fight, be disobedient, etc—because those things hurt them, right?

Tempting reasoning, but mostly we’re controlling because WE simply don’t LIKE their behavior. It’s inconvenient, and we don’t know how to love and teach them. And the biggest reason we find their behavior annoying is that WE are not entirely happy in the first place, and we don’t know why. Other people aren’t happy. (I’ve asked 100s of audiences if they know anybody genuinely peaceful. Zero.) We sense that something is missing from our lives. So how can we help our children become happier? It’s seems impossible.

Controlling is the coming together of our own pain and our ignorance of the pain of our children. We see them splashing, we don’t see that they’re drowning (that’s the ignorance). And then even if we DID see them drowning, we’re in the water drowning with them, so we can’t help them. That’s a real problem.

All of our children’s misbehaviors are only SYMPTOMS of the real problem, and we’re missing what it is. Until we get it, we’re utterly doomed in raising happy children. I’ve read uncounted articles on suicide, rape amongst young people, school shootings, kids addicted to phones and games, etc. Then the solutions: gun control, rape reporting, limited campus access, therapy.

NEVER do the articles discuss the one factor common to every one of these problems: parents. (I’ve done substantial research about the kids who were school shooters. In the beginning, everyone said on camera, “Oh, he was just a quiet, normal kid.” Wrong. They all come from homes where there is divorce, fighting, frequent moves, simple and quiet neglect, addictions, no connection with parents, and so on. They all come from homes lacking in UCL. Child who feel loved and happy simply don’t go to school with guns and shoot people. The Apostle John just told us that a little bit ago. He said, putting together two verses:

“Every one who loves is born of God . . . [and] whoever is born of God does not sin.” (1 John 4:7-8; 3:9)

We can get MUCH smarter at identifying our children’s needs as we understand pain and Protecting Behaviors.

When it comes to some things, we’re pretty good at interpreting the meaning of the signals we get. We understand the cause of the symptoms we’re seeing. If your dog is scratching at the back door, you know the SCRATCHING isn’t the problem. You don’t tape mittens on the dog’s paws so he can’t make the scratching sound, because you know what the scratching really MEANS. Without the dog actually speaking to you in English, you know that the dog just wants to get in the house, so then you just open the door and let him in. Pretty smart of you to figure that out.

Now let’s see how we do with the signals of children. Suppose that a baby is crying. What do you do? Do you put duct tape over the kid’s mouth, to get rid of the noise? Tempting but no, you wouldn’t do that. Your goal isn’t only to eliminate the NOISE. You try to figure out the MEANING of the noise. You make sure the child’s foot isn’t caught in the crib slats, or you check his diaper, or feed him. You know that children cry because they NEED something, so you do whatever it takes to figure out what the need is.

In short, we’re pretty good at interpreting non-verbal signals—in animals and mostly with little babies. BUT then our children get old enough to speak—miracle—and then we begin to make terrible mistakes. We begin to assume that with their words children can actually express what they really need—which is not true—and then we don’t pay nearly as much attention to the REAL meaning of what they do and say.

This is a disaster, because a child learning to speak is not the same as a child having genuine understanding of his or her needs or the ability to communicate them. Most adults don’t either.

Amanda

Let’s go back and address Amanda’s question from several minutes ago, where she asked what to do when her 6- and 8-y.o. fight—often.

I said, “Amanda, When your kids are fighting, what do you do? In your own words, almost immediately you tell them to stop it, yell at them, and possibly punish them. And after doing that a million times—again, your words—you haven’t made any positive difference at all. In fact, it’s probably worse.”

She nodded.

“After a million times, I think it’s safe to say that your way isn’t working very well, yes?”

To all of us: When you’re having to repeat yourself, what you’re doing isn’t working. We need to pay attention to that. That’s valuable information that tells us that we’re not understanding what our children are really telling us with their behavior. And they’re speaking volumes to us about their needs that they’re not putting into words. We believe we hear them speak their needs, but they don’t SPEAK them. They BEHAVE their needs. This applies to kids who are fighting, addicted to their phones, angry at you, cutting themselves, skipping school, choosing unfortunate friends, who are withdrawn, and who demonstrate symptoms of ADHD.

