A FEW MORE FOUNDING PRINCIPLES

THE TRAP OF EXPECTATIONS

It’s time to discuss an important principle that tends to become an enormous obstacle to happiness both for children and parents.

We’ve made it very clear that anger is always wrong, and we’ve proven that truth with the use of scripture, experience, and the counsel of apostles and prophets. Anger is especially damaging to children, who are forming their judgments and perspectives of themselves, of you, of the world, and of God. A child subjected to our anger WILL be in pain, and they will react to that pain in a great variety of unproductive ways—many of which we have described—usually for a lifetime.

It’s easy to understand a child’s pain and fear when we overtly attack them with anger, but we can also hurt them with simply the POTENTIAL for anger, or the threat of anger. A child who lives in fear of anger is often injured just as much as a child who is the object of actual anger. Perhaps the most common way we threaten children with our disappointment and anger is with our expectations. Mostly we are quite unaware of the harm inherent in expectations because everyone around us has had expectations of us all our lives. We accept expectations as a normal part of life—from others and from ourselves.

The Origin of Expectations

Let me illustrate expectations by telling you about a conversation I had with a man named Steven. He said, “Holly is just not affectionate.” (Holly is his wife.)

I said, “Oh? How so?”

“When I leave the house for work in the morning, I find her, I tell her I’m leaving, I give her a hug and a kiss, and I tell her I love ‘er.”

“Sounds like a good thing to me.”

“But she never INITIATES any of that herself,” he said, obviously irritated. “If I just left the house without doing all of that, she’d never initiate the affection. I’ve tried it. I’ve just said, ‘Bye’ as I headed for the door, and she doesn’t do anything. It’s the same when I come home. I find her and tell ‘er I love her, but if I didn’t do that, she’d never do it for me.”

I said, “If you were leaving the house and happened to see the UPS guy delivering a package, would you be irritated if HE didn’t initiate a hug and a kiss?”

“No,” he said, clearly finding my question absurd.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s not my WIFE.”

“Ah, so the rules are different with her, right?”

“Well, sure.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s my wife.”

He looked confused. Obviously he hadn’t thought about his irritation like that before. Who has?

He was caught in a circle of old thinking he hadn’t been aware of, so I helped him see more clearly. “When you married Holly, you both promised to love each other, yes?”

“Sure.”

“So then you developed a natural EXPECTATION that she WOULD love you—as she promised—while you tried to love her.”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s the word that has trapped you for so long: expectation. You believe that because you’re married, and because Holly promised to love you—in front of God and everybody—you have a right to a certain amount of affection. You expect it.”

Steven was getting uncomfortable with where this was going. He said, “I think you’re about to teach me something.”

I told Steven that if we have not been sufficiently loved from childhood, it’s always painful—every time—and then we WILL look for pain relief. Where will we find it? From any person or thing that WORKS, and it’s only natural that we would tend to EXPECT pain relief first from the people closest to us, especially if there is a direct or even implied promise from them that they will care about us. And if those people don’t deliver the expected attention, cooperation, or other relief, we are disappointed, frustrated, or angry.

Expectations always come before anger, proven by the fact that we don’t get angry if the UPS delivery guy doesn’t give us some indication of love. We don’t get angry if we have no expectations, even if we didn’t recognize the expectations at the time.

From a spouse, the promise of love is obvious, but how do we justify our having expectations of our children? Oh, easy:

• We figure, mostly unconsciously, that we “brought ‘em into the world” and supported them from birth, so surely they owe us SOMETHING: gratitude, respect, obedience, compliance, affection. They didn’t PROMISE all this, but after all they’ve taken from us, we unconsciously create in our minds a kind of implied promise that they will reward us in some way. It’s sneaky, but it’s also so common that we accept it as normal.
• OUR parents made us feel obligated to give THEM gratitude, obedience, and more, so why wouldn’t we expect the same from our children?
• This last justification is very clever. Each time we say “I love you” to a child, and the child says “I love you” in return, unconsciously we hear a promise that they WILL love us. That’s quite a trick. And we expect them to say “I love you” to us. How do I know that? Watch what happens if a parent says, “I love you” or “Give Mommy a kiss” and the child refuses to respond. Uniformly the parental reaction is some kind of disappointment or insistence. The parent is actually embarrassed if the child doesn’t respond as expected.

We’ll talk about how expectations are an unrecognized disaster, and then we’ll go over the many ways that we demonstrate expectations of our children.

Problems with Expectations

1. First problem with expectations: The message is “I don’t love you.”

We already talked about how expectations almost ALWAYS precede anger, and I need to add that expectations also precede disappointment, frustration, and other feelings related to anger. So if a child senses expectations, they WILL associate the expectation with a THREAT of disappointment and anger. Unconsciously they reason, Expectations have led to anger in the past, so why wouldn’t anger follow expectations this time? The short version of this is that expectations almost always lead to a child not feeling loved unconditionally. But can’t expectations be useful? We’ll get to that shortly.

2. Second problem with expectations: “I don’t love you” again.

We’ve thoroughly discussed how a child cannot feel whole without being loved unconditionally, with the pure love of Christ, or Real Love. We’ve stated that repeatedly, and now I’ll suggest another definition of love that might be clearer and easier to remember than the list of characteristics suggested by Mormon or Paul.

Real Love is caring about the happiness of another person without wanting anything in return. THAT is unconditional love. And note that it does not allow for us wanting anything for ourselves, which could be said in one word: expectations. The moment we expect something from our children, they can’t feel the one-way flow they require for emotional and spiritual health—just as we require that one-way flow from God. In the vision of the tree of life, people pressed forward to partake of the tree. It was freely given. There was no mention of anybody being required to return fruit to the tree. The tree IS love. It doesn’t require our love in return.

3. Third problem with expectations: Pressure.

By definition, expectations put PRESSURE on a child to perform in a certain way. To these young plants just springing from the ground, outside pressure can so easily injure and deform them.

4. Fourth problem with expectations: They’re selfish. They’re not loving.

How Expectations Are Not Loving

How? Let’s look at the characteristics of love as listed by Paul to the Corinthians, and I will replace some of the words used in the 1600s with modern English and modern scholarship. Today we would not say, for example, that something (like love) “vaunteth not itself” or “doth not behave itself unseemly.” Such descriptions only confuse our children. So, to render 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 into the language of today, without changing the intended meaning:   

Love is patient. But expectations are never patient. They stand there and tap their foot as they impatiently wait to be fulfilled. By contrast, pure love—without conditions—would have no REASON to become impatient. Ever. No conditions, no impatience.

Love is kind. While we stand there tapping our foot, kindness is not the feeling conveyed to the other person. But Real Love could not be anything other than kind.

Love is never jealous. Expectations are a setup for jealousy. If I have an expectation of you, and you put anything or anybody else before the fulfillment of my expectation, I will be jealous.

Love is never proud. My expectations of you scream my belief that my needs are more important than yours, which is inherently proud on my part. If I love you unconditionally, on the other hand, it would be because first I was loved by God and other people. How could I be proud of what was freely given to me without conditions?

Love is never rude. My demanding that you do what I want—the essence of expectations—utterly discounts your needs and desires. That would easily qualify as rude.

Love is never selfish. But my expectations are for ME. Clearly. They’re MY expectations. That’s called “selfish.” On the other hand, love without conditions would always be selfless. When I love you unconditionally, it’s because I can—because I have it to give and want to give it. It does not depend on what you give ME.

Love is not resentful. If you don’t fulfill my royal expectations, I WILL be resentful that you didn’t recognize how important my desires are. If I love you because I WANT to, however, not because of what you do for me, how could I ever resent your behavior?

Love doesn’t take offense. Unfilled expectations are a formula for creating offense.

Love is not boastful. Remember what I said about “Love is never proud” moments ago. My expectations boast of the superiority of my needs and desires.

Love takes no pleasure in other people’s faults. If you dare to fail in fulfilling my expectations of you, I will take considerable pleasure in pointing out your failure (your faults). But if I am unconditionally loving, I wouldn’t even see you as having “fault,” only an inability in that moment to give me what I want.

Love rejoices in the truth. But if I’m filled with expectations, I don’t care about what is “true,” only what satisfies my demands.

Love bears all things. Ha! I can’t bear you not filling my expectations. If I am sufficiently loved unconditionally, however, I don’t NEED you to do anything, so “bearing” or “tolerating” inconvenience and injustice becomes relatively easy.

Love believes all things. With expectations, though, I believe only in what serves me. I deny the principle of agency, for one example, because your agency is trumped by my expectations.

Love hopes all things. People with expectations don’t hope all things. They hope—and insist on—only one thing: getting their way.

Starting to feel bad, yet? As though perhaps you don’t understand love as well as you had thought? Oh, hang on. There's more.

Love endures all things. But expectations endure nothing except selfish fulfillment.

Love never fails. In mortality, expectations certainly persist, but in the end they always fail because they’re not loving. The pure love of Christ, by contrast, never fails, because the source is inexhaustible. Why would I ever stop loving you if there were no conditions for that love?

Considering that detailed description of the pure love of Christ from Paul and Moroni, expectations could qualify only as utterly unloving.

SHOULD 

Expectations can be expressed in two words: “You SHOULD.” That is SUCH an unproductive phrase. It forges a chain around the neck of the person we expect things from, a chain that weighs them down and drags them along behind us. There is no encouragement in the word “should” to make a free choice, as Lehi encouraged. (2 Nephi 2:27) Obligation and guilt—two of the instruments with which Expectation beats its victims—are no way to raise children who “shall inherit all things” (D&C 78:22)

In order to seriously injure our children, we don’t have to hit them or yell at them. Expectations are easily enough to accomplish that grisly end. You may recall Mark from Chapter Two, who felt trapped by expectations to the point where he just gave up trying to be good, and gave in to unhappiness and addictions. But finally, with enough Real Love, he said, “Now I like being obedient.” Why? Because he felt like he had a FREE CHOICE. He followed Christ because he WANTED to (the “new” commandment from Christ), not because he SHOULD (the law of Moses).

Or you’ll remember Matthew in Chapter Three, who returned home early from his mission paralyzed and blind, all because of a lifetime of pressure from Mom and Dad and teachers and other leaders. Expectations are crippling—literally in this latter case.

Examples of Expectations

How do we demonstrate expectations of our children?

1. We expect them to be grateful. I know, right now almost everyone listening is saying some version of the word “But.” Like:

• “But SHOULDN’T they be grateful?”
• “But isn’t gratitude a godly virtue they NEED?”

Reasonable questions. Am I saying children should not be grateful? I didn’t say anything remotely resembling that. No, I said that we EXPECT them to be grateful. Expectations create a vast jungle of pain and problems that we can’t see when we plant the first seeds of what we CALL teaching but what are really the weeds of expectations.

For many years I have carefully observed parents interacting with their children, and you’ve all seen what happens when a child is given a gift—an ice cream cone, whatever. The kid has maybe two seconds to speak before the parent says . . . “Now what do you say?” How do I know parents are EXPECTING gratitude? Because they universally insist on it, and they’re quite disappointed or irritated if they don’t hear the “right words” or attitude.

We BELIEVE we’re teaching gratitude when we do that, but we’re NOT. We’re teaching obligation, forced obedience, and guilt. Again, how do I know? Watch the child’s face when he reluctantly grumbles, “Thank you.” And many times I’ve asked kids about their feelings of forced gratitude, and they describe those feelings as powerfully negative.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t be respectful, obedient, and grateful—far from it. They need these qualities in order to be happy, but they acquire them far more easily and genuinely when we just love and teach them. WE parents need to learn how to do that. Children don’t learn real gratitude—and certainly don’t feel our love—when we expect and demand it from them. We’ll talk much more about how to teach children true gratitude later in this chapter—with a real-life example and words to teach them.

Briefly, how can we know whether we have selfish expectations of our children? Again, disappointment and anger. These feelings mean that WE didn’t get something WE wanted. Our disappointment and anger prove that we’re being selfish, and we experience these feelings in response to the behavior of our children so often that we’ve come to accept them as normal. We justify ourselves, claiming that disappointment is acceptable—even unavoidable—when a child makes certain mistakes, or is disobedient or disrespectful, and so on. We’re WRONG in that justification. When our children behave badly, it IS our responsibility to correct them, but disappointment and anger are never a part of loving and effective teaching.

I spent all that time explaining how it’s wrong to EXPECT gratitude—even though gratitude itself is a virtue—BECAUSE all that explanation applies to all the other expectations I’m about to list:

• We expect them to respect us. If we as adults don’t feel unconditionally loved, it’s unavoidable that we’ll get some imitations of love wherever we can get them, to decrease our pain. Respect is a form of power, one of the protecting behaviors we talked about in Chapter Two. And we get it from our children because we CAN. We’re the boss, we’re bigger and stronger, so we command from them the respect that makes us feel better. We’re not conscious of this, but we still do it. And kids hate it. They simply feel bullied by us, and they’re RIGHT. We ARE using our size, strength, and position of authority to bully them into respecting us. It’s not pretty, and we don’t like seeing it, but it’s true. Then we’re puzzled that children bully each other, but they learn it from US. We show them how it’s done. We teach them with our example that “might makes right,” a principle that has ruled the world from the time of Cain and Abel.
• We expect them to behave with a special civility and decorum in public. Look at parents when their children are behaving badly in a store or at church. We look around to see how other adults are reacting to our children. We don’t like to look like bad parents.
• We expect our children to take the gospel seriously, to WANT to gather for family prayer, to WANT to go to church and seminary and on and on. Are these good activities? YES, but our expectations kill the enjoyment, and then they don’t WANT to engage in activities they would have enjoyed had they been loved and taught instead of intimidated by expectations. Remember what President Joseph F. Smith said in Chapter Four: “You can’t force your children into heaven. You may force them to hell—by using harsh means in the efforts to make them good.” (Improvement Era, January 1920) And expectations ARE “harsh means,” which involve intimidation, disappointment, control, and irritation.
• We expect them to succeed in whatever activities they do: sports, school, musical instruments. Oh yes, I know all the potentially good reasons—by heart—for a child to perform well in anything. I also know the pitfalls of motivating them with expectations, and the damages caused by expectations FAR outweigh the benefits of “success” or “winning.” We’ll talk shortly about competition and success.
• We expect them to do chores without complaint. That quality is actually critical to their happiness, but we can’t force it. Only loving and teaching lead to that quality of WILLING obedience and responsibility.

We expect them to:

• Get into a “good college”
• Be obedient and cooperative
• Be responsible
• Be polite to adult family members
• The list is endless.

YES, mostly these are good qualities or goals. The problem is with the expectations and demands used to achieve those qualities, along with the disappointment and irritation.

Can Expectations Be a Good Thing? 

Oh, but SURELY expectations have a positive use, right? Surely they can motivate a child to accomplish good things in life. EVERYBODY believes that, which is proven by the fact that everybody uses expectations.

