Kids CRAVE Consistency!

Thought for the day. How consistent are you with your children? Do you tell them "no" on one day, but another day give in to the temper tantrums? Do you tell kids in your church, "No talking" and then allow quick little tidbits "as long as they are funny and relevant?" Kids crave consistency even if they don't realize it.

I was at Wal-mart the other day, and this little girl was trying to push the cart, but she was going slow and getting in everyone's way. The Dad stood up and said, "Alright, you have three more seconds to get the hang of it today. There's people waiting to get through." He counted to three, and then the little girl shrieked and started crying. So he threw his hands up and backed off.

It may not make the kids immediately happy, and they may even throw a little fit, but you can not give in to a child like that. Especially as a parent or within your children's ministry. I was horrible with this at first when I started out as Children's Pastor. I had my four rules.

1)No Walking
2)No Talking
3)You Should Know Better Than That
4)Have Fun

However, with rule #2, I didn't realize it, but I would allow kids to break it all the time. It's a smaller group that allows for some group discussion at points, but kids would interrupt me with something funny and somewhat relevant to what I was talking about, but I didn't want to stifle creativity or make a kid feel bad even though their joke might have been super lame.
However, this started to backfire after a while. Kids would then start interrupting me for more and more mindless idle chitchat and next thing you knew, kids were just completely disregarding the rule.

You make one exception, you're actually making a chain link of exceptions, so I learned anyway.

So now rule #2 is NO TALKING. If you have something important to say, raise your hands, and a volunteer will check to see if it's worth interrupting the service for. If it's not, then you can wait until after the service to give me your funny anecdote. If it's important to note, then the volunteer will step back and let the kid keep raising his/her hand and I'll know then that this is important, but usually it's never important enough to interrupt my service.

This can apply to parents too. If you tell your child that you are going to count to three, you'd better have a consequence by the time you get to three or your child will know that from there out they can call your bluff.

Take some time and leave some tips in the comments section! What are some good parenting tips you have in constructive discipline and consistency with your children?