LOVING and TEACHING

I admire you for getting this far in the training. It’s one thing to CLAIM that we care about our children but quite another to exercise our faith and desires in a direction where we actually learn, grow, and change, which is another way of saying that we repent and feel happier. Keep in mind that when I refer to repentance there is none of the scary tone often accompanying that word: “You’d better repent, or else.” No, repentance is a glorious opportunity to transcend the past and the natural man to become a “saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord.” (Mosiah 3:19)

What have we learned so far in the previous four chapters? It’s not so complicated, and I fully realize how some of it has been repetitive. I have also learned that after a lifetime of pain and patterns of reactions, we don’t change overnight. We need to hear the truth spoken again and again, in different ways, just as we find repetition of the same old principles over and over in the scriptures and elsewhere. You are learning the gospel in a highly practical way that you’ve not likely heard before.

What we’ve learned:

• As we have attempted to love our children, we have found ourselves handicapped by a lack of one ingredient essential to raising them: the pure love of Christ. As we have inflicted on them our own pain, emptiness, and fear, unavoidably we have communicated that we don’t love them in the pure way they need, so we have hurt them.
• Unintentionally, we have hurt our children with a combination of ignorance and our own pain.
• Our inability to parent with the pure love of Christ is NOT our fault.
• But it is our responsibility to change what we do now with what we learn and with the love we gain.
• We can learn to understand the meaning of our children’s behavior, and as we see their pain—and acquire the love we need—our impatience and anger transform into compassion.
• Our children behave badly—entitlement, whining, anger, withdrawal, and a wide variety of addictions—only because of the pain they feel while not feeling unconditionally loved.
• As we find love and change the judgments in our lives, we can eliminate the pain, Protecting Behaviors, and PCSD in ourselves and in our children, which together create the perfect storm of misery so many of us experience

So we know WHY children behave badly, but we’re just barely beginning to understand the extent of this. Barely. We’ve been caught almost totally unprepared by the pervasiveness of unproductive or evil behavior in the world, nor do we adequately understand the reasons for it.

We’ve already talked about many principles—using practical examples—to give us the ability to help our children in this increasingly dark world. But now we’re going to talk about three principles that will help weave together what we’ve learned already and will plow the ground for the seeds yet to come.

LOVE AND TEACH

The first of these principles is the necessity that we parents must always be loving and teaching simultaneously, to the point that the three-word phrase becomes one word: loveandteach.

We’ve already discussed how teaching gives our children choices they otherwise would not have. Why else WOULD we teach anybody anything? You may remember the metaphor of not being able to take a fork in the road if we can’t SEE the fork. And then we add love to the teaching, which accomplishes two powerful ends:

1. Our love gives children a REASON to listen to our teaching. Without it, they become defensive and can’t hear the wisdom we hope to offer.
2. Love gives them the POWER to make the better choices they learn. Without love, the simple existence of a choice doesn’t make it possible to embrace. Until a child feels loved and safe, you can’t reasonably expect a child to choose to stop arguing and fighting, for example.

It is commonly believed that reading or hearing the word of God has the most powerful effect in the conversion of the children of men. We hear it from the pulpit on a regular basis, and that view is supported by the occasion when Mormon said, “[Because] the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword or anything else that had happened to them—so Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God.” (Alma 31:5)

While it is undeniable that the word of God is powerful, it is incomplete to say that it’s more powerful than “anything else.” No, people tend not to listen to the WORD of God before they’ve felt the LOVE of God, and usually they receive that love first from a human being.

Joseph Smith confirmed the necessity of love to accompany God’s word when he said, “Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin as to take them by the hand and watch over them with tenderness. When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what power it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 240–41).

Joseph said that the most powerful influence in leading people away from sin was that other PEOPLE would:

• take them by the hand (love).
• watch over them with tenderness (love).
• show them kindness and love.

He went further to say that the absence of love tends to stir up harsh feelings and negative thoughts.

Loving people LEADS to their willingness to listen to the word of God. We see this in the story where Ammon and the Lamanite king Lamoni were traveling to free some of Ammon’s brethren. On the way, they met Lamoni’s father, king over all the Lamanite kings.

The chief-king ordered Lamoni to kill Ammon—the “evil Nephite”—and when Lamoni refused, “the king was angry and drew his sword to kill Lamoni [his son], but Ammon stood in the way and said, You will not kill your son.” (Alma 20:16)

Then the king “tried to kill Ammon, but Ammon defended himself and injured the king's arm so he couldn't use it. When the king saw that Ammon could kill him, he began to plead with Ammon for his life. But Ammon raised his sword and said, I will strike you unless you ... let my brethren out of prison ... and not be angry with [Lamoni] but allow him to do whatever he wants in his land.” (Alma 20:20-1, 24)

“The king rejoiced for his life and was astonished to see that Ammon had no desire to destroy him, and that he had a great love for Lamoni. So he agreed to everything Ammon had said ... and asked Ammon to bring his brethren ... to see him when they got out of prison.” (Alma 20:25-26)

After Lamoni helped free Ammon’s brother Aaron from prison, Aaron went to the palace of the chief-king, where the king asked to be taught because, in his words, “I have been troubled by the generosity and greatness of the words of your brother Ammon. Aaron asked, “Do you believe there is a God?” and the king said, “If you say there is a God, I will believe ... I want you to teach me about all this, and I will believe you.” (Alma 22:1-11)

Clearly the king had not felt much of the power of God’s words yet. He didn’t even have a belief in God at that point, but he HAD felt the love of Ammon, which stirred his soul and shook his view of the world—what he referred to as “troubling him.” Feeling Ammon’s love was enough to give the king faith to hear the words of Aaron, who then taught him about God, the creation, the plan of redemption, and the Atonement of Christ. The king embraced the gospel and shared it with all his people, which was the beginning of the greatest conversion story in the Book of Mormon.

Now we’ve established that as parents we can distill our job down to one thing, over and over: loveandteach. No kidding, it’s that simple, which is not the same as easy.

For the remainder of the course, I’ll be outlining how we can love and teach our children. As I suggested earlier, giving Real Love does not mean being permissive or indulgent. Children need far more than just unconditional acceptance of everything they do—which is just spoiling them, which leads to them feeling entitled, a horrifying condition.

THREE RESPONSIBILITIES

Children must be loved AND taught. But taught what? It would be easy to flippantly respond with, “Teach them the gospel,” but let’s make that a bit more specific. There are uncounted thousands of things children need to be taught, but let’s keep it even simpler, because it helps us to remember our primary responsibilities, and it guides us in the execution of them. Children need to be taught two things most importantly:

1. They need to be taught to be loving. Loving is the singular quality that distinguishes God from all of the rest of us. Not His knowledge or His power, but His love, from which his power naturally evolves.
2. They need to be taught what is right and good. They need to be taught about the love and mercy of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. They need to be taught the importance of agency and all the choices they make. Let’s sum all that up by saying that they need to learn to be responsible—for their own choices, learning, growth, repentance, and understanding of the gospel, and communication with the Spirit.

Now that we understand better what “teaching” means, we’re better prepared to state that as parents we have three primary responsibilities toward our children, and we succeed as parents only as we fulfill them:

The Three Primary Responsibilities of Parents

• To love our children
• To teach them how to love other people
• To teach them responsibility

More simply, we’re responsible for loving our children and teaching them what’s right. When we do that, they can begin to choose to be loving and happy instead of empty and miserable. We are teaching them the course that we were never taught ourselves. We were all taught algebra, history, grammar, and more, but at no point were we diligently, consciously, and effectively taught the course called LIFE. We’re teaching our children how to LIVE for the rest of their lives. If we do this, they have a chance at a level of happiness that very few people in this world achieve.

Those three things you teach—loved, loving, responsible—are the three-legged stool of HAPPINESS. If just one leg is missing, happiness collapses. We have to help them construct and maintain all three. Those are your primary responsibilities BECAUSE the end result is happiness, and that is the end result of our existence, as Joseph Smith stated. You can’t MAKE your children happy, but you can create an environment and the opportunities for them to fulfill the requirement for that condition.

Defining Happy and Right

Since we’re responsible for teaching our children what’s right, and for helping them to be happy, let’s define those terms.