Let’s look at this. Do expectations motivate? YES, in the short term they do, but so does a cattle prod or a loaded gun. Expectations create pressure and fear, and in the short term they DO motivate. But the price is—as I just said—pressure and fear, which are incompatible with the love that is central to happiness, faith, the Atonement, exaltation, and ... oh, everything good. Are we willing to get the short-term “reward”—the accomplishment of “things”—at the expense of lifelong unhappiness?

We’ve all read—and then minimized—the LEGION of stories about highly competitive athletes who achieve world-wide fame and then pay for it with anxiety, depression, suicide. And uniformly they vividly describe how they finally crumbled under the expectations of their parents, friends, coaches, fans, and eventually the world. Win, win, win becomes a powerful expectation and burden that people cannot continue to carry without serious consequences. And for every story of a heavily burdened athlete, there are MANY who don’t tell their story of the crushing effects of expectations.

It is accepted as an unquestioned truth that competition fosters improvement, but competition is the very embodiment of expectations. This belief in the benefits of expectations and competition is WRONG. The greatest motivation we all have—including our children—is that we all truly want to do things well, because we’re good people and have an innate desire to do good.

Did we forget that we are sons and daughters of the King of heaven, the Creator of the universe? You think we don’t have a spark of wanting to follow our Father to some degree? In our premortal life we actually CHOSE to come here to follow Him. You think we were joking? Think we were tricked? No, we DO want to do things well, to do life well.

What did we learn in Chapter Two? I asked, “Why do children draw pictures with crayons?” Because they WANT to, because 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 feels your EXPECTATION that he has to do a “good job” again.

As I said in that chapter, studies have PROVEN that expectations decrease motivation and lead to LESS of the activity expected of the child. Children 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” (Vin Scully)—so we tend to avoid entirely the risks of doing anything that can be judged by others. A child's innate creativity can be squashed with the simple phrase "Good job."

What do we have without expectations? 

We all talk about faith in God, faith in the Atonement, faith in obedience. Of course we do, because those are all true and eternal principles. But how often do we speak of FAITH IN OUR CHILDREN? Almost never. Both we and our children need our faith in them, because that gives us hope, and them hope, in this grand adventure we’re on together. Joseph Smith said that faith is the assurance men have of the existence of things they have not seen, and that it is faith, and faith only, that is the moving cause of all action—physical, mental, earthly, and spiritual. (Lectures on Faith, 1:9-12)

But our expectations scream that we don’t have faith in our children, and they FEEL that. They feel our lack of faith that if we sufficiently love and teach them, they will—overall—make choices that lead to happiness. They feel our control and lack of love, which is ALWAYS painful, after which they turn to the protecting behaviors that are (1) sins, or (2) lead to sin, and (3) never make them genuinely happy. In short, we tend to be the primary cause of unhappiness in our children. Unwittingly, we make Satan’s job pretty easy.

Many parents protest, “But without expectations, how do we motivate children?” Love them and teach them—again. We don’t need competition and expectations. We need to love them and teach them STANDARDS—definitions and examples—of excellence and happiness. If they are sufficiently loved and taught, they WILL move toward those standards? Why? Because they are God’s children and have an inner drive to become like Him, just as naturally as a calf naturally becomes like its parents, without pushing and driving.

I’m not talking here about no standards, or weakness. I’m not talking about the sad movement toward “participation awards” and telling a child that he was “Amazing!” when he didn’t really even try. No, that “Everything is awesome” foolishness just dilutes eternal standards to the point where they become meaningless.

I’m talking about telling children the TRUTH, just as we talked about extensively in Chapter Two, where we discussed positive feedback. It’s called “positive” feedback not because it’s artificially inflated—as in, “Oh, wow, that’s just awesome, like everything else you do.” No, it’s “positive” because it’s simply true observations that have a positive EFFECT on the awareness and growth of a child.

I used to play tennis regularly with my children. We played vigorously. At times—looking at the way we chased down balls that seemed impossible to reach—you would have thought we were in the finals of a major championship. And we enjoyed every moment, whether we made the shot or not. If we just missed the line, we’d scream in mock anguish, while the other player would shout, “Wow, beautiful try!” acknowledging the nobility of the attempt. If a successful shot was particularly difficult, we’d raise our arms in triumph, as though accepting a large silver cup for the tournament.

Would you like to know the secret to this unending enjoyment, this utter lack of disappointment or frustration? We did not keep score. Every approach, each swing, had its own inherent pleasure. We didn’t need the external pressure of an expectation or lost point, nor the artificial reward of a point or a win. We played for FUN. Imagine that. And we got better and better because EVERYONE who plays a sport regularly already knows the standards for a good shot or effort. We simply tried to play better, to get closer to the standards that were intuitively obvious.

Most swimmers do that. They don’t care about winning a meet. They swim to improve what they call their “best time,” the fastest they’ve swum that stroke and distance in the past. I led a large Varsity Scout team for a long time, and we played every sport we could think of: the standard basketball-football-baseball but also team handball, lacrosse, ziplining, dropping rocks off cliffs onto targets in the water, and other games we made up. All with no score keeping.

There was no competition, and yet they played as hard as they could—for fun, for the thrill of seeing a rock explode on the target 100 feet below. Instead of being tightly constrained by expectations and winning, they enjoyed the near-miraculous thrill of watching the nerdy, completely non-athletic boy—who had never experienced any kind of win in sports—as he caught a touchdown pass, for example, from the varsity quarterback of the local school. The entire team erupted in cheers and congratulations. That kid knew the difference between catching and dropping the ball without being burdened by the expectations of others.

Dropping Expectations

With expectations, disappointment and irritation are always right around the corner, and the threat of those feelings is always present, right in your face. With competition, there is one winner and so many losers, leading to sights like that of the second-best competitor in the world at “whatever” hanging his or her head in shame at receiving “only” the silver medal. There is something seriously wrong with that picture.

God does not burden us with expectations. He doesn’t rank us competitively. He loves us, adores us, and nourishes us, and simultaneously He teaches us the way to be happy in this life and in the life to come. He knows that expectations are not what we need but instead “more striving within,” to borrow the words of a hymn. (LDS Hymns, “More Holiness Give Me”)

Jesus revealed both His compassion and His lack of expectations when He explained to His disciples that He spoke to people in parables because they were not yet ready to understand many of the truths He taught. (Matthew 13:10-14). He specifically withheld expectations for their benefit. Nephi made a real point of describing God teaching us according to OUR level of understanding, not according to His expectations. (2 Nephi 31:3)

Expectations by definition are desires or wants I have for what you will do FOR ME, or that you have for your child. By contrast, my unconditional loving is FOR YOU, and you’ll feel it and thrive. Love is emotional and spiritual AIR. Love is the tree of life. With it, you’ll perform better. You will. So will your children. If you rely on expectations, you deny your faith in Jesus Christ and in the pure love of Christ that you could be giving your children. I am not blaming or shaming anyone, just making a statement about what works.

If properly done, my teaching—the other half of loving and teaching—is also FOR you. It’s loving and teaching that are the greatest motivators, for you and for your children. Christ has TOLD us that it’s all about loving and teaching. His entire earthly mission can be summarized in those two words: loving, teaching. We read that “He taught with authority (or power)” (Mark 1:22), which astonished people because it was so different from how everyone else taught the law. He taught with the power of love, which they had never seen. What a beautiful description of the Savior, along with a stinging indictment of how we parents usually teach and have always taught throughout history.

By contrast with loving and teaching, if I had expectations of you, my primary desire would not be for you, you would feel it, you would feel the pressure and pain, and you would eventually perform LESS well. For CERTAIN you would be less happy, even if my expectations drove you to external success for a time.

Expectations Deny Faith and the Atonement of Jesus Christ

In Chapter Seven, I said that when we understand the nature of faith, we have faith in living true principles, not in controlling outcomes. We have faith in the pure love of Christ, which is the fire burning at the core of the Atonement. We have faith that living in harmony with God’s law—the law that governs all that is good in the universe—will yield a kind of happiness in this life and in the world to come that otherwise would be impossible.

With expectations, on the other hand, we loudly deny faith in principles and in the power of love. Instead we decide what WE want—what we expect—and we insist that outcomes conform to our ideas of safety, power, praise, and whatever else we choose to take the place of love and peace.

The effect of expectations is to deny the Atonement of Christ. How is that possible? Alma tells us that He took upon Him death and pain, so that He could take from all of us our death and pain. (Alma 7:11-12) By the power of faith we make all that possible. With expectations we choose another course, other than faith in Christ’s Atonement. We insist that our pain relief come from other people—or other things—conforming who they are and how they respond to our expectations. We put our trust in what WE want, in “the arm of flesh” (2 Nephi 4:34) rather than in Christ. 

Even further, when I have an expectation of you, I’m declaring that I know what you need to do and are capable of doing. Oh, sure, I can justify my expectations by saying that what I’m expecting would be good for you. I could claim that a particular truth of the gospel would be good for you—like faith or tithing—and that would be RIGHT, but I do NOT know whether you are capable of hearing that truth, understanding it, or living it. I have NO RIGHT to make that judgment. God can make that judgment, though, and Jesus demonstrated both His judgment and compassion regarding our circumstances and abilities when He taught in parables. He demonstrated a kindness and sensitivity to people’s ability to understand—as I just mentioned minutes ago—instead of piercing them with his expectations of what they “should” comprehend.

If Not Expectations, Then What? 

So, if having expectations of our children is harmful, what productive feeling or attitude CAN we have while loving and teaching them? We can trust in the power of love, in the power of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Truth, which is one of the Savior’s names. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” He said. (John 14:6) I trust in all that, which is more than enough. If I insist on particular outcomes—which is true when I have expectations—I take over as Savior of the world, and I’m not prepared for that job. Neither are you.

In addition to faith, we can have hope.

We can have HOPE of the cleansing and comforting power of Jesus Christ in the lives of our children, but only after we have loved and taught them.

Elder Holland quoted David Batty, who said, “Hope is not a magic wand that makes problems disappear. Hope is the lifeline that can keep you from being overwhelmed by the storms in your life. When you place your hope in Jesus, you place your confidence in His promises that He will never leave you or forsake you—that He will do what is best for you. Even though you may be in the middle of a huge problem, hope enables you to be at peace, knowing that Jesus is with you every step of the way.” (David Batty, “Finding Hope in the Midst of Life’s Problems”)

We can have hope that all will be well from an eternal perspective. We get so focused on modifying a single behavior that we lose sight of our eternal destinations.

President Eyring has said, “I have seen as a counselor to two living prophets of God that they are individuals with unique personalities. Yet they seem to share a consistent optimism. When someone raises an alarm about something in the Church, their most frequent response is ‘Oh, things will work out.’ They know the way of the Lord, so they are always hopeful about His kingdom. They know He is at its head. He is all‑powerful and He cares. If you let Him be the leader of your family, things will work out.” (Ensign May 2014)

What is the difference between expectations and hope? Hope motivates me to try, and then try again. Right this second, as I’m sharing what I know with you, I hope that you will become a better parent and happier person as a result of what you hear and feel. Without hope, why would I try at all? It is with hope that we plant the seed Alma talked about. (Alma 32) But I have no EXPECTATION that you will learn this and grow. I have no right to that expectation. With hope, there is no disappointment or frustration if you choose not to listen and learn. With expectations, I arrogantly judge whether you SHOULD learn, and I feel disappointed when I can’t control you. There is no disappointment or frustration in hope. This is plenty of both in expectations.

It is the same as we love and teach our children. We are energized by a never-ending hope that we can reach them, fueled by faith in the truth and in love. But we cannot expect specific results, or we deny the powers of agency, faith, love, and the Atonement.

PREPARING CHILDREN for LIFE

When babies are born, they are so tiny, and cute, and darling, and ... well, useless and helpless and profoundly ignorant of what life is going to bring crashing down around them. And WE must prepare them. This is no small job.

Many years ago President Hinckley spoke to the young men of the church and shared an article he had clipped long before that from a newspaper. A violent storm had damaged a building in the West Indies, so the owners sent a man to make repairs. After a time, the man wrote to his manager:

“Respected Sir,

(Likely some kind of diagram or animation here)

“When I got to the building, I found that the hurricane had knocked some bricks off the top. So I rigged up a beam with a pulley at the top of the building and hoisted up a couple of barrels full of bricks. After making repairs, there was still a lot of bricks left over.

“I hoisted the empty barrel back up again, tied off the rope at the bottom, and went up to fill the barrel with the leftover bricks. Then I went to the bottom and untied the rope.

“Unfortunately, the barrel of bricks was heavier than I was, and before I knew what was happening the barrel started down, jerking me off the ground. I decided to hang on, and halfway up I met the barrel coming down and received a severe blow on the shoulder.

“I continued to the top, banging my head against the beam and jamming my finger in the pulley. When the barrel hit the ground, it broke, spilling out all the bricks.

“Now I was heavier than the barrel, so I started down again at high speed. Halfway down, I met the empty barrel coming up and received severe injuries to my shins. When I hit the ground, I landed on the bricks, getting several painful cuts from the sharp edges.

“I was stunned and let go of the rope. The barrel came down, giving me another heavy blow on the head and putting me in the hospital. I respectfully request sick leave.”

“You may wonder,” President Hinckley said, “how anyone could be so thoughtless and shortsighted. But every day we see people whose lives become entangled and bumped and bruised because they fail to plan, to think, to consult with others, and to follow the teachings of the gospel. I would like to speak to the boys of the Aaronic Priesthood, to help save them from some of the bumps and bruises of life.” (Ensign Nov 1981)

And THAT is our job as parents, (1) to prepare out children for the inevitable bumps and bruises that can actually teach and elevate them, and (2) to save them from the unnecessary bumps that only injure rather than edify. Every day I talk to adults who are traveling up and down a rope they can barely hold, banging against bricks and beams at the top and bottom, as well as on the way up and down. And I hear parents describe how their children are doing the same. On the whole, we’re not preparing our children for their journey, nor are we prepared. But we can learn.

In the Book of Mormon we read how the Lamanites came to battle against the Nephites over and over. Before one of many such occasions, Captain Moroni had prepared the minds of the people to be faithful to the Lord their God. AND he strengthened the armies and built forts with banks of earth, and built walls of stone to protect their cities and borders. (Alma 48:7-8) Again and again the Nephites prepared themselves spiritually but also with walls, forts, armor, swords, spears, slings, and arrows.

Our responsibility as parents is nothing less than to prepare our children for attack from all the forces the world can bring against them, led by Satan, who is “the god of this world.” (2 Corinthians 4:4)

Paul wrote to Timothy and said, “Instruct the people to do good and build up for themselves a good foundation for the times to come, so they may gain eternal life.” (1 Timothy 6:17) THAT is our job as parents.