Almost no parents can HEAR what their children are really saying. Right here, right now you’re learning what your children are saying, with every example, every principle, and every tone of voice I use. So let’s talk about this secret language they speak in.

Human behavior came seem quite confusing at times, but it all makes sense when you know that a child behaving badly is simply drowning. Their behavior is meant to keep their head above water. They’re gasping for air, which air is the pure love of Christ. Almost any behavior makes sense if you understand that need. It’s our job to give them what they need—to love and teach them—not to say, “Stop drowning.”

At this point, there are still some parents who are objecting, “But I DO love my child.” We’ve talked about that. You ARE doing your best, but if you use any anger, disappointment, controlling, or bribing, that’s not love, not the love of God.

You might even be tempted to object, “Well, I don’t get angry that often.”

1. You get angry far more often than you realize. We’ve all been disappointed and irritated for so long that we scarcely notice it.
2. It doesn’t take much anger. Imagine that 9 out of 10 times that you and I meet, I’m friendly and kind, but 1 out of 10 times I punch you in the face. That’s not going to average out, is it? You won’t think that “overall” I’m a nice guy, and I have no justification in protesting that I only hit you 10% of the time. That’s how it works with our children. When we hit them emotionally, it’s devastating, and they spend the rest of the time waiting for the next hit.

So I talked to Amanda, loved her, and taught her. The next time her children were fighting—in this case over use of a toy—she went into the room and pointed to her daughter (just pick one child, doesn’t matter much which). She said GENTLY, “Are you happy?”

Daughter shook her head.

Mom said, “What do you need?”

Daughter ran to her and wrapped her arms around her. Then her son said, “Me too,” and Mom included her son in the hug, which she maintained for a good long while.

Mom said to them, “Which do you like better (holding up fingers), (1) fighting or (2) being happy?”

They both said, “Happy.”

Mom: “Later we’ll figure out whose turn it is for the toy. Right now let’s all go do something together.” The kids skipped after her, delighted to have what they wanted most. 

Not a fairy tale. There is so much power in seeing our children and others clearly, and Paul recognized that most of us in this lifetime simply would not:

“For now we are seeing unclearly through a mirror, just as now I know things incompletely.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

But he extends a hope that someday we might transcend our condition of darkness:

“The day will come when we will see clearly, and then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

In the next verse Paul suggests how we might accomplish this miracle of illumination:

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

Without love we are blinded by confusion and by emptiness and fear. As we understand love and feel its power, we gain the ability to see our children and love them.

Now, an important word here. So far what I’ve described is mostly a way to understand people differently—an intellectual way to change your feelings and behavior. Although this intellectual approach is powerful, it alone may not be enough if you’re drowning also. If you’re drowning too, along with your children, you’ll need more than a simple understanding of love. You’ll need the power that comes from actually possessing love that you have received from other people and from God. We’ll be talking much more about that in the next two chapters.

As a brief post-script, some of you are having difficulty with the idea that sin is the result of pain. The first objection is that surely our agency plays a part here, and we don’t just mindlessly react badly to pain. Very important point, which we discussed earlier in this chapter and will discuss even more thoroughly at the beginning of the next chapter.

Some other objections include the following:

1. Anger can’t always be wrong. God gets angry. No, actually, He doesn’t.
2. Anger can’t always be wrong. Christ was angry when he drove the moneychangers from the temple. No, He wasn’t.
3. Victimhood can’t always be wrong. Sometimes we ARE victimized. Yes, sometimes we are victimized—hurricanes, the violence of another, disease—but we can always CHOOSE whether we FEEL like victims.

I have hundreds of scriptural and other references to answer all these objections. We hope to post these eventually on this website.