Oddly, you can’t directly pursue happiness. It’s the end result of finding the ingredients that invariably lead to it. Real happiness comes from feeling loved and from loving other people, and from being responsible, and that kind of happiness stays with us through struggle and hardship. It does not come from being entertained or getting people to do what we want—or from money, or power, or fame, or sex, or whatever.

Not evil, just wrong. Any behavior that interferes with our primary goal just doesn’t work and needs to be seen and eliminated. I know there appears to be a contradiction here. Happiness is our primary goal, but we don’t directly pursue it. Instead we pursue loved, loving, and responsible, and then happiness HAPPENS—unavoidably. So the primary goal results from pursuing three intermediate ones.

More and more I will be answering specific questions about children’s individual behaviors. I tell you ahead of time that despite the specificity of some of the answers, they can all be summed up in my recommendation to remember what will help them to feel loved, to be loving, and to be responsible.

In the following chapters, as I talk about the behaviors of our children and how to respond to the behaviors that result from a lack of Real Love in their lives, keep in mind that these same principles apply to us as adults. Most of us are still living with the effects of not getting the Real Love which is essential to the emotional and spiritual health of every human being—and then we behave badly. We react to our own lack of Real Love as we interact with our children, so they feel the “I DON”T LOVE YOU” and end up feeling unloved themselves. What a cycle, both within a generation and one that is passed from generation to generation.

It is OUR responsibility to CHANGE generations of ignorance and suffering. Stopping the pain, the emptiness, the anger, the victimhood the conflict, and more.

NO MORE ANGER

I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that we would discuss three principles to help us piece together all the other principles of parenting. First was lovingandteaching. Now we address the second: no more anger.

We have proven beyond all doubt—through scriptures, the words of prophets and apostles, metaphors, personal experiences, and more—that anger is wrong and harmful both to our children and to us as parents. There is NO doubt of that. And yet we continue to dabble in the poison of anger, so briefly we’ll discuss it in a different way. We must shun this spiritual pollutant completely if we wish to follow Him.

Can you remember when your son or daughter was born?

It was pretty fantastic, wasn’t it? You waited, you hoped, you prayed, and suddenly there was this gorgeous baby in your arms: a tiny new beginning beyond your imaginings. Perfect.

And you were . . . well . . . overjoyed. Of course. What a privilege. What a treasure.

Now, you may not remember this part, but I’ve heard people say it in the delivery room, later at home, and in public with other people around. As you looked at that tiny creature with all that joy and hope, you made some promises—out loud or silently.

You PROMISED yourself that this child would be safe, and have all the advantages you ever had—or didn’t have: A decent house, sufficient food, good education, and more. But most of all . . . HAPPINESS!

You promised yourself—and your child—that he or she WOULD BE HAPPY.

You promised to hold her, kiss her, tickle her, speak sweet words to her—in other words, to love her. And you meant it.

But how many times have we made well-meaning promises that we didn’t keep? Many, many times—all of us. Mostly we don’t keep them because we don’t know how, or we’re somehow emotionally or mentally or spiritually unprepared or otherwise unable. We mean to love our partners, for example, with all our hearts, but if we were not loved unconditionally ourselves, we don’t have the ABILITY to love them and keep the promises we made.

And the same is true with the promises we make about our children. Oh, how we meant to love them. And we have all TRIED to love our children, with everything we had AT THE TIME.

But we didn’t know what the pure love of Christ looked like, so we didn’t HAVE it to give. All our lives people have imposed conditions on their “loving” us, and when we’ve failed, they’ve been disappointed or even angry. And we’ve done that with our children too—both because (1) we didn’t have the unconditional love to give, and (2) nobody taught us how to love unconditionally. (Notice, we were not lovedandtaught)

When our children have failed to obey us, or be grateful, or cooperative, or whatever—which is our idea of their loving us—we have reacted badly, in unloving ways (remember, we’re starving for love ourselves.

When you first look at a baby, you might think, what could such a ball of perfection ever do that would make me love her less? Unthinkable. How could I possibly be disappointed or frustrated or irritated at this child?

It’s a well-meaning question, but after we promise to love our children and make them happy, we encounter the ordinary events of LIFE. That darling little baby keeps you up for two nights in a row, and you can’t think straight. You can’t work, can’t sleep. You start rocking her harder, with a kind of impatient insistence that she go to sleep. We’ve all done that. And she FEELS it. It affects her view of the world and herself. It WOUNDS them when we get impatient and irritated. Then they get older, crawl into the cupboards, and makes messes you never thought possible. With every passing year, they become capable of inconveniencing us in newly creative ways.

As children explore the world, they unavoidably cause inconvenience for us. And there are days when you simply wear out. You have nothing more to give.

And on those days you do get impatient and irritated. You get angry. Studies have shown that when small children just HEAR small conflicts between adults—no yelling, no hitting, and completely not involving the child—the children STOP playing. They freeze up. Our NOT loving each other (as adults)—in the form of anger, impatience, criticism, whatever—paralyzes our children. Now imagine how the child reacts to anger directed AT THEM. Someday watch a parent who is nagging or critical toward their children—a stranger in a check-out line, a relative, perhaps your spouse. Watch the child’s face. Anguish.

As I said in Chapter One:

When I’m angry at you—you as an adult, not a child—how do you feel? Immediately. Are you happy? Hardly. The moment I communicate my disappointment or irritation, you know that my concern is for MYSELF. With anger—and all its variations: irritation, annoyance, disappointment, everything from screaming to a simple sigh and eye roll—with anger, I’m saying this:

“Look at what you did to ME.”

“Look at what you didn’t do for ME.”

“How could you possibly—and stupidly—forget that the center of the universe is ME.”

It’s all about ME—anger communicates Me-Me-Me—and in that moment, is there any way in the world you could feel my unconditional concern for YOUR happiness? Ridiculous.

Anger is always selfish.

And the effect of my anger on you is devastating. Reflect on your own life about the many times you’ve seen and felt the effect of anger on you and others when another person gets angry. It’s scary and threatening, and then we mortal beings respond with lying, attacking in return, acting like victims, running, hiding—all the Protecting Behaviors.

And THAT is the effect of anger on you as an ADULT. Imagine the effect on a child, who is just learning what the world is like, who is learning the definitions of everything in the universe, and who is learning who he/she IS. Children are much like—not exactly like, but still a lot like—a blank canvas, and throwing anger at them is like throwing a bucket of black paint over a canvas. The effect is overwhelming and not easily overcome.

Anger = “I don’t love you,” and that’s what our children have heard from us, on uncounted occasions—most often when we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

We do NOT have to SAY these ugly words for the “I don’t love you” message to get across clearly and with great power. These kids really are like a canvas, and what is painted there FIRST tends to stay there. It sticks better. If a canvas is first covered in black, it GREATLY alters how our kids see whatever else is put there. It changes what THEY put there. It changes everything. At a VERY young age, children FEEL what we are feeling, and it defines their universe.

When a baby goose—a gosling—hatches, it IMPRINTS on whatever living creature larger than itself that it sees within a short period after hatching. They will follow that creature around exactly as they would have done their real mother, if she had been there at the time of hatching. The gosling doesn’t just FOLLOW around its new mistaken parent—whatever the species. The gosling believes that it IS the same species as the substitute parent. This happens very quickly and often is irreversible. If a gosling first sees a human, not only does the human become the parent of the goose, but the goose BECOMES a human. They want to do everything the human does—walking, riding in a car, typing, eating same food. Many of them will then never follow their own kind, nor mate with them. Wow.

Children are very much like this.

 Our children become whatever we TELL THEM they are—with our behavior, our tone, our unspoken feelings, our words. They BELIEVE that THEY and the WORLD are whatever we communicate. We teach them the Judgments we talked about in Chapter Four, the Judgments that determine the chain of Event → Judgment → Feeling → Reaction

Examples

When you are angry at a child, he hears only that he’s not WORTH loving. That continues through to adulthood—destroying personal happiness and enormously affecting schooling, career, and relationships.