Agency and the Law of the Harvest

As I said in Chapter Three, there is no principle in the gospel more important than agency, and yet we regularly demonstrate that we don’t understand this principle well, a sentiment echoed by President Oaks.

We teach them that they have the right to choose freedom and eternal life or prison and death (2 Nephi 2:27), but that’s only the first part, the easy part, of agency. To complete the principle, (1) we must make them CAPABLE of choosing wisely, which is the definition of RESPONSIBILITY, or the ability to choose or respond. Then (2) we must make them ACCOUNTABLE, which means to require them to shoulder the consequences for the choices they do make. We understand the second and third parts of agency poorly, and we teach it even worse. I intend no criticism, I make only an observation of how confused we are about agency.

Responsibility vs Assignment

To illustrate the interaction between the first two parts of agency—freedom and responsibility—imagine a young soldier in basic training. On his first day, we issue him a uniform and do the necessary induction paperwork. On the second day we hand him a rifle and say, “This is your weapon. Use it wisely.” Then we put him on a plane with a thousand similarly-unprepared infantrymen and ship him to the battlefront.

How do you think that would go? With the exception of possible intervention from luck or lack of fighting, the kids are doomed. Nobody would send a soldier into action that badly prepared, but we do it with our children every day. We give them the FREEDOM to make choices in the world, but then we don’t properly prepare them to possess the ABILITY to RESPOND to the world—which we have defined as true responsibility. We can’t make a child truly responsible simply by giving them what we call “responsibilities.”

Let’s look at just one example of preparing a child to be truly responsible: the use of screens, with their ever-increasing array of programs and apps. We hand them the device—exactly like we would hand them a weapon, with all its potential for both good and ill—and then we merely HOPE that they’ll figure out how to use it wisely. That does not go well, just as it does not with a military weapon.

How do I know for CERTAIN that we prepare them poorly? Easy. I compare what they NEED with what we actually GIVE them.  If we appropriately regarded our responsibility to prepare them, what would it look like?

1. First, we would be adequately prepared ourselves for the responsibilities of life. We would be diligently keeping the commandments. Why? To be obedient? NO. We’d be keeping the commandments to prevent any obstacle from coming between us and the whisperings of the Spirit, a subject we covered in some detail in Chapter Seven. We’d be listening to the Spirit and actively seeking out the pure love of Christ from our fellow wanderers in this life and from God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. AND we’d be learning about every device and application used by our children, so we’d know the relative benefits and dangers.

That’s a lot of preparation before we even address our children, and we tend to do far less than military instructors, who have thoroughly prepared for the very fighting they’re training their recruits for. These instructors are physically fit, trained and tested in communication devices, intensely familiar with military procedures and tactics, and much more.  

2. We’d consistently and unconditionally love our children, rather than intermittently supervising them, controlling them, neglecting their real training, and pacifying them (2 Nephi 28:21) with whatever they want, rather than what they need. Without this underlying pure love, they will be unprepared for the inevitable difficulties in life, just as a soldier cannot go to battle without any physical training or fitness.

3. We would teach our children how to feel the pure love of Christ from the Master Himself, providing the foundation for all other teaching. We talked about how to do this in Chapter Seven by teaching faith, repentance, and revelation.

4. We would teach them the gospel of Jesus Christ, focusing on how every principle is founded on—and leads to—faith, repentance, revelation, feeling loved, being loving, being responsible, and being happy. We’d focus on what matters, not primarily on the Pharisaic details. Military instructors perform a similar task with every recruit. Do we regard the eternal lives of our children with similar importance?

5. We would discuss with them the potential blessings and dangers of everything they experience in the world: the wounds and protecting behaviors of others, the desires of Satan for their souls, the ever-abundant sales pitches shouted from the great and spacious building, and the spectrum of potential distractions they will face, with screens being just one of a great many.

6. We would provide an environment where they could learn responsibility and practice making real choices without exposing them unnecessarily to the dangers of the world. This is exactly what military instructors do in basic and advanced training. Can we possibly do less than that?

We CAN learn to do all these things, and then we will be prepared to prepare our children for life. There are no shortcuts, and we only need to start where we are now. Comparing ourselves to others, or regretting our past behaviors or inaction is completely fruitless.

CHOICE, Not Reactions

This training program in the proper use of agency has such a primary role in the loving and teaching of our children that I could distill our purpose as parents into a single sentence: We are here to teach our children to replace mindless reacting to people and events with genuine CHOOSING. That simple sentence includes discourses on faith, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the pure love of Christ, agency, and more.

Human beings mostly react to pain, as we’ve discussed, and in the process our agency is stripped from us—and from our children. And we don’t even realize that it’s happened, that we’re only reacting, rather than choosing. We’ve lost our agency without our knowledge. Could there be a greater tragedy? But it does not have to stay that way, certainly not for our children.

Making genuine choices is a powerful and joyful experience, while reacting is a never-ending prison. One danger of reactions lies in the subsequent self-deceit where we justify our false perceptions. Once we’ve reacted, we become invested in our behavior and will then do anything to justify it. We genuinely believe we’ve made a choice when we’ve only reacted to pain of various causes. That self-deception tends to continue throughout life unless we eagerly seek the love and counsel of those who can see and love us. We need that loving and teaching as parents, and then we can offer it to our children.

Accountability

If we fail to provide our children this training in the responsibility of making choices, what is the likelihood that we will hold them accountable for the choices they make? Very low, OR we will rigidly and unkindly hold them accountable for choices that WE did not prepare them to be responsible for—which is what we do with our impatience, anger, and controlling (see Chapter One). And then what is the likelihood of their being able to confidently and adequately stand accountable for their choices? Close to zero. In fact, mostly they won’t even make choices. Without preparation from us, they can only react to the pain and distractions within and around them.

I personally know several military drill instructors, and if a soldier goes into battle unprepared, they hold the INSTRUCTOR accountable for that, not the soldier. And so it is with us as parents and children who are not prepared for life.

The Law of the Harvest

It’s time to talk about the Law of the Harvest. It turns out that exact phrase “Law of the Harvest” is not found in scripture, but it certainly is described:

Paul said, “Don’t be deceived. God cannot be mocked. You will harvest whatever you plant. If you plant to please the flesh, your harvest will decay. If you plant by the Spirit, you will harvest eternal life.” (Galatians 6:7–9).

Alma speaks of planting and harvesting a tree of life for ourselves (Alma 32), and Christ tells us that all blessings flow from obedience to eternal laws. (D&C 130:20–21).

We must teach our children that there is a price to be paid for ALL good things.

We have to plant the seeds of truth, which requires faith and study. 

We exercise faith again to wait for the seeds to grow, to “wait on the Lord.”

We have to care for them, weed them, and nourish them.

Have to pay attention to the plants often and watch for the earliest emergence of weeds. We don’t have to do anything to help weeds grow, just neglect our consistent efforts to eliminate them.

We go to church and seminary, have home evening, pray together, and study Come Follow Me. But then if we ignore the whining, anger, victimhood, and screen time, we tend to wonder why we’re having problems. We say, “But I planted the seeds, and I watered and fertilized them!!” Yes, I’ve done that in gardens many times, and but if I was neglectful, at a speed I could not have imagined, I had a harvest of weeds taller than my corn and choking out most of my crops.

How do we get behind in loving and teaching our children? How do the weeds creep in? We forget the Law of the Harvest:

If we don’t plant, we get nothing or—more likely—a garden full of weeds.

Often we actively plant weeds. In our pain, we use the protecting behaviors—anger and controlling, for example—that are selfish and take us far from the tree of life. We confuse the temporary pain relief of protecting ourselves with genuine happiness. We confuse the loud partying found in the great and spacious building with the fruit of the tree of life that is "the most joyous to the soul." (1 Nephi 11:23)

So, how do we help our children understand the Law of the Harvest?

CONSEQUENCES

We have to teach our children that for every choice, there are CONSEQUENCES. We have referred many times to what Lehi said: We are free to choose liberty and eternal life or captivity and death. (2 Nephi 2:27) In the verse before, he had already said we are free to choose for ourselves, so when he said that we’re free to choose liberty and eternal life or captivity and death, he was not saying that those were the only choices. No, he was saying that those are the final CONSEQUENCES for all the choices we make.

Rarely are children clearly taught—without anger or guilt—about the nature of consequences. For one thing, we need to teach them that there are four classes of consequences, which will help them understand how and why we’re teaching them the principles of salvation.

Let’s go over these four classes:

1. Long-term natural consequences. 

These are the consequences that NATURALLY follow months or years later from a single choice—or a pattern of choices. Example: a military recruit learns the basic principles of disassembling and reassembling his rifle, but somehow the drill sergeant fails to test him under rigorous conditions, like doing the work in the dark, or the rain, or while being rushed. This kid appears to have an adequate knowledge of weapon maintenance, but years later he’s in a forward observation post, a trench, at night and in the rain. He can faintly make out distant shapes moving toward him and begins to fire. He’s rattled, drops his rifle into the mud, picks it up, and resumes firing. But after one round—the one in the chamber when he dropped the rifle—subsequent rounds won’t load, which requires that he disassemble the weapon, clean it, and put it back together again. But he’s almost paralyzed by fear, and he’s never maintained his weapon under fire, in the dark, in a hurry, and in the rain. He fumbles at the job for some time, when suddenly an enemy combatant appears at the edge of the trench and shoots our boy in the head. A failure in early training to properly learn the function and maintenance of a rifle led to the long-term consequence of his death.

As parents we fail in almost exactly the way this boy’s drill instructor did. We are afraid to allow our children to experience hardship as they learn, so when hardships come later in life, they are unprepared for them. We’ll be talking more about this.

Another example: A child knows he has at least two assignments to complete at home before school begins tomorrow, but he plays on a screen instead of doing his schoolwork. Who wouldn’t? Playing tends to be more fun, so he plays. That’s not the mistake that matters here. The real mistake is that Mom and Dad don’t notice, don’t ask, don’t check the school website for assignments given out that day, and don’t require an accountability.

The child has long before established a pattern of playing before working—the nightmare alternative to work-before-play, which we’ll be talking about—and without intervention by a parent, this pattern grows to the point where the child naturally avoids doing school work. His grades drop, he acquires a disinterest in continuing his education past high school, and soon finds himself without a job, deeply distracted by an addiction to screens, and unable to support himself. He’s angry at the world for not taking care of him, angry when he’s forced to leave home, angry that no woman wants to date or marry someone with that degree of irresponsibility, and in his overall resentment at life quits praying, reading scripture, and going to church. Then we throw up our hands and ask, “How could this happen?” These are the predictable long-term consequences of a few unmodified choices made at age seven or earlier.

A great many choices in childhood, in fact, can lead to a greater and greater separation from the ways of God and our ability to feel the love of God. Eventually, we can no longer hear His Spirit or come unto Him. We separate ourselves from His eternal presence, which is spiritual death. The Book of Mormon is filled with examples of long-term consequences, as well as explanations of spiritual death. (Alma 12:16)

2. Long-term imposed consequences.

On many occasions I have visited men and women in prison, and they vividly illustrate long-term consequences. If we ignore the laws of God and man long enough, or ignore some laws even once, the courts can impose long-term consequences with severe effects. Only a small portion of people who are the objects of such consequences end up benefitting from them. 60-70% of violent felons return to prison within three years after their release. Prison becomes a punishment, not a way to teach a lesson.

Many of these prisoners, with whom I have worked while they were incarcerated and later on parole, have said, “How I wish that somebody had taught me this when I was a kid. How I wish that somebody had cared enough about me—and had the courage—to say NO, or to make me pay the price for my stupid choices before I came to THIS [prison or parole].” Hearing such expressions fills me with compassion for them, as well as a desire to help parents give their children exactly what these prisoners described. And I have watched many parents complain about their children’s behavior but then refuse to learn what was required to help their kids, who then go on to suffer the long-term imposed consequences of the judicial and prison systems, along with the negative consequences from people in average society—teachers, bosses, and more.

God’s consequences

And if we refuse learning sufficiently, God can’t spare us from long-term imposed consequences. Alma taught that “The plan of redemption can’t happen unless men fulfill the conditions of repentance. Without repentance, mercy cannot take effect without destroying the work of justice. And if justice is eliminated, God would cease to be God.” (Alma 42:13) He confirms in a later verse that “mercy cannot rob justice.” (Alma 42:25)

God Himself is required to support justice, and at the judgment He will “separate the sheep from the goats.” (Matthew 25:32) He will put some on his right hand and some on his left. (Matthew 25:33) He HAS to do that, or that which is celestial would no longer be so. The order of the entire universe would become chaos, and “God would cease to be God.”

God does NOT WANT to impose separation or damnation upon ANYONE, and THAT is WHY he imposes—or allows—short-term consequences now.

In Deuteronomy we read, “If you will not listen to the voice of the LORD thy God and follow all His commandments, all these curses will come upon you: You will be cursed in the city and in the field, and you will starve. Your children, harvests, flocks, and herds will be cursed. The Lord will plague you with deadly disease, he will smite you with weakness, fear, a severe burning, the sword, and diseases of your crops. He will strike you with madness, blindness, and confusion. He will strike you with painful and incurable boils all over your body. You will plant many seeds but harvest little because the locusts will eat them. You will plant the vineyard, but worms will eat the grapes so you can’t drink the wine. Your sons and daughters will be taken into slavery. All these curses will come upon you and follow you until you are destroyed, because you didn’t listen to the voice of the Lord. And they will be upon you and your descendants for a sign and a wonder forever, because you did not serve the Lord with joy and gladness.” (Deuteronomy 28:15-47)

Isaiah said the Lord would send Babylonians and Assyrians to destroy Israel. And the enemy would kill their men, women, and babies; and kill their animals and cut down their trees; and leave nothing but barren desert. And why? So they would know, in His words, that “I the Lord am God.” (1 Nephi 17:14) He said, “I am He who brings destruction upon you because you turned from me.” And He says in so many places and ways a version of this (in modern language): “I don’t LIKE smacking you around to wake you up. No, I would much rather bless and kiss you.” In His words, “How often I wanted to gather you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, to nourish you, but you refused.” (3 Nephi 10:4) He would MUCH rather gather us as chicks and enfold us in the arms of His love and mercy.

But we have to listen to Him and follow Him, and He loves us enough to teach us how to do that, no matter the price involved for teaching. He is the Shepherd, the Master, and even the drill instructor who is willing to train us under the most difficult conditions SO THAT we can learn the difficult and eternal lessons available in mortality alone.

And He prophecies His consequences. Why? So we know it was HIM who made them happen. Isaiah heard these words directly from the Lord: “Listen, I have prophesied to you from the beginning, and then I showed you the fulfillment, and you were surprised. I did this because I knew that you are stubborn and unteachable. From the beginning I have prophesied things to you before they happened, so you could not say that they happened because of anything YOU had known or done. (1 Nephi 20:1-8)

I describe some of the consequences God imposes on us in the short term so that we as parents can “gird up our loins” with the courage required to do the same—to impose consequences in practical and effective ways we’ll be describing shortly, ways that don’t involve sending boils and Babylonians, for example.