When you are critical with a child, he hears only that he’s defective. A critical tone stabs like a knife. That continues through to adulthood, affecting everything. They become small, they hear criticism everywhere. Parental anger just might be the most damaging single act flowing through the history of the world—more than war, famine, disease, anything.

When you’re disappointed with a child, he hears that HE is a disappointment, that he’s not what he SHOULD be. If you say, or even convey with facial expression, “I’m so disappointed,” the child always finishes that sentence with . . . IN YOU. Just a tone will do that.

That belief, that imprinting, also continues through to adulthood.

When you’re frustrated with a child, he hears that he is responsible for how you feel. He hears, “YOU are frustrating. YOU MADE ME frustrated.” YOU are responsible for how I feel. It’s the ONLY conclusion a child COULD make.

And again, that imprinting continues through to adulthood.

Such children—the objects of frustration or disappointment or anger—are in pain and then unavoidably use Protecting Behaviors. They might generally withdraw from life—to avoid the disapproval. They might be called shy.

OR, just as bad, they try to please everyone and live in a prison of people pleasing for a lifetime—punctuated by episodes of anger or manipulation or depression.

Here’s the Tragedy: (1) with our anger, we destroy our children, AND (2) we don’t know we’re doing it or how badly we’re hurting them, so (3) we keep doing it, and we make it worse and worse. We’re also trapped by another ignorance. Our anger is a reaction to our own lifetime of pain, but we don’t know that, and we can’t stop it. We don’t know another choice but to REACT and hurt people—notably our kids—instead of CHOOSING to love them.

You might be thinking, "I'm not angry ALL the time. In fact, I'm not angry most of the time." Remember what I said in Chapter Two, about the overall impression you’d have of me if I “only” hit you one out of every ten times we met. Doesn’t average out, does it? Pain is very memorable, and we can’t ever excuse ourselves by thinking that we hurt our children “not very often.”

A mother called to talk to me about her daughter. She told me some utterly transfixing things about her 5-year-old daughter, who had been behaving badly lately.

Mom asked the daughter why she was behaving badly—usually a stupid question to which children have no answer. But this child had a response.

She said, “Mommy, when you get mad, I get afraid, and then I don’t know where I am. I can’t even think. When I get whiney, I just need you to hold me and love me. If it doesn’t work the first time, just keep doing it. And then the scared goes right out of me and sticks to the wall.”

(Wow what insight. Keep in mind that this is true of nearly every child who experiences anger. This child is just freakishly aware of it and can SAY it. Other children just automatically protect themselves, almost always in ways we don’t see, so we think everything is fine.)

Here’s another way to see our anger, which also happens to be a way change our Judgment, which we learned in the last chapter is a way to change our feelings and behaviors. 

When other people have been angry at YOU, have you ever liked it? NO.

Do you think more clearly? NO. Do you make better decisions or perform better? NO.

When YOU are angry, do you think more clearly or make better decisions? NO.

So does anger work for you, really work? Does it make your life happier? NO.

Does it work for your child? Does it lead to deeper connections, happy life lessons, the child feeling more loved?

Does it help you fulfill your Primary Responsibilities as a parent, to LOVE and Teach?

NO. So if anger fails on every level, could you possibly ever claim that anger is RIGHT?

NO. It’s this simple:

Every time I’m angry—especially at a child—I’m wrong.

Yes, I’m repeating this principle, but this concept is so different from how the world operates that we need to hear this truth in as many ways as possible.

I have no interest in making people feel guilty about a lifetime pattern of justifying anger. I’m not labeling it evil. That’s not productive. Anger is just wrong, meaning that it doesn’t work. If I get a flat tire on my car, replacing it with a kitchen sink isn’t evil. It just doesn’t work, so it’s wrong.

Just KNOWING that something is wrong helps us to stop it. Just being AWARE. If you turn your car down a street, for example, that obviously doesn’t get you where you want to go, it’s the wrong street. Would you then go down that street over and over, in attempts to get to your desired destination? No, because just knowing that the street is wrong would motivate you not to do it again. Admitting that we’re wrong is NOT intended to make us FEEL BAD, just a tool to help us make wiser choices—to repent.

Same with anger. It’s wrong. It’s kind of dumb, actually. Well then, maybe we’ll consider not doing it. ESPECIALLY if we know some alternatives that DO work. We’ve been talking about those—the 5-year-old girl just gave her mother some wiser choices—and there is much more to come.

Expecting Love From Our Children

I couldn’t count how many adults I have asked how their parents treated them as kids.

The usual answers most often include some version of: “You know, Normal.” Or “Okay.”

AFTER those same people learned to find the pure love of Christ—following suggestions like we discussed in Chapter Four—ONLY then did they realize that their entire childhood had not been as they had thought. After learning about God’s love and after feeling it, then people described the same “Okay” childhood in ways like this:

• “Somebody was criticizing me all the time.”
• “They were always angry at me.”
• “There was a feeling of tension in the house that never went away.”
• “I think I spent my life fearing my next mistake and the next attack that would follow. So either I tried to be perfect—to avoid criticism—or I just hid and stayed away from risks and from people who would see my mistakes.”

Anger became NORMAL, and because the parents occasionally said they loved their kids, anger became PART of loving. See how that works? I tell you that I love you, AND regularly I’m angry with you, so anger becomes part of loving. This is unbelievably confusing and damaging to a child, who will attract and create for the rest of his or her life relationships that include anger—and they’ll accept them as normal—including the relationships with their children.

So, if it’s so harmful, WHY do we get angry? You already know the answer. Because all day we’re reacting to a lifetime of pain we’re carrying around, while the present event with our children—their acting out, their being inconvenient, their disrespect, or lack of responsibility, or whatever—actually plays only a small part. But that small part pushes us over the edge if we’re already in pain—even if their individual behaviors seem minor or normal. Their behavior “triggers” us (Chapter Three), triggers our own PCSD. We’re already wounded, and it doesn’t take much to increase our pain to the point where we react in unfortunate ways. If you’re drowning in the middle of the ocean, even if it seems normal and you’re surviving, it doesn’t take much of a wave to cover your face with water.

We get angry at our children because we have expectations of them. Anger is always preceded by expectations. We don’t get angry at the mailman if he doesn’t clean his room, because we have no expectations about it. But we do with our children, because we do have expectations.

What do we expect from our children?

• Obedience (power, safety)
• Gratitude (praise)
• Respect (praise, power, safety)
• Cooperation (power, safety)
• Affection (praise)

Certainly these are qualities children need to have in their lives if they want to be happy—obedience, gratitude, cooperation, more), but rarely do we insist on these qualities in our children solely for their benefit. When we don’t have enough love in our own lives, we demand obedience, for example, to feed our own need for praise, power, and safety. We need gratitude to confirm our own worth (praise). We demand respect to confirm our position of power over our children. When we’re in pain, we expect and then demand that our children behave in ways that make us feel better (Protecting Behaviors). We demand their attention and affection.

Now, are obedience, gratitude, respect, cooperation, and affection good qualities for our children to learn? YES, they are the elements that make up the pure love of Christ. Do we need to teach them? YES, but for the benefit of our CHILDREN—so THEY can be happy—NOT so WE can feel better about ourselves. We’ve already discussed many examples of teaching these principles, and there will be many more.

The Powerful Need for Our Children’s Love

On many occasions, I have asked adults, “Does anyone love you unconditionally?” and a common answer is this: “Yes, my children do.” Awww, the unconditional love of a child, so sweet, right? No, Wrong. Those kids—whose parents believe they UC love their parents—are in real trouble, and so are the parents. With rare and exceptional moments—mostly when our children have matured as adults—OUR believing that our kids love us is almost always inaccurate, inappropriate, and dangerous. Our children are not responsible for loving us, and with the rare exceptions I mentioned they’re also incapable of doing so.

Most of us place considerable responsibility on our children to make us feel good. We prove this every time we’re disappointed in them or angry at them. AND we also prove it ever time we approve of them, have an agenda for them, or control them, because on all these occasions we’re declaring that they are responsible for our happiness or unhappiness—and we’re mostly unaware of how often we do that.

Our happiness is not determined by the behavior of our children. Our happiness is a result of how much unconditional love we’ve received over a lifetime of experiences with parents, teachers, friends, and spouses—and by how loving we are toward others. Most of us, however, were not unconditionally loved, and without Real Love we have become unhappy as adults and parents. And most of the time we don’t even notice our unhappiness because we have re-defined barely surviving as normal and even as happiness.

It is not our children’s responsibility to give us the Real Love we need. Children need to be loved by us. They need to be filled up with the unconditional love required for their happiness.

Children become whole only when love is initially a one-way flow, from us to them.

That can’t happen while we’re expecting or demanding something (love, gratitude, so on) from them in return—the very essence of CONDITIONAL love.

We WANT to believe that our children love us unconditionally, but if they haven’t received enough pure love from us—as few of them have—how can they give it to anyone else, especially us? In most cases, when we expect love from our children, we’re asking them to give us what they’ve never received sufficiently themselves. Their task is impossible, and the burden is crushing.

There is a SECOND reason kids can’t love us: Love can be unconditional only when it’s FREELY given. The giver of unconditional love can’t be empty or afraid. When people are empty or afraid, they can only manipulate other people to get what they want or protect themselves from being hurt. Almost without exception, our children are both empty and afraid BECAUSE they badly NEED us to love them, and they’re scared to death of losing our love. These are natural conditions for a child, but they make it impossible for children to give us the pure love of Christ. Simply put, they NEED something from us—love—far too much to be able to love us without conditions.

So why do we believe our kids love us?

We tend to “love” our children more when they’re good—when they do what we want. They can feel that our approval is not unconditional, but it feels better than nothing, so they do their best—in the beginning, at least—to earn more of it by giving us what we want: gratitude, respect, obedience, affection, and so on. We FEEL GOOD when we get those things, and then it’s understandable that we believe that our children are “loving” us.

But they need our approval and love far too much to give us anything without expecting something in return. They give us what we want so we’ll give them the “love” they desperately need. Although it’s unconscious, our children trade imitations of love with us, and we gladly participate in the exchange, all of us just doing our best to survive in the absence of God’s pure love.

So when your darling little three-year-old looks up at you while you’re holding him, telling him a story, and giving him a piece of chocolate, and says, “I love you, Mommy,” what DOES that mean? It means, “Mommy, I REALLY like it when you’re nice to me. I like how you make me feel.” They call it “love” because they’ve heard YOU say that you love people and things that make you feel good.

Is it ever possible for a child to unconditionally love his parents? Yes, but only after that child has been consistently and unconditionally loved himself for a long time. And that rarely happens until well into adulthood for a child. As my children have become older, and had their own children, they have on many occasions expressed a genuine caring for my happiness.

But no loving parent would expect such love from a child. When a child can love his or her parents, it’s just a delightful bonus for those parents, not something they have a right to expect.

Allow me to illustrate with a real-life story.

I know a young single mother who was beginning to learn the principles of real parenting because she wanted to be happier herself and wanted to be a better mother to her 3-year-old son, Brian. But she hit an obstacle that baffled her. She wrote to me,

“I’m much happier since I’ve learned about real love, studied it, understood it, and found people to love ME so that I could share what I have with others, including Brian. But just when I think I’m doing pretty well, Brian will do something wrong, and I’m in the toilet almost immediately.

“Example: Earlier today he was eating dinner, and suddenly he said he hated what he was eating, (face, tone, yelling) and wanted something else. I told him that this is what I’d prepared, and he’d liked it in the past. But he just exploded.”

At this point I reminded her that angry people are never reasonable. They’ve kind of lost their minds and are purely protecting themselves. 

She said, “He screamed over and over that he wanted something else. Red-faced, impossible to talk to.”

It’s important to remember that when somebody gets emotionally worked up about something, it’s never about the single thing—like the food in this example. It’s about feeling unloved, unsafe, something. It’s about Protecting themselves from pain, in this case by using power and control. This is an example of the PCSD we talked about in Chapter Three.

She continued: “What really surprised me is how quickly I became angry right back at him, picked him up, took him to his bedroom, dropped him on his bed—which at the time I thought was better than throwing him out the window—and slammed his door as I left. I realized that I behaved like a monster, but it was like I couldn’t stop myself.”

I suggested, “There are three things to observe and learn here: 1. YES, you really couldn’t stop yourself in the moment. You were reacting to your own lifetime of pain—PCSD—and kind of lost your own mind.

“2. And yes, he DOES have to learn—like every child—that he can’t have everything he wants. He has to learn early that not everything is designed to accommodate him, or you’ll train him to become a demanding, entitled child who will turn into a demanding, entitled adult who can’t function in a world with rules and limitations, and nobody will tolerate him. The world is filled with such selfish people.

“3. You so have to teach him this lesson, BUT in a way that he knows you care about him.”

“He kept crying and screaming,” she said, “so I left him in his room while I had lunch. Before learning about real love, I would have given him what he wanted—made a new meal, the one he demanded—even though I could see it was spoiling and indulging him.”

“Yes, you would have done that before. You HAVE done that before, so you have been training your 3-year-old—Brian—to become an entitled, angry, miserable child—likely to become an entitled adult. That’s the part about Brian. Now, the part about you, where you were startled at how quickly you become rageful and insane. Why did you become angry so quickly?

“I’ll answer my question,” I said. “Every time your emotional response to a situation is out of proportion to the event itself, you’re reacting to your own deep-seated pain—a lifetime of it, which has permeated every cell, your personality, your judgments, your feelings, everything.”

Speaking now to everyone reading: If you look closely—without fear or guilt—you’ll find examples of you over-reacting to “little things” (with your kids, your partner, whoever) many times a day. You’re not over-reacting to individual events. You’re reacting to a lifetime accumulation of pain, which is then simply triggered by the individual events. THAT is PCSD, which we discussed extensively in Chapter Three.

Now back to the mother of Brian. I said, “Your son, Brian, had a little tantrum. If you had felt healed, loved, and whole, you would have handled it FAR differently. How do I know? Because parents all over the world have learned to find love for themselves, and then they’ve learned to react lovingly and calmly to situations just like this. And then they can lovingly teach important life principles to their children. But you blew up at Brian because you were already at the edge of coping. You were carrying a lifetime of pain around with you from YOUR childhood. Your reaction with Brian was PARTLY him—a small part (the trigger)—but mostly a reaction to all the pain in your life from unhealed wounds, from the time you were very young.

I continued: “We won’t over-analyze this, but think for a moment. Who did you have in your childhood who would suddenly burst into rage? And you couldn’t do anything about those outbursts. And they came out of nowhere, with no apparent provocation. Who made you feel helpless and small and confused, just like you felt with your son?”

Her face contorted with simultaneous understanding and shock as she loudly said, “My MOTHER!!”

“Yes, your mother. You spent your entire childhood living with your mother’s outbursts of rage. And you couldn’t do anything about them. You couldn’t make them less or go away. They seemed to come out of nowhere, certainly way out of proportion to any precipitating event.

And her raging AT YOU strongly carried the message that YOU were to blame. You had to deal with the pain of the rage and also the confusion about what you did that caused the rage—as your mother’s ranted incoherently. As a result of all this raging and blaming, you felt helpless and small and confused.”

“So,” I said, “When your son behaves in ways that resemble how your mother behaved—even a little—you don’t react just to what he’s doing. You react to a LIFETIME of pain associated with your mother’s behavior. To make it worse—and to continue the generational pattern—when you feel helpless and small during Brian’s rages, he FEELS (1) your weakness, (2) his power over you, and (3) your inability to love him. So then what does he do? He gets even angrier, so he can control you, hurt you, and feel less helpless himself. It’s quite a mess, isn’t it?”

I have counseled with thousands of people who have been utterly baffled at how their lives got so screwed up—personally, career, relationships—when they couldn’t recall any kind of “abuse” as children. But it’s ALWAYS there, even if they can’t remember it. The trauma might be obvious, as in the case of rage or physical abuse, but sometimes it’s simple indifference or emotional neglect.