3. Short-term natural consequences

An example:

A child knows he has work to do, but he plays instead. It appears that he gets away with it, but he doesn’t. He has begun to establish a pattern that can destroy him, and even in the short term, he feels separated from the blessings of feeling loved and being responsible. He learns that he can finish a video game but not finish an assignment at home or school, but he ignores this short-term consequence, so and eventually he is almost unable to be responsible for short-term assignments.

Another example: When a child fails to listen to the Spirit, he learns that often there is no immediate punishment. He “gets away with it,” but immediately he feels isolated from God and wonders why his life just “feels off” and unfulfilling. There is always a consequence for the choices we make—now and later.

4. Short-term imposed consequences

These are the consequences imposed by parents and sometimes teachers and others in authority. The purpose of short-term consequences is to teach with action when words have failed, and to PREVENT a child from experiencing long-term natural and imposed consequences.

In our backyard, there is a creek, over which I built a forty-foot bridge. From a branch high above the bridge, I hung a tire swing, where the grandchildren enjoy swinging far out over the creek. On the return arc, however, the tire and suspending chains sweep rapidly over one part of the bridge, so I am very careful that anyone not on the tire is standing well back from the path of the return arc on the bridge.

Years ago I was swinging some grandchildren on the tire, and the arc was becoming impressive, which meant that when they reached the bridge, they were really moving. I told one child near the bridge, Jack, age 4 or 5, to stay on the path and safely away from the bridge. Of course, when I turned away from him for an instant, Jack began to walk across the bridge. When I turned to look for him—less than two seconds later—I could see that the tire, loaded with kids, was maybe one second from hitting Jack, where he would have been knocked off the bridge and thrown to the rocky creek bed below.

Under normal circumstances, I strongly advocate the benefits of teaching children in a calm and loving way. In some cases, however, that is simply not possible. In that moment, had I calmly explained to Jack the possibility of injury, he would have been struck hard, breaking bones and injuring internal organs—possibly including his neck and brain—both from the tire blow and the fall to the rocks below. So I rapidly reached out, grabbed his collar, and jerked him off the ground to a place of safety as the tire missed him by inches.

Jack had been oblivious to the swing, so all he knew was that I’d violently changed his intended course. For a moment, his face expressed considerable irritation, but then I kneeled down and explained to him—face to face—why I had acted as I did, saving him from injury and potential death. He hugged me and thanked me.

Did I feel bad that jerking on Jack’s collar made an abrasion on his neck? No. What if I had grabbed his arm and dislocated his shoulder? Would I have cared? Not really, because the severity of any of those short-term imposed consequences would have been FAR LESS than standing by and allowing the short- and long-term natural consequences to occur.

Now, an example you can use immediately: A child spends more than the allotted minutes on screens, or is using them past the permitted time at night. It is in SUCH moments that the habits of a lifetime are created. THIS is how a child BEGINS a lifetime of protecting behaviors and addictions. Every drug addict begins with a single dose. The long-term consequences are not seen as easily or immediately as Jack being knocked off the bridge, but they’re every bit as real.

Recently, I watched and listened as a famous stand-up comedian told the audience that he had a 14-year-old. son. The audience groaned in sympathy for him. He described how this entire parenting process has been one learning experience after another, and that there came a time when he wondered if he would just fail. And then he said that one day he figured out the solution to all his problems. When his son behaved in a way that wasn’t loving or responsible, the father just held out his hand, palm up. (Demonstrate) Then he said, with a smile and a kind voice, “Phone.” The potential conflict was OVER.

In less than a minute, this father demonstrated to his audience what it means to use short-term consequences to prevent much longer and much worse consequences. Generally stated, first you use love and teaching with words. When words aren’t working, IMMEDIATELY you impose a short-term consequence, or what I’ll just call consequences, unless I state that it’s one of the other three categories of consequences.

Imposing Consequences

People are creatures of convenience. We—as well as our children—tend to choose the easier of any two roads. We also tend—because of the ease of familiarity—to repeat the same behaviors unless something motivates us to change.

Without guidance, most children would not choose to be responsible and loving. There are too many influences in the world leading them to do otherwise. Understandably, they’d tend to choose the easy, pleasant, and irresponsible course of eating, sleeping, and being entertained. Before they will choose the relatively uphill path that leads to growth and real happiness, they need us to love and teach them. Love and guidance alone, however, are not enough in some cases, as we see here with Kyle and his mother, Suzanne.

Suzanne was a single mother of three children, and in their family all the children were assigned significant household chores: laundry, dishes, kitchen, the lawn, and so on. Among other assignments, Kyle was responsible for cleaning every dish after the evening meal every day—immediately after the end of the meal. Mostly he did his job, but sometimes he played around on his phone after dinner, and other times he did a sloppy, minimally compliant job. We’ve all seen that. Kyle would clean MOST of the dishes, and even those were MOSTLY clean. You CANNOT accept that pattern, or it continues and causes problems for a lifetime.

Suzanne talked with Kyle to be sure he understood his duties, and she pointed out that he needed to improve his performance. As she instructed him and loved him unconditionally, he felt the absence of irritation. For a time, he did better with his work, but after a couple of weeks he was back to his old ways. Again she talked to him about his duties, and two weeks later she talked to him again. In loving instruction, there is no impatience. After several attempts at simple instruction, she tried another approach. “Kyle,” she asked, “do you like living in this family?”

After a brief hesitation, he said he did.

“What do you like about it?” Suzanne asked.

She then helped Kyle see some of the things he liked about being in the family:

• Having a roof over his head, where he could be warm in the winter and cool in the summer—all possible because Suzanne consistently performed her job as the bread-winner in the family
• Having clean clothes—a result of his sister doing her job as the person in charge of laundry for the family
• Having a nice yard to play in—courtesy of his older brother who mowed the lawn and kept the bushes and trees trimmed
• Having nicely prepared meals—mostly by Suzanne, but with some help from his sister

“So you can see,” said Suzanne, “that it takes a lot of people consistently doing their jobs to make this a pleasant place to live. You are a part of that. When you do your job, it makes the family run that much smoother. When you don’t do your job, it makes things harder for everyone else. Do you see that?”

There are so many reasons for children to be diligent about their responsibilities around the home, the least of which is the actual accomplishment of the tasks assigned, like washing dishes. As children do their chores, they experience the higher purpose of contributing to the welfare of other members of the family. In the process, they learn how to love, they feel closer to the family, they learn gratitude, and they learn responsibility—all attributes that are valuable for a lifetime. Children are simply much happier when they’re being loving and responsible.

Kyle did see what Suzanne was talking about, and for several more weeks, he did much better with the dishes. When he began to slack off, Suzanne had the same conversation with him one more time, again just loving and teaching him.

This is important. Suzanne talked with Kyle maybe three times total about this subject. Children are not nearly as stupid or forgetful as they sometimes pretend to be. If there is something they WANT, suddenly their reasoning becomes brilliant, their research impeccable, and they remember every word you’ve ever spoken on the subject. You know what I’m saying. So after three conversations, Suzanne KNEW that Kyle DID understand his duties and was just ignoring them in favor of playing around.

Suzanne came into the living room to discover the dishes not done and Kyle playing on his phone (or could have been a video game or whatever). Words alone had clearly failed, so she applied a consequence. She held out her hand. You know what he said next. “What?”

“Phone,” Mom said.

Kyle said he’d go and do the dishes right then. Parents, you cannot fall for these tricks, because that’s what they are—along with, “I was just about to” or protests that it’s unfair, and on and on. If you have genuinely taught with loving and words, as Suzanne had, it’s obvious that something else needs to be done.

Kyle began to whine, so Suzanne said, “I WAS going to take your phone for the rest of the evening, but you’re resisting being taught. That’s a real problem. It shows that you don’t want to learn to be responsible, so I’ll be keeping your phone today and all of tomorrow. Now you have a choice. You can HAPPILY, eagerly clean the kitchen, or I can remove the phone for much longer, and you’ll still have to clean the kitchen. Checkmate. Kyle cleaned the kitchen.

Before you impose a consequence on a child, you must understand the difference between a consequence and a punishment. The difference is not a matter of technique or the words that are spoken—the difference is motivation. The same action that is a consequence when imposed by a loving parent becomes a punishment when it comes from an angry and unloving parent.

Consequences are imposed:

• to teach a principle when words are ineffective.
• to make NOT doing the right thing inconvenient enough that the child WANTS to do the right thing
• with genuine concern for the happiness and growth of the child.
• with no impatience or anger or feeling of control.
• with no anger whatever.

Punishments are given:

• to make a child “pay” for what he’s done.
• to teach a child the “lesson” that he must not inconvenience his parents.
• for the sake of “justice.”
• with impatience.
• to make a parent feel powerful and “in control.”
• with some pleasure that the child is uncomfortable.
• with anger.
• with shaming.

In short, the difference between a consequence and a punishment is anger. The instant you’re angry, you’re not teaching with a consequence; you’re punishing your child, and the only thing he or she will hear from you is, “I don’t love you.” Any time we feel irritated with a child, we can only punish him and teach him that he’s unacceptable to us. He learns that his safety and happiness are far less important to us than our own convenience. He learns that he’s an object to be manipulated and controlled, and then he feels empty and afraid, and he responds with his own special recipe of Protecting Behaviors. Punishment might temporarily change a child’s behavior, but the overall effect is disastrous.

As parents we also must understand the purpose of consequences, which is to make the wrong choices sufficiently inconvenient to our children that they will want to make the right choices. The correct role of consequences is only to guide children toward long term, genuine happiness. Eventually, a child who is sufficiently loved and taught will make right choices simply because he wants to—because it makes him happier—and then he no longer needs the imposition of consequences. We can’t impose consequences on a child all his life.

Suzanne further explained that now Kyle didn’t ever have to hear her nag. She would simply hold out her hand for the phone, and he would know what to do. If he cooperated, the consequences would be small. If he resisted, they would increase. Simple.

Suzanne further explained that consequences are how LIFE teaches. “If I don’t show up at work,” she said, “they don’t nag me; no, they just don’t pay me. If I fail repeatedly, they fire me, and then life gets very difficult. I’m trying to save you from those heavy prices.”

Kyle said he didn’t like the plan much, but his mother asked again if he had a better idea for motivating him to do his job. He couldn’t think of one—other than a vague promise to do better, which never works—so the consequence was set. Suzanne made it clear that if Kyle chose to neglect his job, HE was choosing to lose his phone. It was up to him.

Choosing Consequences

You do NOT have to work out ahead of time every consequence for every infraction of a rule. If you try to do that, children become amateur lawyers and argue how everything is unfair. No, just tell them calmly—even sweetly—that if words don’t motivate, consequences will, and with no impatience whatever be consistent with applying them.

You DO need to formulate a list—written or in your head—of consequences that motivate each particular child. It has to be something—usually a restriction of a privilege—that is just inconvenient or unpleasant enough that the child will tend to happily choose to be loving and responsible over NOT. In short, you’re helping your children to choose, as Lehi described, liberty and eternal life, not captivity and death. This is not a punishment. It’s a blessing. These consequences are what God has imposed on us from the time of Adam, to motivate us to make better decisions.

When consequences are imposed, children will almost certainly express their displeasure, so then you remind them that they CHOSE the consequence when they broke the law, much like you choose to get a speeding ticket when you choose to break traffic laws. If they complain, the consequence increases, or you add another. There can be NO irritation on your part. If anything, you tell them you’d prefer NOT to impose consequences, but they were simply necessary.

You already know the things your children like and don’t like. You’ll come up with the consequences that work. I offer a few only to spark your own creativity.

• Removal of the phone.
• Missing a desired event, like basketball practice. The coach will usually understand, even possibly add another consequence of his own. He sees most of the same behaviors in your child that you do, and he’d love to help.
• Taking on the chores of another child for that day.
• Assignment of a job around the house that needs to be done, perhaps one that you would normally do.
• Removal of their bedroom door from its hinges. If a child has been clearly instructed not to use screens other than in a public area, but the child continues to use screens in their room, removing their door tends to remind them of the instruction.

The list is endless. You must be kind. You must be firm and unflinching in applying these. If they argue, the consequences increase.

In talking about consequences here, I am giving you a big key to parenting. The parents who fail with their children do not apply consistent consequences for violation of acceptable behavior standards because they are afraid of the disapproval of their children. This, of course, PROVES how much parents inappropriately NEED love from their children, and it puts the child in charge of raising himself—which is very dangerous.

Short-term imposed consequences are VERY effective. We’ve proven it everywhere in life:

• A police-issued ticket has proven to be more effective and far less painful than skidding on or off the road at 100 miles per hour, resulting in the death of the driver and who-knows-how-many other people. For years I worked in emergency rooms and personally saw the effect of a driver who had not experienced enough short-term imposed consequences to prevent exactly such a tragedy.
• Teachers give a low grade, or even failing grade, to a student not as a punishment but as a short-term imposed consequence—an evaluation in this case—to inform the student that improved study will be required to prevent the long-term consequences of failure in school or failure in career or failure in life in general.

God Himself has given us innumerable examples of consequences, like the boils and Babylon mentioned earlier in this chapter. Abinadi spoke to the people of king Noah and said, “Curses be to this generation! And the Lord said ... Because of their sins, this generation will be taken into bondage, and struck on the cheek, and driven by men, and killed; and the vultures of the air, and the dogs, and the wild beasts will eat their flesh. (Mosiah 2:12)

God is pretty serious about consequences. And again, WHY does God use consequences? Let’s look at what Alma said to Corianton: “I sense that there is another thing worrying you that you don't understand, about the justice of God in punishing the sinner. You want to believe that it's unfair that sinners would be assigned to a condition of misery.” (Alma 42:1)

Corianton was doing just what your children do. He was saying, “But that’s not fair!” (the whole justice thing)

So Alma explained (and I paraphrase without changing the meaning): “O my son, don’t deny the reasoning of God anymore. Don’t try to excuse your mistakes and object to His consequences. Instead see what God is trying to teach you. Feel God’s justice and mercy and patience in your heart, and let it bring you down to the dust in humility so you can learn and be saved.” (Alma 42:30)

Alma clearly states that God gives consequences:

• To teach us
• So we won’t excuse our mistakes
• So we’ll feel God’s justice and mercy and patience
• So we’ll be humbled to the point where we can learn and be saved.

What kind of consequences does God give us? Well, there are boils and Babylonian armies, but if we break the commandments:

• He may withdraw the Spirit, so we can know the darkness and yearn for the light.
• He may withdraw our ability to participate in the Church—through disciplinary councils, for example—again so we can feel the darkness and thirst for the light.
• He may give us a “stupor of thought” (D&C 9:9) so we will continue to search for the feeling of the Spirit confirming a choice.