One 40-year-old woman strongly claimed that she had been loved from birth, so all her present problems—marriage, kids, and more—could not possibly be due to her childhood. She could not listen to any mention of childhood trauma. She could not bear the idea that her parents hadn’t loved her, so I finally stopped explaining and just let her speak. As she was speaking, I moved a little closer, looked deeply into her eyes, and then rolled my eyes while I sighed deeply with that sound and body language that convey deep disappointment, even disgust.

She burst into tears. I felt a little bad for doing that to her, but I also knew she needed to realize how much pain she was hiding from her experiences with moments just like the one I simulated. After she calmed down, she said, “I heard that sound my entire childhood, and I’ve heard it almost every day as an adult. It kills me every time.” She was describing the “I don’t love you” message that children feel with pain no less than that resulting from a physical slap.

Another woman I knew also maintained that her childhood had been just lovely. Following an impression, I reached over and just brushed away the hair that was covering part of her face. She screamed loudly, then buried her face and cried. All during her childhood, her mother had done exactly that: moving her hair, along with adjusting her dress and controlling everything about her with a tone of irritation that communicated how utterly flawed her daughter was.

What’s the point I’m making here with all these illustrations?

Anger destroys a child, as does disappointment or controlling. What else could you expect to happen with the message of “I don’t love you?” which is delivered with not just rage and yelling and throwing things. Anger is everything from yelling and hitting to just an eye roll, or turning away and stomping out of the room without a word, or a sigh, or simply avoiding a child with no sound at all. We think we’re hiding our anger with our kids, but we’re NOT. When we sigh in frustration or disappointment with a child, we might as well hit them in the face. It’s all anger, and our anger is always traumatic to them—whether we see the wounds in that moment or not.

So we’ve talked about HOW our children are wounded, and how they respond to their pain. I promised that we would begin to talk about what we can DO about the pain and the wounds. So here’s the first rule of parenting, absolutely inviolable. It might take a lifetime to learn to love and teach them well. It might take years for them to feel it enough to heal. But we can do something RIGHT NOW that will make a HUGE difference in how they feel—no matter what age they are or what problems they have. Without this step, we’ll never get to the place where they feel loved.

Never, ever express anger at a child!

Anger is so destructive that it can tear down the positive effects of 20 loving acts in a second.

Picture loving a child like building a LIFE—because it is—or building a house, to create a metaphor. It’s a lot of work to build a house—foundation, walls, ceilings, plumbing, wiring, etc. It often requires a full crew months to complete.

But how long does it take to destroy a house? With a wrecking ball and a couple of big backhoes? 20 minutes. 

It’s the same with anger. We HAVE to stop destroying our children with anger before we can help them heal and build a strong and happy life.

When we’re angry, the “I don’t love you message” becomes like a bullet, shooting our children in the head. They don’t like it. Under that attack, they HAVE to fight back. Or cut their own arms, or run, or use drugs, or disappear in their screens, or whatever. There is too much pain for them to do nothing in response.

Sometimes parents tell me with pride that they’re doing “better” with expressing anger at their child. Improvement is commendable in a lot of things in life. But in some things improvement simply is not enough.

In Chapter One we talked about having a Zero Tolerance for whining in your family. None. Ever. It’s just too destructive. The same is true for anger. So, NO anger toward your children is acceptable—or toward your spouse or anybody else, because no matter who you express your anger to, it adversely affects your children.

That might sound impossible, simply to stop something you’ve been doing for years. No, it’s not, not if you see the harm in it. How often do you stop for a red light when you’re driving? EVERY TIME. How often do you discipline a child with an ax? Never. Once you know how harmful a thing is, your JUDGMENT of that thing changes, and so do your feelings and choices (Chapter Four).

Make a choice right now: I will never, ever express anger to my child.

Now, listen slowly to what I’m about to say. I am NOT telling you NOT TO BE ANGRY, even at a child. I’m suggesting only that you never EXPRESS your anger at a child. EVER.

If you’re angry—which is inevitable because you’re HUMAN—there are things you can do to prevent hurting a child with it.

Five Steps to Change Your Anger

Let’s look at five steps that can dramatically change your anger. They do not have to be done in the order described. Sometimes Step Four is the best to take first, or Step Five. But we have to start describing them somehow, so we’ll start with Step One now.

Step One in responding to anger:

Step One: Be quiet. When you’re angry at a child, you will not speak. In fact, it’s usually best not to be in the room, because you WILL express your anger in so many non-verbal ways: rolling eyes, breathing, posture, facial expressions. Brian’s mother did this imperfectly when she went to eat lunch while Brian was screaming in his room. She was not especially loving, but her silence was better than the alternatives she had employed in the past.

Go somewhere and REFLECT. First, remember that if you express your anger, you can cause only injury.

Then consider using the concept we talked about a lot in Chapter Four: Event → Judgment → Feeling → Reaction

FOCUS on that. STOP, PAUSE, and change a judgment.

If you’re angry, you DO have a judgment about your child, perhaps like one of these:

THEN consider whether the truth isn’t more like this:

If you can make that change in judgment, you’ll be able to change your feelings from irritation to compassion and even love. Miracle.

Here’s another thought to contribute toward changing your judgment about your anger:

Anger’s Disregard for the Atonement of Christ

The Apostle Paul says, “God proves his love toward us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He proves his love even more by making us righteous through the shedding of his blood and saving us from the punishment to come. We have been reconciled to God by the death of His Son and saved by His life. We also have joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the atonement.” (Romans 5:8-12)

We owe everything we will ever be to the Atonement of Christ. In His own words:

• “I am the living bread that came down from heaven, and if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.” (John 6:51)
• “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even if he has died, he will live. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)

Jesus Christ has taken upon Himself the sins of the world, and through Him all men and women can be forgiven. Through His suffering and death, Christ alone has earned the right and power to bestow on mankind the condition of grace that makes forgiveness possible.

Although we don’t think about the following process consciously, when we are angry at someone, this is what we’re saying: “Although I believe in the Atonement of Christ, if you sin against me, His atonement isn’t quite enough for you. You must first experience my righteous wrath and, where possible, compensate me for any harm I judge you have caused me. When it comes to sins that inconvenience me, you have to work through a special Supplemental Atonement, and then maybe I’ll be satisfied. Maybe.”

Anger is more selfish and arrogant than most of us have ever imagined, and that awareness alone can become another useful tool that will help us cast our anger aside. One clear glimpse of how ridiculously selfish we’re being with our anger is sometimes enough to give us the strength to let it go.

Step Two in responding to anger:

Step Two: Be wrong. You know from what we’ve discussed that every time you’re angry, you’re being unloving—always—so anger is always wrong. Anger always hurts other people and yourself.

When I say, “Be wrong,” I mean to admit to yourself that you are wrong when you’re angry but also to talk to other adults regularly—especially those who are taking or have completed this training—about your being wrong. Remember the process of Truth-Seen-Accepted-Loved, as we discussed in Chapter Four, as well as the many ways to find people to be truthful with. As you admit your errors to someone who can see and accept you, miracles happen:

1. You’re not alone. As Sister Aburto said in Chapter Four, “Together we realize there is hope and we do not have to suffer alone.” (Ensign Nov 2019) We were not meant to walk the path of this life alone, especially when we stumble.
2. You can FEEL the pure love of Christ as it is conveyed to you by the Spirit from the soul of another person.

Notice, I’m not telling you not to be angry. I’m saying that instead of just spewing and venting it all over the place, express your anger to someone who can LOVE YOU. If you can feel that love, your anger WILL disappear. You will feel seen, accepted, and loved. You’ll do this more specifically in the Fourth step of dealing with anger, which is coming up soon.

People regularly call me and say something like, “I want to kill this child.” That’s actually a wonderful thing to be able to say. What?! It’s a good thing to want to kill your child? No, what’s good is that they called me instead of expressing their anger to their child. Instead of injuring their child, they chose to talk to another adult—in this case me, but this can be done with any accepting wise person. They KNOW they’re wrong to be angry, but instead of vomiting that venom on their child or with people who will sympathize and make things worse, they’re talking to someone who can LOVE them while they’re angry.

What do I do with such an expression?

If you’re really brave—and really want to learn to be truthful about yourself—ask your KIDS to tell you when you’re angry. We’ll get to this in a couple of chapters. Don’t walk into that concrete wall until we’ve talked about it some more.

Step Three in responding to anger:

Step Three: Feel loved. By this I suggest that you REMEMBER the unconditional love you HAVE received from other adults as you have told them the truth about yourself. Of course, remembering this love requires actually having experiences where you were loved, and we just talked about how to accomplish that in Chapter Four.

Pray to your Father in Heaven, and ask to feel His love, to heal your wounds, to cool the fires of your anger and change your judgments of your child. He’s eager to enfold you in the arms of His love, just as Lehi felt. (2 Nephi 1:15)

Or do the meditation at the end of Chapter Four again, and again.

Step Four in responding to anger:

Step Four: Get loved. If the first three steps don’t eliminate your anger, you might say to your child, “I’ll be back to find you in five minutes (or whenever).” Then leave the interaction with your child and instead call or visit in person with another adult, one who can love you and help you see your mistakes. We talked a lot in Chapter Four about how we find these people.

Notice that if you do Step Four (Get Loved) that helps you with the other steps:

Step Five in responding to anger:

Step Five: Be loving. After following the first four steps—and after all we’ve talked about to this point—you may find yourself prepared to interact with your child in a loving way. And already in this Training we’ve discussed many examples of responding to your child in a loving way.

Sometimes being loving as a First Step can be effective in helping YOU to lose YOUR anger. Without thinking or reacting to what your child specifically is doing, just ACT. Like how? When your child is being difficult, in some way triggering or provoking anger in you, you might:

As you do this, as you love with no expectations whatever, you’ll find your irritation diminish. Sometimes in the act of loving, we experience the love of Him from whom all love flows, and our anger evaporates. As we love His children, we feel His love ourselves.

President Eyring said, “It is love that must motivate the shepherds of Israel. (As parents we are shepherds of His sheep) That may seem difficult at the start, because we may not even know the Lord well. But if we begin with even a little grain of faith in Him, our service to the sheep will increase our love for Him and for them ... When we ask [what we can do], answers will come ... In those moments, we will feel the love of the Savior for them and for us ... And that will increase your confidence and your courage.” (Ensign May 2001)

The Savior and the Adulteress

The Jewish leaders brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. They wanted Him to condemn her as the law of Moses would. After teaching them a lesson in judgment and humility, they all left, leaving Him with the woman. When He asked her where her accusers were, she said there were none, and He said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” (John 8:1-11)

There was no anger, no condemnation. He just understood her, accepted her, and briefly taught her the law she already knew.

A father once told me of his experience with loving (normally Step Five) Michael, his eldest son as the first step to change his anger. Michael’s younger brother first ran into the room where his father was reading, screaming as though he had been stabbed.

“Michael hit me,” he said.

“I see that you’re not bleeding,” the father said. “Good start. Now I need to talk to Michael, and then I’ll come to find you.”

Father called to Michael, who came into the room with his shoulders hunched over. “I didn’t hit ‘im,” he said.

Father gestured to Michael to come closer, and then he embraced his standing son while he sat in his chair. That put them roughly at the same height, so their cheeks were touching. Father could hear and feel the labored breathing of his son. The embrace continued without words.

Finally, Father said, “I’m not angry at you. I HAVE been angry at you before, which was foolish of me, but I’m not now.”

The embrace continued until Father could feel the tears of his son wet his cheek. Michael whispered, “I didn’t hit him very hard.”

“I believe you,” Father said. He looked Michael full in the face and with a smile said, “Why don’t you go talk to your brother for a minute, and then send him in here.” Michael floated from the room. There was no lecture, no anger, no “discipline,” just love. And it made all the difference. Michael already knew what he’d done, and he was quick to protect himself, but all that disappeared with his father’s love.

Love is Not Always Soft

Because anger is so often accompanied by a loud voice or stern tone, sometimes we fail to discern the occasions when loving and teaching can be quite direct, even loud—but without anger.

One day I turned away from my grandson Jack, a toddler, for a few seconds, just long enough for him to sprint toward the street and an oncoming car. My mistake, and I could see that he would reach the street before I reached him. So I called his name, quite loudly. He had never heard me be stern or angry, so the volume and tone of my voice were shocking to him. He skidded to an immediate stop, after which I reached him and pointed out the nearness of his being flattened by the passing car.

His initial reaction was some degree of fear, understandable considering the delivery of my warning. He wondered if I was angry, but almost immediately he could see that none of the other signs of anger were present. He understood that I simply had to get his attention immediately and without mistake. You must explain that to your children, that on occasion you have to deliver an important or immediate message in a way that might seem direct or even harsh, but that you will do whatever it takes to communicate love at the same time. And you will watch for any signs their fear, so you can be sensitive in your delivery.

Now, at this point—even though we’ve pounded on the truth that anger is harmful—don’t even think about making a resolution that you won’t get angry at your children anymore—however well-meaning you might be. Such a commitment is almost laughable. Of course you’ll get angry. You’re human.

The REASON you get angry at them is the exact same reason they get angry at each other—YOU don’t feel enough Real Love in YOUR life, either, and without that, you can’t suddenly just decide you’ll be more loving and not angry. You can’t give what you ain’t got. But now you’re much better prepared to approach the commitment to Zero Tolerance.

The day WILL come when you will no longer have a NEED to get angry at your children, and without the need—without your own pain and fear—you won’t get angry anymore. Anger will just seem foolish to you.

I’ve asked large groups of parents to imagine no anger in their own lives or with their children. Most cannot imagine it. What does that tell you? That response loudly proclaims that we’ve lived with anger all our lives. It’s become normal.

But now you CAN imagine a life without anger. If you continue learning, feeling loved, and being loving, that day will come.

We have talked about our need to have a Zero Tolerance for our own expression of anger as parents. We must also have a Zero Tolerance for our children venting anger to us or to each other. I am not advocating the suppression of anger, only that it not be indiscriminately vomited. If a child is angry, the child is angry, but he needs to express it in ways that conclude in understanding and love. We’ve already discussed examples of accomplishing this, and there will be more. You’ll be loving and teaching your children just as I have been doing with you.

SCREENS

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that we would discuss three principles at this point to help us piece together all the other principles of parenting we’ve talked about so far. First was lovingandteaching. Then came our commitment to Zero Tolerance for anger—in ourselves and in our children. Now we address the third: the use of screens, which would include smart phones, televisions, computers, notebooks, video games, pornography, and on and on. I am certain that as you read this a great many other electronic devices and apps have been developed that have changed the meaning of “screen time” or “screen use.” These activities are evolving daily.

We human beings have succeeded in stopping the aggressions of invading nations around the world, we have conquered diseases that used to kill millions, we have traveled to the moon many times, we have sequenced the 3.2 billion base pairs in the human genome and used this knowledge in astonishing ways. And yet we are now confronted with a problem—no, more like a largely unseen mortal enemy—that threatens to destroy us while we EMBRACE it whole-heartedly.

We won’t address the solution to this problem at this point, but we will discuss the seriousness of this problem that has slipped under our radar and is literally filling the air with potentially lethal projectiles. Let me begin with a comparison, or metaphor.

One Thing Always Leads to Another

For decades, nearly everyone—even if you HAVE lived under a rock—has been keenly aware that smoking causes lung cancer. What we don’t know is that as recently as the year 1900 lung cancer was a rare disease, with no known cause. What happened?

At the turn of the 20^th century new technology facilitated the production of cigarettes on a large scale, advertising glamorized smoking, and during World Wars One and Two the U.S. government gave out free cigarettes with nearly every meal to every member of the military. The consequence of these and other factors was an exponential escalation of smoking.

Because nearly everyone appeared to be smoking—in the military, commercials, movies, homes, and offices—how could there be anything wrong with it? It was “normal.” And it was very cool. And it “relaxed” us. What could be wrong with that? Let’s look at how smoking increased over the years.

We’ll measure per capita cigarette consumption per year, which means the average number of cigarettes that would have been consumed by every adult in the country if they all had smoked:

There is another addiction spreading like wildfire throughout the world, especially in developed countries, an addiction that—like cigarettes—began innocently and inconspicuously but has led to severe and unanticipated effects. We did not see this deadly epidemic coming, so it surprised us even as it grew unnoticed right under our noses. It still is growing—rapidly.