BUT

Despite the obvious benefits of consequences in God’s plan, in the Church, at work, and in the laws of man, parents are still so very afraid that if they apply them to their children, their children will NOT LIKE THEM (the parents). This fear paralyzes most parents and makes effective parenting utterly impossible. I’m not exaggerating the effect of this fear. If you’re afraid of your children’s disapproval, your children OWN you, and you cannot be their parents. If you are afraid, you give up your job as a parent.

Recently I described consequences to a friend who said, “But I’ve heard that some children kill themselves when parents take away their phones.”

YES, that is true. That has happened on rare occasion. And what is not being highlighted is the FAR GREATER number of children who kill themselves precisely because their parents lacked the training and courage to REMOVE their phones long ago.

Children kill themselves for ONE reason. All their reactions to pain have been exhausted and have even made their lives more unhappy. Eventually they are caught in a tangle of emotional barbed wire from which there appears to be no escape but to leave the world. So they do. Suicide and suicidal thought are not a mystery. Addiction to screens and other protecting behaviors STRONGLY contribute to suicide. Removal of them is not to be feared.

Again, it is so in military training. Recruits are penalized for not keeping their weapon clean, or not cleaning it properly, or not finishing assembly in allotted time in the dark or the mud or under live fire. Why focus on such a silly thing?

Because it will SAVE HIS LIFE in battle. Short-term consequences are imposed to prevent long-term natural consequences, like DEATH.

And those who complain that a child might die because of a consequence fail to recognize:

• That the child was not sufficiently given unconditional love first.
• The child was not methodically and kindly taught many, many times first.
• That there were many other factors involved, other than simply removing a phone. The parents knew nothing about loving and teaching, for example.

In short, this belief that a child would kill himself BECAUSE of removing a phone are highly uninformed, with no understanding of the overall context.

God has never hesitated to impose consequences, and yet we believe we have come up with a better way to teach than God uses? Even if people DIE so that others might learn the lessons of eternity, God has always chosen to teach with consequences, however harsh they might seem.

God has sent fire from heaven, blackened the sun, shaken Laman and Lemuel with a power they had never imagined, destroyed entire civilizations, and more, all to get us to pay attention to—ironically—his loving patience, his mercy, and his burning desire to help us return to His presence. Sometimes we can be pretty dense, so he uses short-term imposed consequences to save us from our own long-term self-destruction. 

Consequences and Justice and Mercy

The Law of the Harvest is an eternal principle. God’s justice cannot be mocked, but by the power of the Atonement of Christ, through mercy we receive far more than we deserve, more than we could ever earn. But we have to satisfy the requirements for mercy too, which are so simple. We must be willing to follow Him. Mercy cannot rob justice.

As Alma said, “What, do ye suppose that mercy can rob justice? No, not a bit. If so, God would cease to be God.” (Alma 42:25)

YOU as a parent can’t allow mercy to rob justice either, because you’ll teach your children a principle that will lead them away from the path God has described. Oh, but at the expense of ignoring eternal law, we DO tend to dispense mercy in great buckets, while requiring responsibility, accountability, and justice FAR less. Result? We raise children who are entitled, selfish, angry, demanding, and controlling. And then we’re surprised that our children are like that.

As parents how do we do destroy justice with mercy? Just a few examples:

• A child gets to school and discovers that he’s left his homework on his bed. You take the homework to school. At this point, if I suggest anything other than that choice, nearly every parent on the planet whines—not kidding—saying, “But I’m just being helpful! I don’t want him to fail his class.” Yes, “I’m being helpful” is just what I thought the first time I helped a butterfly out of his chrysalis with a scalpel, to make it easier for him. I was careful and kind, so I did not immediately injure him, but I robbed the insect of the effort needed to struggle and pump the necessary body fluids out to the wings and make them functional. Unintentionally, by “helping him,” I crippled him, and he died. Or what if every time an athlete complained of being tired, the coach said, “Oh, take a break.” Or, “Why don’t I run those laps for you?” Kind and helpful? Maybe, but it eliminates the effort an athlete needs to become stronger. And when our kindness interferes with our child’s preparation for life—the subject of this entire chapter—we become enabling, and that produces a weak, entitled child.
• A child has agreed to be home by 9:30 pm on a school night, but she calls at 9:20, says she can’t get home in time, and begs for an extension to 10:00 pm. And you agree. Mercy just destroyed justice, and your child will do this—or something like it—again soon, and a pattern will be established.
• Your child says something unkind to his sister, she whines about it, and he says “I was just joking.” And you let it go. And the pattern of making excuses is established or further confirmed, and such a child will have a VERY difficult time in all aspects of life.

I could easily provide a thousand such examples where we rescue kids from the consequences of their behavior. So could you. When we rescue them, we not only fail to prepare them for life. We PREVENT their preparing for how life really works. Who will rescue their marriage from the predictable injuries of them being irresponsible? Who will rescue them from a baby who cries all night? Who will save them from their demanding boss? Nobody, and if we haven’t prepared our children, they will find themselves unprepared for a great many things.

Consequences must be immediate and consistent. If you apply a consequence with anything less than absolute consistency, your child will lose respect for your inconsistent rules and for you. Joseph Smith and the first elders of the Church declared, “We know that there is a God in heaven, who is infinite and eternal, from everlasting to everlasting the same unchangeable God ...” (D&C 20:17) How could we possibly have faith in a God who changed the rules and changed His mind from one moment to the next? Nor can we expect our children to respect and follow us if we are not consistent in what we say and do.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE JOY

When Lehi was having a moment of loving and teaching with his son Jacob (2 Nephi 2:25), he gave us one of those breathtakingly pithy summaries that can be invaluable if we remember them. He told us why we’re HERE on earth—why we’re alive—all of us, from the fall of Adam to the end of this world and eternally beyond. He said, “Man IS—the purpose of our existence—that he might have JOY.” He did not say, “Man is that he might be obedient.”

Does that mean that obedience isn’t important? Silly. But elevating obedience to the level of our reason to exist would be like saying that cars exist so that we can put gas in them, and change the oil. No, we maintain cars SO THAT they can fulfill their ultimate purpose of letting us move more quickly, safely, easily, and farther than would be possible by walking. Similarly, we obey the laws of God SO THAT we can live as our Father lives, as Christ lives—joyfully, fully, completely. And they live that way because they followed the same laws.

Obedience is a MEANS to achieve harmony with the laws of the universe and the ways of God.

Jesus and His disciples were once traveling through corn fields on the Sabbath. They were hungry and plucked ears of corn to eat as they went. He was criticized for breaking the Sabbath by some who kept the law as a rigid, visible proof that they were righteous. He—the Creator and Savior of this world—responded to the criticism, saying that “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” (Mark 2:23‑28) Jesus was also criticized for healing on the Sabbath. (John 5:4‑16) He understood the real purpose of the truth and law, while they did not.

Alma spoke of how we can plant a seed and grow a tree. (Alma 32) He described tilling, and weeding, and fertilizing, but those activities were NOT the goal of planting. The goal was nurturing a plant that would become a tree of life to us, a source of the love of God, which gives us happiness—according to Lehi (1 Nephi 8:10)—and is "the most joyous to the soul," (1 Nephi 11:23) according to Nephi.

Sometimes our children get the idea that they exist just to obey the commandments. Where would they get that idea? Possibly from our emphasis on the commandments, with all the “shoulds” and “should nots.” And why would we do that? Because teaching RULES is EASIER for us as parents than teaching love. If we teach love, we’d have to BE loving, and we find that FAR more difficult than simply reciting lists of commandments.

In ancient times, people were given—and they kept—the law of Moses for the same reason, because it was an easier set of rules than the higher law that would arrive with the Savior’s mortal ministry.

Abinadi talked about these people when he said, “It was necessary for a strict law to be given to the children of Israel because they were stubbornly proud, quick to sin, and slow to remember the Lord their God. So a law of performances and ordinances was given to them, a law they would keep strictly from day to day, to help them remember God and their duty toward Him. Did they understand the law of Moses? No.” (Mosiah 13:29)

Elder Holland echoed this lesser nature of a law emphasizing mostly obedience when he said, “Unfortunately, as a symbol of genuine repentance and faithful living, this ritualistic offering of unblemished little lambs didn’t work very well, as so much of the Old Testament reveals. The moral resolve that should have accompanied those sacrifices sometimes didn’t last long enough for the blood to dry upon the stones.” (Ensign May 2019)

And then Jesus began to teach in the flesh and said, “I give you a new commandment, That you love one another, just as I have loved you.” (John 13:34-5) He taught that the real joy is in the loving.

We want to teach our children this higher way of living. We do NOT want to turn them into objects that simply keep rules. We want them to get to the place that Nephi described in a prayer to the father: “O Lord, I will praise you forever. My soul will rejoice in you, my God and the rock of my salvation. O Lord, will you redeem my soul? Will you make me shake at the appearance of sin as my heart is broken and my spirit is humble? O Lord, will you wrap me in the robe of your righteousness!” (2 Nephi 4:30-33)

This really changes—and elevates—our perspective on obedience, doesn’t it? It’s a perspective that will greatly empower our children in a day—this day—where the distractions of the world can so easily overwhelm simple compliance with a list of laws. We have to acquire a hunger and thirst for righteousness that will enable us to rise above the “fiery darts of the adversary.” (1 Nephi 15:24)

So, with this perspective, why would we choose to be obedient to the commandments of God? Why would we “shake at even the appearance of sin?”

• Because when we sin we are so distracted by the ways of the world, and by our focus on our own safety—as we discussed in Chapter Two—that we can’t feel His love, which is "the most desirable above all things." (1 Nephi 11:22)
• Because when we sin, we can’t hear the voice of the Spirit, who will teach [us] things, and bring all things to [our] remembrance.” (John 14:26–27) We cannot tolerate the loss of His companionship, because—as Joseph Smith taught—He “will whisper peace and joy to [our] souls; [He] will take malice, hatred, strife and all evil from [our] hearts; and [our] whole desire will be to do good ... and build up the kingdom of God.” (Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 529)
• Because we can’t stand to be out of connection to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
• Because we cannot live disconnected from the Light of Christ, which fills the universe, and sin would cause that separation. The light of Christ “goes forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space.” (D&C 88:12, 6-7) It is the light “which is in all things, which giveth life to all things” (D&C 88:13). This light “is in all things [and] ... is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God ... who is in the midst of all things.” (D&C 88:13)

To sin is to separate us from all those things, from all that is good. To sin is to live as though we were dead. THAT is why we want to keep the commandments, and that is what we must teach our children. Until they feel THAT way about sin, they will be unprepared for the sneaky chains of sin, which will sprout from the ground everywhere, snake around their limbs, and carry them off to places they could not anticipate and will not like. (2 Nephi 28:21; 1:13)

We want them to enjoy the feeling king Lamoni’s household experienced, when “Ammon arose and ministered to them ... and they all told the people that their hearts had been changed, so they had no more desire to do evil.” (Alma 19:33)

We want them to have “their hearts knit together in unity and in love for each other,” as did the people of Alma at the waters of Mormon. (Mosiah 18:21) THOSE are conditions that last, that place their feet firmly on the Rock, so they don’t sway and fall like waves of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. (James 1:6)

When I was a boy, my grandmother would occasionally recite a poem to me from memory (author is unknown):

"I love you, Mother," said little John;

Then, forgetting his work, his cap went on.

And he was off to the garden swing,

And left her the water and wood to bring.

"I love you, Mother," said little Nell;

"I love you better than tongue can tell."

Then she teased and pouted full half the day,

Till her mother rejoiced when she went to play.

"I love you, Mother," said little Fan;

"To‑day I’ll help you all I can;

How glad I am school doesn't keep!"

So she rocked the baby till it fell asleep.

Then, stepping softly, she took the broom,

And swept the floor and tidied the room.

Busy and happy all day was she,

Helpful and happy as child could be.

"I love you, Mother," again they said,

Three little children going to bed.

How do you think that Mother guessed

Which of them really loved her best?

This poem is not about a child “loving” a parent, which in Chapter Five we proved they cannot do. It’s about the kind of love—respect, obedience, humility, and WILLINGNESS—we learn to offer our Heavenly Father.

In this dispensation, Christ said, “I require the open hearts and willing minds of the children of men.” (D&C 64:33-34) And yes, the Lord requires obedience but the kind that comes as a natural PRODUCT of willingness to submit and follow, not as superficial substitute for a willing heart, an eager obedience, and a joyful step as we follow Him.

Having fun can be confusing in the face of all the commandments to work, to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, to strive for perfection, to do missionary work, family history work, temple work, and so many other “shoulds,” as President Uchtdorf noted in Chapter Seven. But the Savior identified the most important of all of those commandments, which is love, which is the tree of life, which is light and joy.

The importance of remembering the joy in everything is highlighted by a vision Joseph Smith described, saying, “I saw the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb, who are now upon the earth, who hold the keys of this last ministry, in foreign lands, standing together in a circle, much fatigued, with their clothes tattered and feet swollen, with their eyes cast downward, and Jesus standing in their midst, and they did not behold Him. The Savior looked upon them and wept” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 107).

Oh, how we need to teach our children this principle, that we remember to look up, and enjoy what we’re doing, and see the Savior in our midst. And the best way to teach this to our children is for US to live that way ourselves.

Marta, a mother of two, spoke to me on a video call. The day before I had talked to her about her children, who were becoming increasingly difficult for her to love and teach. I took one look at her and said, “You look like you’re carrying a mountain on your head.”

“That’s how it feels,” she said.

“If you want to feel more loved yourself, and to share that with your husband and children, you WILL have to climb a mountain, emotionally and spiritually speaking, but right now you’re looking at the whole mountain and trying to carry it—on your head—and it’s crushing you. You don’t have to do that.” And I described some different perspectives, which means different judgments that can lead to different feelings and choices, as we described in Chapter Four.

We all have mountains to climb—learning and repentance that never stops—but the journey is accomplished one step at a time. And it’s not a matter of slogging our way up each step, barely enduring the experience.

The next day Marta wrote me: “I do have a big mountain to climb, but with a wave of my hand I can eliminate the mountain from my mind and simply look at the one step in front of me. I see rocks, flowers, and saplings, and a view that expands as I turn around. I don’t have to feel prodded, or pushed, or forced. I get to enjoy this step. I never understood that before. I get to take my time, savor the climb, enjoy it. This is not like my past at all. With each step I'm gradually changing an entire lifetime, and I’m not alone. I have the support of people who love me. And now I take the next step and watch the results of each step with wonder as I enjoy every rock and tree I encounter.”