In the past few decades, there has been a striking increase among young people in the incidence of entitlement, ADHD, anxiety, gaming addiction, disrespect toward parents, lack of connection with parents and with each other, depression, suicide, porn addiction, gambling, and more. THAT is the cancer, in this case many kinds of cancer. But what is the underlying cause? As with lung cancer, there are always multiple causes, but one cause sticks out brightly.

All of these unproductive, uncooperative, and harmful behaviors in children and teens began to increase strikingly—and have continued to grow—with the increase in the technology of electronics dedicated to communication and entertainment. Texting, sexting, audio and video calling, cyber bullying, video games, porn, social media, endless video streaming, and more are FUN and therefore remarkably effective in distracting our children from the pain of lacking the love of God in their lives, love they can potentially get directly from Him and by connecting emotionally and spiritually with us, their parents. As long as they are distracted by this carnival of carnality, they CANNOT feel either God’s love or ours. That’s a problem, and we’re not addressing it with anything approaching effectiveness.

AND the distractions of these many forms of screen addictions are temporary, so when our children intermittently return to the real world, they are not feasting on the pure love of Christ. They can’t feast, because their brains—and souls—are tuned to another channel, another bandwidth, another frequency, EVEN WHEN they’re not actually using their screens.

You’ve all experienced this as adults. You are completely occupied by one thought, problem, or activity, and when it ends, you can’t simply switch your brain and soul to the next thought or activity. You get deeper and deeper in your involvement with a thing—in a kind of rut or channel, which sometimes is necessary and good—so when it’s time to change course, you have to climb out of that channel before you can enter another. You require an adjustment period, and the more involved you were in the first thing, the more difficult it is to switch to the next, and the longer it takes.

Even when they’re away from their screens, our children’s brains are reset to channels that are not used by the Spirit. So their pain worsens, and the temporary pain reduction of their addictions becomes less effective—which is the case with all addictions—so what can they do now?

They use their addictions MORE and more, and the content of all that online material is specifically designed by designers to be more and more exciting. Eventually, kids can’t live without their multiple forms of entertainment—the very definition of addiction—nor do they have time or energy for schoolwork, interaction with the family, responsibilities around the house, creating and maintaining communication with the Spirit, and other elements of “real life.”

And if parents try to require responsibility or to limit the use of the addictive electronics, the reactions can be quite dramatic and defiant. And that is what entitlement is—a “disease” that is crippling a generation of children who are in pain, who are doing their best to reduce it by any available means, and who feel utterly justified in DEMANDING that they have access to their pleasures and addictions. Entitlement.

Children born in the years from 1995 to 2012—the iGen—have never lived without ready access to cell phones and video game boxes. It’s only natural that they turn to these artificial sources of excitement when they don’t have sufficient love and guidance. The kids who use these devices for many hours a day—as most do—kill themselves at a rate more than double the rate found in kids whose use of such devices is limited. These numbers are rising every year, and suicide is just ONE indicator of the overall emotional health of our children.

One expert in the field writes, “This new generation is defined by their technology and media use, their love of electronic communication, and their need to be entertained and artificially stimulated.” Note the use of the word “defined.” Increasingly, children don’t even know who they are without electronics, and they can’t live without these forms of stimulation. Then “one thing leads to another,” and before long—without anybody suspecting the cause—they’re emotionally crippled.

Then everyone is surprised when a child is defiant, failing school, constantly anxious and on medication, gets pregnant, has ADHD, becomes depressed, is cutting, or is addicted to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more. As parents we actually have the gall to be surprised when these common problem behaviors arise. I’m here to declare, to plead with people to see, that we have NO justification for surprise. Our children’s pain has been building for years, and they’ve been screaming their pain.

But now they have access to electronic devices that give them immediate relief, and all the screens are designed to keep them pacified and using. So they treat their pain in ways that appear to keep them quiet, and mostly we’re content with that. They’re not robbing banks or shooting people, so what’s the problem? Our standard for parental guidance has become low enough for snakes to crawl over after a heavy meal.

As with cigarettes, (1) electronic devices are popular, (2) the negative emotional effects are delayed, and (3) many companies make large sums of money selling them and denying their effects. And we are so blind to the incalculable energy being devoted to promoting this addiction.

Surely no parent would watch an eight-year-old child begin to smoke cigarettes without a warning of the severe risks of that behavior. Unthinkable. And yet with electronic devices, we stand by cluelessly and helplessly, while one thing leads to another. Can we afford to do that?

Can we afford to watch our children become emotionally and spiritually crippled because we ignored the many, many signs that they were treating their pain with screens? Do we realize that EVERY SINGLE TIME a child looks at a screen without us being there, we are inviting WHOEVER happens to show up on the screen to parent our children? And I promise you that those teachers, those surrogate parents—their peers, video games, porn sites, social media, adult predators, marketers of everything you could think of, and complete strangers—are NOT interested in helping our children “feast on the words of Christ.” (2 Nephi 32:3)

Statistics

I have no interest in alarming you about screen addiction. Fear is not a great motivator or teacher in the long-term. And we’ll be talking about responding to screen addiction in much more detail in a later chapter. But for now just be aware that we are astonishingly blind to what is going on in our children’s worlds, and we cannot lead them to Zion or to the tree of life as long as we remain deaf and blind. The world is very actively engaged in involving and enslaving your children. If you’re standing on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to teach, you’ve already lost, and so will they.

In a very popular mainstream magazine, a recent article stated that the average ADULT in the U.S. spent 13.5 hours per day looking at screens in March 2020—before all the isolation of COVID—a number that had increased by 3 hours and 20 minutes from only one year before. (Time magazine, Mar 17, 2021) The numbers for kids were worse. I want to raise my hand and ask a question: After all that screen time, what time is left? What time remains in a day to study or even sleep? What time remains to do any good in the world, much less to “draw near” to Him? (D&C 88:63)

A recent scientific article states that 50% of American adults now report they have zero close friends, down from two close friends just ten years ago. (Scientific American Mind, May‑June 2016, “Friendship: The Remarkable Power of Our Closest Connections.”) Zero, which is also a close reflection of the degree of genuine connection experienced by our children. And this disconnection is DIRECTLY related to the degree of false connection kids experience with people and avatars on screens.

40% of American teenagers are connected to a device within 5 minutes of waking up. 60% go to sleep with a device touching their body. Children aged two to six now spend four to six hours a day on screens. (Oh, and all these numbers continued to grow from the moment I wrote them down.) And all this screen time has PROVEN to affect the ways their young brains process the world, their interaction with others, and their concept of self. Despite these rather horrifying dangers, most parents make feeble attempts—at best—to limit their children’s screen time. It’s not enough, and we’ll be talking about this in detail.

For now it’s enough just to mention that all the abundant counsel I’ve read—in books, articles, professional journals—about managing screen time for children could be summarized with a single title for a possible article: “Learn to Teach Your Children How to Play with Their Pet Cobra.” Excuse me? How to play with a cobra? Sounds ridiculous, but we’re asking HOW to MANAGE the potential destruction that comes from screen time? Why are we playing with cobras or screens at all?

Toward the end of Nephi’s life, he warns us—you and me, today—of what we will be experiencing. He says, “There will be many who will say, Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die, and it will be well with us.” (2 Nephi 28:7) Allow me to put that in today’s language: “People will say, Oh, have fun and do whatever you want.” And that is exactly what people are doing today with screens. I have read scientists who have attempted to justify the use of screens, while making not a single reference to parents, love, or God. How can anyone describe the potential dangers of anything to children without referring to the love of God?

Nephi adds, “They have all gone out of the true way. They have become corrupted.” (2 Nephi 28:11) To corrupt means to defile or pollute that which once was good, and again that describes what screens have done in this world. Every evil and impure idea and practice, which in times past might have failed to take root, now flourishes instantly and widely—almost universally—for an audience eager to be entertained, excited, and distracted from the emptiness of their lives.

Nephi concludes this particular train of thought by saying, “they have all gone off the path (that’s US), except a few, who are the humble followers of Christ; but even they wander after the ways of men.” (2 Nephi 28:14) And where are the “ways of men” taught with greater abandon and less restraint than on screens? But still we allow our children to “wander”—without guidance—in the gardens of delights and potential destruction.