We can’t effectively take the next step until we enjoy—and learn from—the step we’re on now. I suggest, in fact, that if we don’t enjoy the step we’re on—no matter how far down the mountain we think we are—what could motivate us to keep climbing? It is the love and joy we experience AS we climb that encourages the hope and magnifies the faith required to take the next step. No matter how difficult the step you’re on now, you can learn from it and be grateful for the experience. When you have achieved that condition, take the next step. Then enjoy, learn, and step again.

As you enjoy the process of faith and repentance, your children will see that. You’re the most powerful example of that process your children will ever see. Make it a good example. You may have noticed that I try to make learning all the principles of parenting fun, for you and for your children, and as we get more and more specific about problems to solve, I’ll continue with that attitude of making this fun to do.

TEACHING CHILDREN GRATITUDE

Everybody has a list of “most important” commandments or principles. For parents I’m going to suggest three that distill all the others into something memorable:

1. Love, without which children cannot learn, cannot develop, and cannot find “peace in this world and eternal life in the world to come” (D&C 59:23) We’ve talked about love a lot.
2. Faith in Jesus Christ. In Chapter Seven we talked about teaching our children this core, indispensable principle and power.
3. Gratitude.

Gratitude is a Higher Order of Living

I suggest that the condition of gratitude is not just commendable or useful. It’s a higher way of living that has the capacity to eliminate all the feelings and behaviors that distract us from the eternal life we seek.

Let’s look just at the Protecting Behaviors, which we established in Chapter Two as so destructive to our souls. If I were truly grateful for all I have, I would be filled to the brim and running over with gratitude and peace. With those feelings and that sense of wholeness, there is no pain that would create any NEED to obsessively seek praise or power or pleasure or safety. I would simply lose the need to lie, be angry, be critical, act like a victim, or withdraw—all responses to pain.

But grateful for what? I have heard innumerable children and adults emphatically declare that they have nothing to be grateful for, and they feel amply justified in their claims. We’ll get to all that—the astonishing array of blessings for which to be grateful—and how to teach that to our children, but for now it’s enough to say that in the presence of sufficient gratitude we lose the need to sin. Not kidding.

With sufficient gratitude, we lose our need for all the Common Behavior Problems, which are just the Protecting Behaviors manifest in obvious ways. If we were brimming with gratitude, why would we ever whine about anything, for example? Unthinkable, nor would there be any arguing, fighting, withdrawing, lack of responsibility, defiance, anxiety, depression, and addiction to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more.

What Is this Gratitude 

What is this Higher Order of Living?

Gratitude is NOT just an attitude. I understand why we would use the phrase “an attitude of gratitude,” but it can over-simplify and potentially trivialize this quality that changes our judgment about almost everything.

One disadvantage of seeing gratitude as an attitude is that we tend to believe that we can simply “change our attitude,” an instruction we have heard many times from those who have given us this well-meaning advice.

Simply “changing our attitude” is a terrible misconception and sets us up for almost certain disappointment. You can’t just choose a new attitude without preparation, anymore than you can choose to fly a plane without training.

We see gratitude as much more than an attitude when we realize that gratitude is both (1) a judgment (which is a result of old and new events or experiences) AND (2) a feeling, which follows the judgment. Remember the sequence of Event → Judgment → Feeling → Reaction?

Changing our judgment to increasing gratitude requires being loved (new events), learning new perspectives (new judgments), and practicing those judgments (more new events).

Gratitude is NOT a form of positive thinking. I can’t say that strongly enough. I have watched self-development teachers, therapists, and ministers tell thousands of people to adopt a “positive attitude” that includes gratitude. This advice does NOT work because if someone has not felt unconditionally loved, and they’re in pain, and they’ve been in pain all their lives, they CANNOT truthfully choose to suddenly change their view of the world by force of will.

Usually, such people can’t even imagine a loving and happy world, so eventually they regard “positive thinkers” simply as liars who don’t understand them. OR—just as importantly—they regard themselves as failures who just couldn’t do what was recommended to them. Positive lies are just as harmful as negative ones. All lies.

So what IS gratitude? It is an AWARENESS or KNOWLEDGE of what is TRUE, and a celebration of that knowledge. The knowledge of what we have changes every other judgment and subsequent feeling. Allow me to illustrate by reading and commenting on Psalm 23, which we’ve all heard many times and which I have come to understand much more powerfully only recently.

Psalm 23:1 (a) “The LORD is my shepherd.”

I used to read that and think, “What a sweet metaphor. Awww.” Now I read it and think, “You’ve got to be kidding. Look around at all the leaders of the little lambs in this world—parents, teachers, politicians, others. Which of those leaders would I want leading me out of the mists of darkness, away from death and toward eternal life? Not many. Mostly they’re pretty lost themselves—pick up a magazine and read about the leadership of the world, in any magazine, any newspaper, any day. Mostly I see little lambs panting and fainting in the desert with little hope of relief. But of all the shepherds I could have, I’ve been assigned to Jesus Christ, whose love and light fill the universe, give life to all creatures, and redeem me from the incalculable and seemingly endless foolishness of my mistakes. Really? I was assigned the Creator of the world as my shepherd?” If I remember that blessing alone, how could I ever be anything but grateful? Exactly what would I ever feel justified in complaining about? THAT is gratitude.

Psalm 23:1 (b) “I shall not want.”

Not only do I have right NOW all that I could possibly need, but I have all that I WILL ever need. (“I shall not lack or need,” the verse says.) This gets better and better.

The Game is Already Won

Permit me a brief aside here about how indescribably generous the Savior is with us.

Paul compared life to a race (1 Corinthians 9:24; Hebrews 12:1; 2 Timothy 4:7) and to a fight. (2 Timothy 4:7) Both are forms of a struggle or contest or serious game. Sometimes this race or struggle can seem like quite a burden, even an oppression. But revelation tells us that the battle has already been WON! Who would have thought it?

Christ has already suffered and died for us, in Gethsemane and on Calvary. The Atonement of Jesus Christ has already happened, has already been offered to us as a gift freely given. (Romans 5:15-18; 1 Corinthians 2:12)

Elder Holland said, “So much rests on our shoulders, but it WILL be a glorious and successful experience. ¼ The victory in this final contest has already been declared. The victory is already in the record books ¼” (CES address, Feb. 6, 2015, broadcasts.ChurchofJesusChrist.org)

And the game was already won even for those who lived before His birth here in this world.

Long before Jesus was born, Abinadi spoke of Christ’s coming in the past tense, “speaking of things to come as though they had already come ... " (Mosiah 16:6)

More than 700 years before Jesus was born, Isaiah said of Christ, speaking in the past tense, “He has taken upon him our pain and sorrow ... He was wounded and bruised for our sins ... his suffering gave us peace, and with his whipping we are healed ... He has taken upon him all our sins.” (Isaiah 53:4‑7; Mosiah 14:4‑7)

Where once we were lost, imprisoned, and even separated from God, now we are freed from prison and found. And now we are free to choose to participate in the “heavenly gift” (Hebrews 6:4) to the extent that we desire, as demonstrated by our choices and our willingness, which we discussed at length earlier in this chapter.

Paul taught the Romans that “ by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” (Romans 5:18)

The path to our acceptance of His freely offered gift is not complicated. To the wealthy man, Christ said, “Come, follow me.” (Luke 18:22) That’s it. He spoke even more succinctly—two words—when he said to Peter and Andrew: “Follow me.” (Matthew 4:19) While walking on the water, to Peter he said only one word: “Come.” Christ can be pretty brief. He wants us to know that this decision to accept the embrace of His mercy does not involve a library of legal volumes. And when we think He couldn’t make it even easier and simpler, He said one word to the people of Moses who were dying in the wilderness after being bitten by poisonous serpents: “Look.” (Numbers 21) Just look to Him and live.

I’m feeling pretty grateful right now. You? Do these principles give you a hope you can teach your children?

Back to the Nature of Gratitude

Now, after that long parenthetical thought, we return to Psalm 23.

:2 “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:”

He ALLOWS me to enjoy the riches of life.

“he leads me beside quiet waters.’

There are great floods and dangerous rivers all around me, where I could drown easily, but HE leads me beside waters that are not only safe but give life—living waters.

:3 “He restoreth my soul:”

He renews my strength when I am tired and weak. He is my nourishment, my intensive care unit, my rehabilitation facility.

“he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”

He guides me in righteous paths, fulfilling His purposes.

:4 “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,”

No matter how bad things get or seem to be, though “the very jaws of hell gape open” after me, (D&C 122:7) and I am surrounded by the ways of death,

“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

I will be afraid of nothing because you will support and protect me.

:5 “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”

Though I might be surrounded by danger, you will feed me and bless me. My cup—my ability to receive your love and blessings—is filled to overflowing gratitude.

:6 “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”

Pretty clear. No explanation needed.

That entire psalm is about gratitude. For everything—EVERYTHING, not just what I want in the moment, but everything. Note that just in this psalm we are grateful for:

• Him as a shepherd but also for everything that goes with Him. His guidance, His love, His Atonement wouldn’t be required if this life didn’t also include the confusion of the dark, twisting paths, rocky inclines, and wolves lurking at the edges of the flock. In our premortal life we AGREED to come to this earth knowing that it would be difficult. But we did express some measure of gratitude that we would be given an opportunity to become like our Father, which unavoidably included every difficulty of this life. Come to think of it, the prophet Job said that all of us actually “sang together ... and shouted for joy” (Job 38:7) at the announcement of God’s plan and our coming here. And now we’re learning to be grateful for all of this life. We cannot meaningfully express gratitude for The Shepherd without also being grateful for the circumstances that require our HAVING a shepherd.
• We are grateful for the green pastures, which revive us from the barren lands choked with thorns, thistles, or nothing at all. We recognize that there must be “opposition in all things,” and we are grateful for all of it. As we said in Chapter Seven, we are grateful to have faith that leads to healing and faith in the plan of the Lord when healing is not His plan.
• We are grateful for quiet waters, as well as for the floods and raging currents that require our following the Shepherd.
• We are grateful that He “restores our souls,” which healing accompanies the times that exhaust and weaken us. And we agreed to those difficult experiences. If we are not grateful for all of it, we are left to begrudgingly endure the difficult times and impatiently wait to be rescued. That is not the life of a child of God.

Understandably, we all want growth without difficulty, we want strength without exercise, learning without struggle, wisdom without failing, faith without obstacles and fear. But these desires—these “wishes”—are impossible. Learning, growth, wisdom, faith, love, and repentance REQUIRE opposition, struggle, fear, hatred, failure, and the very “jaws of hell.” And we can learn to teach our children not to reluctantly “suffer” through these difficulties but instead to embrace them and THROUGH THEM—and with the rod and staff of the Shepherd—learn the qualities that will make us His children and then become shepherds in His service.

I am not being naive or artificially cheery here. Being grateful for our struggles does not mean we must always enjoy them. I operated on people for 20 years, and in the process I caused them pain. They didn’t enjoy the pain, but they were GRATEFUL that I had temporarily hurt them on the road to healing. Should we not feel similarly with God, who emotionally, physically, and spiritually operates on us so we may be healed? God is far more interested in our education than our comfort. We agreed to come here to learn, not to be swaddled and fed with a bottle, and the same is true for our children.

It is one of the greatest accomplishments of a human being to be grateful for the education, which inevitably includes the discomfort. True joy comes from being grateful for the entire experience, grateful for what we learn from the pain, grateful for the faith we learn from the uncertainty and fear.

I repeat, we need to be grateful for EVERYTHING. We voted to come here. Now we’re here, and we’re in the midst of a gloriously beautiful world, where we have so many opportunities to choose eternal life. And some of the choices are straight up a mountain where we can’t imagine finding our way. Sometimes we fall and bleed, but we CHOSE this, and we GOT it—even the hard stuff.

And with the hard stuff, we got so much beauty, so much mercy, so many blessings as a result of those who have gone before us. Sometimes as I simply drive down the road, I feel the hum of the tires on the pavement, and I feel so grateful for the thousands of people who blazed trails through the wilderness two hundred years ago or more, who buried their children along the way, who got sick without medication, who lived and died desperate and alone—or possibly with the name of God on their lips and a song in their heart. So many people—and the blessings of God and inspiration of the Spirit—to make it possible for me to be in this time and place, driving on this road, to minister to this brother or sister—or simply to relax and take my sweetheart out for a meal she doesn’t have to prepare, eating food produced, distributed, and prepared by people from all over the world, with technology designed and created by yet others, all united by the light of Christ.

When we’re grateful, we tell the truth about ALL the blessings we enjoy—most of which we’re not consciously aware of. We value what we already have. Gratitude produces real joy, which is the happiness that endures and doesn’t depend on what is happening right now.

Grateful people are happy. Their joy is not stripped from them by inconvenience and injustice. I read a comic strip some time ago, where a pig, a goat, and a mouse were talking together—they often do.

The goat said: What does it take for you to be happy?

The mouse: I need every single thing in my life to be going perfectly.

The pig: I need one slice of pizza left in the box.

The goat: Pig may have an easier time.

Pig: Two slices, and I weep with joy.

That’s gratitude.

In gratitude we LIVE. We inhale the joy of life. A lack of gratitude—whining, complaining, controlling, anger, feeling like victims, withdrawing, seeking praise and power, and using any of endless list of addictions—is like sleeping through life and all its joys. It’s like sleeping in the rain when shelter is available. He calls to us as a hen gathers her chicks (Matthew 23:37), and it is with gratitude that we find shelter under His wings.

Gratitude yields a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of all the sadness, pain, and injustice of life.

How Do We Acquire Gratitude

How do we find this lifegiving gratitude? I can demonstrate it in a brief diagram, and then we’ll talk about what it means and discuss examples of implementing it:

Blessings

↓

Awareness

↓

Feeling

↓

Choice

First, blessings are given to us.

Then we learn to become AWARE of them. This step is hugely important—because it changes everything in our lives—and is unfamiliar because we are not accustomed to either the specific or greater view of all that we have.

When we become truly aware of our blessings, we FEEL like a different person, and those new and exalting feelings profoundly influence the choices we make.

Blessings

First, the blessings we are given. We are SHOWERED with blessings, all day, every day. Of this there is no doubt, even though from moment to moment we are relatively or completely unaware of them. We’ll get specific about them in a moment.

Awareness

If it’s raining, and I’m four stories underground in a large building, in effect—for me—it is not raining. If you leave a gift outside my door, but I’m locked inside and not answering the door bell or my phone, in effect I have no gift.

With a great many things, our awareness is required before that thing has any effect on us. Our awareness is required before that thing even exists. And this is nowhere more obvious than with the blessings that surround us.

Shortly we’ll be discussing a real-life example of teaching awareness and gratitude to a child, but for now let’s increase our own awareness as adults and parents.

Martin called me and said, “I didn’t get the promotion.” His tone was filled with disappointment, dejection, and even bitterness. “I need help dealing with this,” he added.

“You sound pretty miserable,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” he said, with a tone that clearly communicated that I must be a bit stupid to make such an obvious assessment.

Continuing my course of looking stupid, I asked, “What are you unhappy about?”

Using a tone that conveyed his confusion about my lack of understanding, he talked about how qualified he was for the promotion, how hard he’d worked, how the person promoted was far less deserving, how unseen and unfair forces must have been involved, and on and on.

Martin had asked for my help, so I continued: “Did you shower this morning?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You said you wanted help dealing with this. Are you willing to stay with me for a minute?”

“Sure,” he said, in a tone that communicated, “No, not really.” 

This might begin to sound like some of the conversations you’ve had with your children. On average, people everywhere complain many times a day about something that didn’t go their way. You might consider how my communication with Martin could influence your conversations with your children.

“Okay,” I said to him, “back to the shower. Did you have one this morning?”

“Yes.”

“As you showered did you think about how miraculous it is that water from more than a hundred miles away was transported by pipe to a water tower near you? Then pumped up to the reservoir to give you some water pressure? Did you consider that the pump used electricity generated another hundred miles away by burning fossil fuels laid down at least 250 million years ago? Did you think about the thousands of people involved in inventing, building, and maintaining all those processes? Did you think about the 30% of the world’s population that doesn’t even have clean drinking water? Think about any of that?” (The TONE used here is very important. It can’t be challenging. The questions are gentle and genuine.)

“Uh, no.”

“Did you drive to work this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have to walk? Or harness a wagon? Or saddle a horse?”

“No.”

“Did you think of all the people and time and processes involved in making it possible for you to drive a car?”

“No.”

Then I talked to him about the free gift of the Atonement, which I talked about earlier in this chapter, and about how we’ve already “won the eternal game,” so to speak. We have the victory as a gift, and now it’s all about how much of that gift we’re willing to accept and enjoy. (Those last two verbs are code for gratitude).

There was a long pause on his end before Martin said, “Now I feel pretty ungrateful and stupid.”

“Yes, I would think so,” I agreed. “But only for a minute. That’s what learning is for, to get over ungrateful and stupid.” I’m pretty sure I could hear him smiling.

We can all learn from this conversation with Martin. I did and still do.

Gratitude involves an awareness of—and telling the truth about—EVERYTHING we have, not just a focus on one particular thing we did or did not get. If I’m grateful in the moment I receive a large check in the mail, so what? Who can’t manage gratitude under such conditions? No, true gratitude results from an awareness of the whole picture around me. Admittedly, we couldn’t possibly know everything we’re benefitting from, but that’s where learning and repentance come in. We can LEARN to see more, be aware more, and therefore greatly increase our gratitude.

We need to back up from our focus on one tiny disappointment or inconvenience and see the landscape. Nearly every day I work outside managing a small forest, where I shovel gravel onto paths, eliminate poison ivy, prune errant or dead branches, plug leaks in a dam, fill in sinkholes, or whatever.

Every time I’m doing that work—often muddy, difficult, and exhausting—I could so easily focus on the inconveniences, the scrapes, the falls, the mud in my face, the never-ending “fixing” of things. But with practice now I simultaneously focus on repairing or building a thing, and also step back and shake my head at the overall beauty of all of it—from the landscape view to even the intriguing structure of a single flower or pinecone.

Sure, sometimes I get distracted by tripping over a root and falling down, and then I lose the joy of what I’m doing, but overall I find the simplest tasks a miracle. As I wrote the outline of the words I’m speaking right now, I was sitting next to a warm, bright campfire in the woods, listening to a chorus of dozens of birds and the sounds of a waterfall and flowing river. I was grateful both for the chorus of song and for the capacity to do all the work that made that moment possible. That is gratitude, a quality I am attending to more every day. It’s a process of increasing awareness that never ends.

Grateful is the opposite of myopic—meaning short-sighted—a word used by President Nelson, which we talked about in the last chapter and in Chapter Four. (Ensign Nov 2020)

One day I gained a new perspective of gratitude when I reflected on the concept of injustice or unfairness, a subject that most people complain about nearly every day. It occurred to me that we always, always complain about unfairness in terms of how we didn’t GET enough, or we were INCONVENIENCED or slighted or injured more than we “should” have been. But when do we ever notice, even a little, that we RECEIVE more than we earn? Is that not a form of unfairness, but in our FAVOR? Of course, but we don’t talk about that.

King Benjamin understood the “unfairness” of our blessings when he said, me paraphrasing, “If you gave thanks with your whole soul and served that God who has created you, and preserves you and gives you breath and supports you from one moment to another, so you can make your own choices to live in peace and rejoice, you would still be grossly overpaid servants.” (Mosiah 2:20-21)

I could never, never earn the resurrection, redemption, cleansing, healing balm, peace, joy in this world, and eternal life that Jesus Christ has already earned FOR me and offers me. His Atonement is the ultimate example of “unfairness” in my favor. Again from the hymn mentioned in Chapter Seven:

“I stand all amazed at the love Jesus offers me,

Confused at the grace that so fully he proffers me.”

I didn’t earn that sacrifice or those indescribable gifts, but He still offers them to me—even when I’m far less than deserving or grateful. When I remember that alone—with its immediate and eternal effects—there is nothing left to complain about. Nothing. Living in that perspective and gratitude, nothing is unfair anymore. In light of that overall picture, there is no injustice in my life. I’ve have been “unfairly” blessed beyond measure. All that remains is gratitude and awe and joy.

Back to

Blessings → Awareness → Feeling → Choice

In the beginning, understanding this flow of conditions and choices is difficult because we’ve become accustomed to not consciously choosing gratitude. But just now we experienced some examples of increased awareness of our blessings—from God and from others—and we can choose to increase our own awareness. We can choose to focus on what is true all day, as David did in Psalm 23.

As we choose to increase our AWARENESS of what is TRUE—which is overwhelmingly good regardless of our immediate circumstances—we allow the Spirit to change our feelings. Again, Event ® Judgment ® Feeling ® Reaction. Then we KEEP DECIDING to be aware and choose, rather than mindlessly and ungratefully reacting to any particular event in the present.

We can remember the whole picture. Years ago I was working in an emergency room somewhere, and at 1:00 am two anxious parents brought in their daughter, maybe 9 or 10 years old, who was unable to sleep because of a persistent and recent cough. I did all the appropriate things—history, examination, testing—and the only reasonable diagnosis was some kind of upper respiratory infection. I prescribed rest, fluids, and time.

But two hours later I was awakened to find the same girl lying on a hospital bed. Just as I entered the room, she gasped and quit breathing. Quickly I inserted a breathing tube into the passage to her lungs, passing it through vocal cords and surrounding tissues that were so inflamed and swollen as to be barely recognizable anatomically. We loaded her into an ambulance and shipped her off to the large university teaching hospital an hour away. I was grateful that the parents got her there quickly, that the emergency room was properly equipped, and that I had been adequately trained and had the experience to perform that procedure.

The next day I received a call from her attending physician. He said, “That girl should have died. She had more swelling in that area than I have ever seen, and I cannot imagine how you got a tube through an opening that did not exist.” And that’s when my awareness expanded, as I realized through the Spirit that by myself I had NOT successfully performed that procedure. The more we see the whole picture, the more grateful we get.

I once met a Jewish man who had been interned in a concentration camp in World War 2. He lost his parents, brothers, sister, and entire extended family. He was the sole survivor, and he said, “I’m grateful for all that.”

I was a bit surprised to hear those words and asked him to explain. He said, “It was through that experience that I learned what loving people really meant.” I’m still humbled to have heard those words from his lips. He saw the whole experience as a blessing—losing his home, being imprisoned in filthy conditions, sickness, pain, and death. He understood that his learning and his loving were more important than he or his family simply surviving. I wonder if we all could learn from that and teach it to our children. God really is more focused on our education than on our comfort.

Notice how similar Blessings → Awareness → Feeling → Choice

is to

Event → Judgment → Feeling → Reaction

Each thing leads to and contributes to the other, which in turn contributes to the others.

Blessings, like Events, just happen. Sometimes we justly earn a positive consequence, but most of our blessings are unearned, unrecognized gifts.

But blessings alone don’t change us. Laman and Lemuel were blessed with the voice of the Spirit, but they were “past feeling.” (1 Nephi 17:45) They were saved from the Babylonians, led to a promised land, saved from drowning in the depths of the sea, visited by an angel, and far more. But they skipped the next step in this process:

Blessings → Awareness → Feeling → Choice

They chose to focus on the inconveniences of the moment rather than the overall picture of rich blessings. We have all done that from time to time. We can learn to be wiser and teach our children the same.

Once we are aware of our blessings, we can feel the joy of being a protected, beloved child of God, supported from one moment to another. And with that joy, our decisions naturally change from selfishness and protection to loving and serving. We move from choosing captivity and death to choosing liberty and eternal life. (2 Nephi 2:27)

Recall Billy from Chapter One, where his mother taught him that simply stopping his whining was not the point. She persisted until he had completely changed his whining attitude to grateful, even though she didn’t use the word “grateful.”

How we lose gratitude

Very often we recognize blessings in the moment they arrive. Laman and Lemuel rejoiced when the storm threatening their lives stopped. They were grateful when Nephi made a bow and killed food when they were approaching starvation. But then we lose the awareness and the feeling. How does that happen? Let me suggest two ways, without implying that there are only two:

First, rather than allowing our cup to “runneth over” (Psalm 23), we keep making the cup bigger. We spoke extensively in chapter Seven about the horrifying consequences of expectations, and this is yet another of those consequences. The more we expect, the larger we make the cup, to the point where it can never be filled, much less overflow with gratitude.

How do we make our cup bigger?

• We pay attention to an onslaught of advertising that can only be described as overwhelming, to a point that was unthinkable only a few years ago. If we are connected to the Internet, we hear dozens of times every day that we NEED this thing and that thing, as well as a new version of what we already have. How could we live without these things? And then, unless we are very aware, we are swept away by our expectations of getting those things, which turn into internal insistent demands for those things. Our cup expands into a bathtub that never fills.
• We participate in social media, where we see people openly display—to the point of boasting—everything they have: physical appearance, friends, vacations, and toys of every kind. Unless we are very aware of the overall picture of this life, envy springs up like an unbidden weed, requiring very little nourishment. We WANT what we see other people have, and that expands our cup.
• We compare what we have—and who we believe we are—to the outward images that others have polished to perfection to gain our approval. Our reality suffers by this comparison, and again our cup enlarges.

Eventually, our cup becomes the size of a dry lake, incapable of filling, and we can’t even remember the last time we were grateful. Expectations KILL gratitude. With expectations, the best you can feel is, “Well, okay then” when you get exactly what you wanted.

A second way we lose our gratitude, or fail to even reach that condition: We drill holes in our cup. As we compare ourselves to others and to our own notion of perfection, our dissatisfaction and yearning and shame drill holes in a cup that might possibly have filled to the point of gratitude but now cannot. We also drill holes in our cup with fear, protecting behaviors, and sin. And while we are mired in selfishness, guilt, and shame, we cannot feel gratitude either.

How We Fail to Teach Gratitude to Our Children

Our first mistake in teaching our children gratitude is to force them to be “grateful,” which we discussed earlier in this chapter when we talked about expectations. When we give them something and then follow that up with “Now what do you say?” we are pressuring them to express a pseudo-gratitude, which in reality is guilt or obligation. That does NOT have the positive effect we anticipate. They DO need to learn gratitude so they can be happier, but forcing them is not the way to accomplish that.

Second mistake: we don’t teach them to be grateful FOR what they receive, which is the only approach that contributes to joy. Instead, we require them to be grateful TO US. The difference between these two perspectives is enormous.

When children are grateful FOR what they have, they’re more aware of the gifts they receive and the joy in their lives. That kind of gratitude magnifies the enjoyment of every experience and enables children to feel more loved, hopeful, and happy.

But we tend to selfishly require children to thank US for what we give them, because then we tend to feel gracious, generous, and important. We expect their gratitude and receive it as a form of praise. We like that feeling, and we manipulate them for even more of it. We prove that our motivation for encouraging their gratitude is selfish every time we become disappointed on the occasions when they’re NOT grateful. The things we give them are therefore not real gifts much of the time. We’re actually buying their gratitude and trying to make them feel obligated to us. Our expectations show that our primary concern is for our happiness, not theirs, which places a great burden on our children and isolates them from us.

How We Confuse Our Children about Gratitude

We’ve talked about two ways that we teach our children an incorrect form of what we call gratitude but which is really obligation and guilt. Let’s look at two other ways where we confuse our children about the true nature of gratitude.

First, we choke gratitude out of their lives with too much indulgence, much like weeds choke out the flowers in a garden. When we don’t know how to love our children unconditionally, it’s only natural that we give them moments of pleasure and control and superficial freedom, which are easily confused with genuine happiness. And then they pursue more of that instead of what they need. We confuse making them “feel better” with guiding them along the path of love and joy. Oh, that’s a very easy and seductive confusion.

For example, a child plaintively tells you she NEEDS a new phone. The look on that face is so undeniable needy and insistent. How could we resist? She NEEDS, and we’re also aware from past experience that if we refuse, her facial expression is very likely to change to one we dread: that mixture of disappointment, pain, disapproval, and even disgust that loudly communicates “I don’t love you,” as well as “You don’t love me.” We hate that, and our children know we hate it, so unconsciously they use it to manipulate us.

We please them and buy their approval and pacify them in so many ways: we excuse them from responsibility, we let them do what they want rather than what would benefit them, we buy them things, we allow them to associate with people we know would affect them negatively. And as they consistently get what they WANT, it’s only natural that they assume that this is how life should be. They feel ENTITLED to get what they want, and that is the kiss of death for a kid. Once children feel entitled to get what they want, the cycle of expectations, demands, disappointment, and anger becomes endless. And the possibility of happiness and fulfillment is over.

A child who feels entitled—uniformly as a result of being spoiled by over-fulfillment of desires and a failure to teach responsibility and needs vs wants—becomes crippled by expectations. Such a child cannot feel grateful. He can only feel temporarily and superficially satisfied by immediate gratification, which is an entirely different experience from gratitude and joy. Entitlement is a dangerous condition, as Elder Holland confirmed when he said, “in our modern world many have come to believe that the highest good in life is to avoid all suffering, that no one should ever anguish over anything. But that belief will never lead us to ‘the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’” (Ensign Nov 2020)

A second way we confuse our children about gratitude: we don’t live gratefully ourselves, and they follow that example. Oh, we might talk about gratitude in testimony meeting, but most of us live in ways not compatible with our verbal claims:

• We complain. A lot. We complain about the weather, traffic, other drivers, people in the service industry being slow, our children, our bosses, and more. Our children hear every complaint and accept complaining as normal, even commendable.
• We handle disappointment poorly. When we don’t get what we want—enough, timely, and courteously—we liberally express our disappointment. Most notable is the disappointment and irritation we express at our children. They’re hurt by our disappointment, but they also accept and adopt our pattern of using disappointment as they respond to other people and the world around them.
• We don’t express gratitude with our every breath. If we truly paid attention to the magnitude of everything we had—a subject we discussed not long ago in this section—we’d communicate our gratitude many, many times a day:

The bottom line is that (1) we set examples of ingratitude, and then (2) we don’t teach them gratitude, and then (3) we enable them to the point where expectations replace gratitude.