Alma spoke to his son and to all of us when he said, “Don't allow yourself to be led away by vain or foolish things.” (Alma 39:11) I’m proposing that in the Bible Dictionary under “vain and foolish” there should be a photo of a smartphone.

Isaiah saw the last days—our day—and spoke of us when he said, “Their land is full of ... treasures ... and chariots (cars, planes). [And] they worship the work of their own hands, made by their own fingers.” (2 Nephi 12:7) Have you ever watched the fingers of a child dancing around a phone or a game controller, worshiping the work of their own hands? Isaiah described us well.

Alma said to his people, “All you who want to follow the voice of the good shepherd, come away from the wicked, and be separate, and don't touch their unclean things.” (Alma 5:57) I suggest that had he been asked, he would have said to the parents of our day, “If you want your children to follow the voice of the good shepherd, lead them away from the wicked, guide them not to touch the polluted things of the world, and help them to be separate from the world.” Screens ARE the world.

Our children now have the voices of the world screaming—quite literally—in their ears, separating them from the tree of life and renting them rooms in the great and spacious building. We must act so that they do not become as the generation immediately after King Benjamin, children who also grew up to be “separate” in their lack of faith, no longer believing in the “tradition of their fathers” and lost in the “hardness of their hearts.” (Mosiah 26:1-4)

WHY DO WE ALLOW THIS?

The dangers of screens are AT LEAST as obvious—and apparent in a shorter time—than the dangers of smoking. So how are we missing this epidemic, which makes physical illnesses look insignificant by comparison?

Earlier I said that some contributing reasons for our blindness are the popularity of screens, the delayed effects of screens on our children, and the huge vested interests of companies that make billions of dollars from the use of screens. But those are not the primary cause of our blindness as parents. Not even close.

We fail to see the problems inherent in screen use primarily because we don’t WANT to see them. We have a strong investment in our children being happy. That’s potentially good, but if we lack the pure love of Christ, we don’t know how to help them toward “happy,” and then we make the only choice we can see: We create the APPEARANCE—if only in our own minds—of them being happy. We pacify them with devices and declare that condition “happiness.”

We deceive ourselves because of our need to feel good about ourselves as parents. And, as I mentioned in Chapter Four, by definition self-deception is always unconscious. We don’t know we’re doing it, which is WORSE, because now we can’t correct it. So we add layers of deception and justification, and in no time at all we have made the threat disappear from our minds. We have immersed ourselves in HOW to manage screens instead of questioning whether they should be used at all outside of rather obvious positive circumstances—family history, school work (supervised), scriptures, and other uses that easily come to mind.

Once we have identified what we WANT—the outcome—the self-deception begins. Rather than turning to the Father saying, “Let thy will be done,” we define our own wills—that our children will like us, for example, which makes real parenting impossible. We want to see their smiles when we give them gifts, which is far easier than learning to love them and teach them the saving principles of the gospel and of life. We have no idea how to love them unconditionally, so we indulge them instead.

Now that the self‑deception has begun, then we have FAITH that we can achieve those outcomes, and we dedicate ourselves to gathering evidence that we’re reaching our goal. We succumb to what scientists call confirmation bias. We gather only the information that confirms the goodness or truth of what we want to believe. And that’s the end of growth and the death of repentance, bypassing our eligibility for the saving grace of the mercy of Jesus Christ found in His Atonement.

Let’s make all this simple and obvious:

We want our children to be happy.

The more we understand faith, the more effective it becomes. The more we act on faith in the right principles, the greater our faith grows.

Self-deception is seductive and soul-crushing. It is the purpose of this Training to help us find the love and the knowledge and other people to help us out of self-deception and to find the path that leads to eternal life, for us and for our children.

EPIGENETICS

One more thought in this chapter that serves to connect principles to practices: epigenetics. We briefly mentioned this in Chapter Two.

For many years we have known that we get our DNA—what makes us tall, short, blond, dark, smart, not—from each of our parents. The nucleotides, especially the nitrogen bases of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, don’t change. In very recent years, we have learned that our genes don’t just sit there and mindlessly express themselves in the creation of enzymes, structural proteins, fatty acids, and the other million cellular functions occurring in any given moment. No, the entire DNA double-helix is wrapped around and covered by clusters of proteins which can CONTROL whether a given gene can express itself—whether the gene turns on or not. These proteins all together are called the EPIgenome, epi meaning above, on, over, or making up the outside of, in this case the outside of the genome, or the strands of DNA.

To be clear, suppose that you have a gene that allows you—neurologically, hormonally, chemically—to respond more calmly and productively than average to stressful situations. What a great gene that would be, and it turns out that such genes DO exist—proven in mice and in humans. But the epigenome can TURN OFF that gene, which IN EFFECT creates a condition where you don’t even HAVE that gene. So you CAN have the gene that makes you resilient to stress, but your epigenome can turn it OFF. Wow, that’s a huge thing to learn.

We’re not done. It turns out that what we EXPERIENCE can CHANGE the epigenome—not the DNA but the protein coating—which means that how we think, what we’re taught, the trauma and fears we experience, can turn off genes we might need, or turn them on, or turn on genes we don’t want to express themselves. It has been demonstrated that how mice and humans are treated can change their epigenome during their lifetime, which changes the expression of DNA, which changes how they behave and respond to circumstances. AND that change—caused by environment, including how much love a child receives—can be passed on to the children and grandchildren of the people whose epigenome was changed.

Let’s be practical: If your parents were raised in emotionally stressful circumstances, where pain and helplessness were dominant, that very likely changed their epigenome to the point where they became LESS able to deal with stress. They can pass that on to you, so you’re less able to deal with stress. Horrifying.

Ah, but now YOU can be loved and taught to the point where you can change YOUR epigenome and TURN ON the DNA that allows you to respond more productively to stress. Miraculous. And that’s what you and I are doing RIGHT NOW. I am loving and teaching you so that you can (1) learn more choices, and (2) feel loved, and—now we know, incredibly—(3) your very cell structure (epigenome) can change and make you far more powerful in making more loving choices. Freakishly cool. And you can pass that on to your children who are yet unborn, and you can change the epigenome of your living children as you TREAT THEM DIFFERENTLY.

In the words of one leader in the field, Moshe Szyf, “Epigenetics will have a dramatic impact on how we understand history, sociology, human behavior, everything.”

Your genes affect who you are—to be sure—but now we know that your thoughts are constantly impacting your genes. And you are here right now learning principles and experiencing feelings that are changing your thoughts and your judgments, which in turn changes your feelings even more. You are changing the mechanisms that are turning on and off thousands of little switches on your DNA.

Years ago I watched a movie based on the actual writings of Ibn Fadlan, an Arab, who traveled in the 900s AD with Scandinavian traders in Russia. In the movie, a Viking chieftain recites a prayer with all his men, just before he dies:

Lo, there do I see my father.

Lo, there do I see my mother, my sisters and my brothers.

Lo, there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning.

Lo, they do call to me.

They bid me take my place on Asgard in the halls of Valhalla,

Where the brave may live forever

Although the references to Asgard and Valhalla are colored with culture, he beautifully describes the eternal connection to our forefathers and mothers. We are a product of their cultures, their times, and their individual decisions. And now, as we grow in the power that can come only from love, they are proud of us. They rejoice that we have found the joy that eluded so many of them. We need never condemn them for their failures but instead would benefit most from a deep and overwhelming gratitude for all they did to make our present loving experiences possible.

We stand on their shoulders. We are enriched by the elevation of our gaze to include all those people. We are all connected more than we could know. We’re loaded with epigenetic effects. We’re affected by things we don’t remember or understand. By things we didn’t cause, by events and decisions and circumstances we were not even present for. Our children and their children are similarly connected to us.

That could all be quite discouraging, if we see the “traditions of our fathers” only as liabilities, which often they are. But now we know that we can CHOOSE to change our choices and change the epigenetic effects of uncounted generations before and after us. Let us begin today to make those exalting changes today, for ourselves and for our children.