Teaching Gratitude

So, how DO we teach our children gratitude?

First, we set an example by regularly expressing gratitude in the ways I just discussed. Our example is more powerful to a child than almost anything else. St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.” Children need our actions far more than our words.

Second, teach them to work. Children who work understand the time, effort, and resources required to accomplish a task or to earn an object. Children who do not work couldn’t possibly have such an understanding. Instead they almost unavoidably—in their defense—are led to believe that privileges, opportunities, goods, and freedoms appear magically, often in response to whining, demanding, and expressions of disappointment and anger.

We can teach children to work as we assign them household chores and learning opportunities instead of  “letting them out to pasture” in a virtual world of games and social media, where we hope that their lives will somehow turn out all right. We’ll talk more later about the assignment of household chores.

Third, we can directly teach children the principle of gratitude. Let’s illustrate how to do this with one practical example:

With a tone of insistence, Lisa said to her mother, “I need a new phone.”

“Tell me about it,” Mom said. Note that Mom is not arguing with Lisa. She’s LISTENING. She continued: “Tell me if I’ve missed something: The new phone is faster, has a better camera, and has lots of features that would make social media and the Internet easier. Yes?”

“Yes,” Lisa said, surprised that Mom was making this so easy.

“And it’s cool,” Mom said.

“Yes.”

“Those all sound like fascinating and positive features. Now, slow up and think about the answer to this question: Do you NEED those new features? Do you NEED them in the way you need food, education, shelter, clothing? Or do you WANT the new phone, in the way you would like ice cream for dessert or another pair of shoes to match a new outfit?”

Lisa argued how she badly needed the phone, completely ignoring what Mom had said.

“It starts with this,” Mom said. “You don’t appreciate what you DO have, so of course you constantly want more. That’s my fault, not yours, that I didn’t teach you gratitude.” 

Mom gently held out her hand, palm up.

With a defiant tone, Lisa said, “What?” as in “What in the world do you mean by that?”

“Let me see your phone,” Mom said.

“Why?”

Mom continued to hold out her hand with an expression indicating no irritation but communicating a firm resolve.

Reluctantly, Lisa slowly placed her phone in Mom’s hand.

Mom said, “We’re going to learn some lessons together. Right now the learning is what matters most. So lay aside the idea of having a phone at all. It will distract you from what we’re going to learn here.”

Lisa felt like she was being led in a direction she did not want to go. “When do I get my phone back?”

“For now,” Mom said, “think of it as MY phone, so you don’t have to worry about it. It’s a privilege, not a right. If you want the privilege back, you need to learn more about gratitude. Otherwise, you’ll just go from one expectation and demand to the other, and you won’t be happy no matter what you get.”

Lisa huffed and said, “How long is this ‘lesson’ going to take?”

“Depends on you. It’s not about how LONG this will take. It’s about how willing you are to learn.”

Not the answer Lisa was looking for. She considered living without her phone as a form of torture, so she didn’t like not knowing when that torture would end. But she could also sense that Mom wasn’t playing a game, so she said, “Okay, so what do I have to do?”

“Wrong question. It’s not about what you HAVE to do. It’s about what you GET to learn. If you feel like you HAVE to do this, you won’t be willing, and it’s willingness and gratitude that you’ll be learning. If you fight it, it could take a long time. Up to you.”

Mom gave Lisa some assignments in sequence. She was told to research and report on:

• The history of the phone, including many of the related inventions, along with what it took to produce all that.
• Wireless communication, beginning with the invention of the radio
• Electricity transmission, beginning with Tesla and Edison
• Power generation, from today’s power plants back to how fossil fuels were created—or nuclear elements (her choice)

In the beginning, Lisa whined a bit, and Mom said she could choose (1) to do the assignments willingly or (2) complain, after which Mom would just add more assignments. Several months of research were required, and most important was Mom’s attitude. Mom was never irritated or impatient, never punitive, and always eager to learn what Lisa was discovering.

Lisa learned:

• How plankton and plants were compressed and transformed
• How fossil fuels are converted to heat and from there to electricity
• How electricity was generated, and how a critical decision was made between the transmission of it by direct current versus alternating current

And much more.

They met every few days to discuss what Lisa was learning. Over and over, Mom asked questions like these:

• How did X or Y happen?
• How many people were involved?
• How many people gave their lives to do that (mine coal, build power lines)?
• Had you ever thought to be grateful that we benefit from the lives and labors and creativity of all those people?

Then they talked about what efforts and resources her parents had expended in order to put a single phone in Lisa’s hand:

• $ per month for mortgage payments to provide a home
• $ per month for heat, air conditioning, water, sewage
• $ per month for food, transportation
• $ per month for medical, home, car, and life insurance 
• $ per month for entertainment and other privileges: phone, wi-fi, tennis lessons, streaming subscriptions
• $ for so many other things
• The years of study and work and sacrifice required to earn all those dollars

Mom assigned Lisa to do research in talks, books, and scriptures to learn about the Atonement of Jesus Christ, emphasizing some of the principles earlier in this section, where we talked about the atonement being an unfathomable gift whereby we have already “won the game,” so to speak, leaving us only to accept the victory by declaring with our choices a willingness to follow Him. Her conversation was similar to the one I had with Martin earlier in this section.

Mom talked to Lisa about how much the Savior had done for her without her earning it in any way—a free gift.

Then Mom asked, “Do I love you?”

“Uh, yes,” Lisa said. There was some hesitancy in her voice.

“Prove it,” Mom said.

“Prove what?”

“Give me evidence that I love you.”

Lisa gradually began to describe evidences of her mother’s love:

• Mom spent a great deal of time with Lisa that could only be for Lisa’s benefit.
• Mom forgave uncounted incidents of Lisa being irresponsible or disrespectful.
• Mom provided a safe and loving home.
• And more

And they talked about the innumerable hours of work and preparation required from both parents to provide the home in which Lisa lived. Mom successfully avoided communicating any snotty attitude of obligation—nothing remotely like, “Look at all we’ve done for you, so why can’t you be more grateful and less entitled?” Nothing like that.

Gradually, Lisa began to feel her mother’s LOVE. THAT was the point.

She also learned responsibility as she (1) fulfilled her assignments and (2) learned about countless men and women who had made her comfortable life possible.

Again, it was Mom’s love that made the difference:

• Her insistence on learning
• Her kindness during the times Lisa was resistant and angry

During this experience, Mom also held Lisa consistently accountable for her homework, her chores at home, and her duties at church.

Eventually, Mom could see that Lisa’s attitude had changed. She became willing to learn, humble, and ... yes, grateful. Mom returned Lisa’s phone to her, and, remarkably, Lisa didn’t bring up getting a new phone again. She had learned to be grateful.

Short Version

It would be impossible to go through a process anything like the exhaustive one we just illustrated for every lesson that needed to be learned. After Mom had taught Lisa gratitude to the point where she generally felt genuinely grateful, there were, of course, occasional times when Lisa forgot her gratitude and instead became demanding or snippy.

One day, for example, Lisa needed Mom to take her to a tennis match, and Mom was late getting out to the car. Lisa became increasingly impatient and finally returned to the house, where she said, “Well? Are you coming?”

Mom sat on a chair, looked calmly at Lisa, and said, “Would you like to try saying that in a different way? Up to you.”

“What do you mean?” Lisa said, hoping she wouldn’t have to admit her selfish attitude.

Mom looked at Lisa patiently and with no facial expression. Lisa knew what Mom was saying without words, but still she said, “Can we go now?”

“Not yet,” Mom said. “There’s a lesson to be learned here, and we’ll stay here until you get it.” Complete calm.

“I’m going to be late,” Lisa said.

“Yes, probably.” Still no look of disapproval from Mom.

“When are we going?”

“When you’ve learned the lesson, which is WAY more important than you making it to a match on time.”

Lisa realized she was not going to get out of this lesson, so she sat and closed her eyes. Finally, she said, “I was being demanding.”

“Yes, you were.” Still no tone.

“I was not being grateful.”

“True.”

“And I can’t be happy if I’m not grateful.”

This time Lisa’s tone matched her words, so Mom said, “Sounds like you’re ready to go.”

THAT is loving and teaching, which we’ve been talking about for eight chapters and many hours now. THAT is what you want to be doing with your children. It will save their emotional and spiritual lives. It’s worth it.

DEFINITIONS

We live in a world where evil is accelerating, and Satan has been working on it for a long time. He’s very good at what he does, and he uses one particular tool that is exceptionally clever and efficient. It’s clever because this tool is used EVERYWHERE, and we’re not seeing it. It’s efficient because with so little effort the negative yield is enormous. We’re blind to a sneaky deception that is destroying us.

The tool is called “Changing Definitions.”  Satan and his followers have meticulously changed the definitions of some very important words, which changes everything. If you change the definition of a single word, everything that involves the use of that word will be confusing or WRONG.

Like what words?

Love 

Paul and Mormon each defined what real love is: the pure love of Christ, which you are now quite familiar with.

What has the world—carefully guided by the father of lies—done with this word? DESTROYED it. They’ve not only diluted its power but have twisted it so that the word actually harms people. How?

• If two people become emotionally drunk on the exchange of physical attraction, power, praise, and pleasure, they have been taught by EVERYONE—their families, friends, movies, social media—that they are “in LOVE.” So they believe it. And then they’re doomed. They form a relationship based on this imitation of real love, hoping for the promised happiness that follows, but it uniformly transforms into pain, disappointment, expectations, demands, addiction, and emotional disaster that involves them, their partners, their children, and more.
• If someone really, really likes chocolate, they say they “love” chocolate. So what do our children learn? A definition of “love” that utterly confuses them when it comes to their relationships with us, future partners, and even God.
• If we really like what someone gives us, we say we “love” them. Our confusion and distraction deepen every time we use this life-giving word in ways that dilute or distort the primary meaning.

If people believe a distorted definition of the word “love,” how will they ever feel the pure love of Christ from the Savior or from other people? How will they ever know the sweet fulfillment and assurance that nurtures their faith and actions? They won’t.

Happy

Other than “love,” few words have lost more of their true meaning than “happy.” Overwhelmingly, now when people say “I am happy,” what they mean is this:

• “I am currently not threatened with danger or crisis.”
• “I just ate a good meal, and I don’t anticipate starving in the near future.”
• “I’m getting paid well for a job that’s not too demanding or stressful.”
• “I’m surviving in my marriage but have no idea what genuine happiness even is.”
• “I physically take care of my children, but I don’t look too closely at their pain or protecting behaviors, because I wouldn’t know what to do with that information.”

When I ask people if they’re happy, only on rare occasions do they show any hint of understanding the meaning of my question. They have come to define happiness as survival and the avoidance of pain. With that definition, they have no reason to pursue genuine happiness because they believe they already have it.

Laman and Lemuel nicely captured the world’s misconception of happiness when they angrily said to Nephi, “These many years we have suffered in the wilderness, when we could have enjoyed our possessions and our home in Jerusalem. We could have been happy.” (1 Nephi 17: 21) They refused the path of faith, repentance, revelation, and preparation for greater joy—exactly the subjects of this chapter and the last—and chose the path of comfort and pleasure and control over their environment.

This is the path being taken by nearly everyone in the world, including so many of our children. If we don’t teach them the nature of real happiness, they will follow the world directly through the double-wide doors of the great and spacious building, where the noise and lights shout for the attention of all people.

Real happiness comes from feeling loved, from being loving, and from being responsible. It’s a natural result of faith, repentance, revelation, and following the Lord Jesus Christ. Happiness is achieved by being accountable, making commitments and keeping them, and following a conduct based on moral values like respect, generosity, and integrity. Happiness is built on the foundation of the “peace that passeth all understanding.” (Philippians 4:7) It is not defined by having money, praise, power, and a sense of entitlement, or from getting our way, earning popularity, acting like victims, or being selfish. All of scripture testifies of the truth of Paul’s definition of happiness, just as I testify from my own experiences and those of thousands of others.

Agency or Choice

The world teaches the FREEDOM of choice, but that’s all. With conviction they teach, “You can do whatever you want, and on the whole, the price of your choices will be paid by other people and institutions. If you make a mistake, you can avoid paying the price with the liberal use of excuses, justifications, and blaming. To a degree that can be marked by the day, this insidious teaching is growing in power, and people are feeling increasingly entitled and irresponsible, a deadly combination.

We must teach our children the real nature of agency, as discussed in Chapter Three. Agency includes ALL of these components:

• Freedom to choose
• Responsibility for our choices
• Accountability for our choices

Agency with all these elements makes us truly free, so we can choose liberty and eternal life rather than captivity and death. (2 Nephi 2:27)

Sex

The world describes sex as a natural urge—even a need—that can be satisfied at will. They brush a superficially moral veneer on this description by saying that we must restrict our urges to those who simultaneously agree to participate with us, but this is only one small element of a morality declared by God but ignored by the world.

Is sex a natural desire? Of course. Is it a divinely given desire and function? Yes, but as with agency, freedom alone is not enough. Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability, or the freedom becomes corrupted and destructive.

Justice (or fairness)

When most people talk about what is “not fair,” they mean:

• “I didn’t get what I want.”
• “I was not allowed to exercise freedom WITHOUT the burden of responsibility and accountability.

Real justice is compliance with all the laws of God, the laws by which God Himself lives. Real justice demands PAYMENT, modified by mercy only with the Atonement and our participation in that great act by our willingness to follow Him.

Good 

The world’s definition of “good” has degenerated to mean this:

• “Whatever makes me feel good in the moment.”
• “Whatever I can do that I can legally justify.”

Mormon’s definition of what is good is found in Moroni 7:16-24, and we have discussed it in other chapters. Alma also said, “Everything good comes from God, so if a man shows good works he is listening to the voice of the good shepherd and follows him.” (Alma 5:40-41)

Other Words

And in similar fashion, the world has changed the meaning of the words anger, and God, and more. And thus the devil deceives us about “that which is good. And he pacifies us and lures us into a feeling of earthly security, so we will say, All is well. And so the devil cheats our souls, and leads us away carefully down to hell.” (2 Nephi 28:20-21) Oh, how softly and carefully he leads us away, often beginning with these false definitions.

See the Pattern

Notice the pattern. People WANT words and principles re-defined to conform to the behavior they already have. They want to be their own masters and gods. They want to make choices but without responsibility and accountability. But in that direction there can be no happiness, as described by the plan of happiness given to us at the foundation of this world by God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.