All I needed to do was to quietly help her. So with my hand in hers, we started picking up blocks. I wasn’t doing it for her, I was helping her. She was saying, “Leave me alone. I’ll do it myself.” That’s okay, so I left her alone. As soon as I left her alone, she took off for the closet. That’s resistance. So I had to go and get her and drag her back into the living room, and keep helping her. Finally, she said, “Leave me alone. I’ll do it myself.” This time she just stood there watching me do it. That’s no good. I wasn’t going to do her job for her, but I was willing to help her.

With my hand in hers, we picked up the blocks; and when we were finished, she looked up at me and she said, “I’m going home and I’m going to tell my mother on you, and I am never ever going to come back.” She gave me one final dirty look, and away she went. Do you know that little girl liked to play at our house? Her mother described her this way, she said, “We are raising a juvenile delinquent.” All the rest of us on the block agreed. She was a nasty kid, but she did like our house.

Now what she would do on the sidewalk, for instance, if she wanted a tricycle, she would knock the kid off the tricycle and say, “Give me the tricycle.” That’s the way she was. Now at her house, she couldn’t find any boundaries. If she yelled loud enough, or if she cried long enough, if she made herself obnoxious enough long enough, she could always end up getting what she wanted.

Now that poor little kid was lost. It’s as though you walk up to a wall and lean up against the wall and the wall collapses. Now that would make you pretty uneasy, wouldn’t it? That poor little girl couldn’t find any boundaries at her house, and that’s why she liked our house because there were boundaries there. That’s what little children need, they need limits. They really need limits. Fair, reasonable, as few as possible, and what the limits should be should be the considered united judgment of a man and his wife.

Whenever you set limits, you can expect the people affected to resist those limits. I’m a business man, we have a bunch of employees (about three hundred employees in our business), and we have among those people twenty-two employees who don’t work. They don’t work at all. Do you know what their job is? Their job is to make sure that the rest of the people work.

Do you realize that it takes twenty-two people to make the rest of those people work? Now mind you, we’re not talking about children, we’re talking about people that we pay. They agreed to do a certain kind of a job. You don’t expect people when you hire them to just go ahead and do the job.

Any of you that work, you expect to have a supervisor don’t you? Now why? When can you tell an individual, when can you come to an agreement with a person that they will do a particular thing, and you can expect them to do without checking up on them? It doesn’t happen. Anybody that’s in a business world, anybody that wants something done, knows that you have to have supervision because people tend to go their own way.

That’s what it says in Isaiah 53:6. It says, “All of us like sheep have gone astray.” We’ll stray away from our own limits. We have gone everyone to his own way. Now you can see that tendency to go your own way full blown and very obvious in little children, and little children will test your limits.

I was in an airport one time, and in wandered this big lady. She was as wide as this thing and tall, six feet. She came waddling in with this little bitty preschool child, and that child really looked small beside that lady. She eased herself into one of those airport chairs, and the little child started wandering away. This lady had kind of a deep bass voice, and she said to that child, “You come back here.” That child didn’t pay any attention to that great big lady, kept wandering away, and the lady said, “Come here I said.” That child felt perfectly secure, that big lady wasn’t about to budge out of that chair.

Now there are a lot of us that realize that, do we not? In the business world we have a term that says the employee will do what the boss inspects not what he expects. It’s the same way in parent-child relations. The child will do what you inspect not what you expect. You can expect your children to resist you. When our children were small, we had to make a choice, whether we would raise grass or children in our backyard, and we decided that we would raise children instead of grass.

We discovered that if you want children in your backyard, you won’t have much competition, and the neighbors weren’t competing for the children. So quite often, there they were in our backyard. We liked that because then we knew where our children were and we could keep an eye on them.

I was standing there one day watching these children play in the backyard, and across the ether waves comes this voice. There is one of these I suppose in every neighborhood. It sounded something like this : “Jooohhnnneee!” Johnny kept right on playing, and the second time and the third time comes this voice, everybody in the neighborhood could hear it and one of the kids even said, “Hey Johnny don’t you know your mother’s calling you?” He said, “I don’t need to go yet.” Then pretty soon you hear this voice, “Johnny!!” and away he went. His mother had two voices and he knew perfectly well that when his mother used that first voice she wasn’t about to do anything about it except make a lot of noise.

Now a lot of children realize that if we can adjust to mother’s screaming we can do anything we want. Children don’t need to be yelled at, children need to be helped.

I’ve had mothers say to me, “How do you get your children to go to bed?”

I say, “Well what do you do?”

They say, “Well I say, wouldn’t you like to go to bed now?”

You know you don’t want to order them do you? Kids don’t like to be ordered so you want to make them want to, and so you say, “Wouldn’t you like to go to bed?”

The answer is inevitable isn’t it? “No.”

Now how do you get a child to bed? The simplest way that I know is to scoop her up and plunk her into bed. That’s help. You can beg these little children, and as long as you want to beg, they’ll let you beg. I said to a lady one time or she asked me, “How do you get a small child dressed?”

Here’s this big lady and this little child, and what she would do in the morning was to approach the little child and say, “Don’t you want to put your dress on?”

The little child looks up at that big lady and says, “No.”

I think sometimes these little kids get a real big kick out of what happens to these big ladies.

She said, “I say to the little girl, if you put the dress on, you can have some breakfast.”

“I don’t want any breakfast.”

“Well if you put the dress on; you can play with these toys.”

“I don’t want to play with any toys.”

How do you get a dress on this little girl? Of course I’m a pro and I should know these things, stuff her into it. It just saves you all kinds of trouble, all kinds of time. What the child needs is a little help, that’s all.

Now you see what I’m saying? If you don’t understand human nature, and what is human nature like? - “All of us like sheep have gone astray and we have gone everyone unto our own way, ” - that’s the most normal, natural thing there is, is to want to do something the way you want to do it, if you’re going to have something done. That is, the child is that way. That child wants to do what that child wants to do, and they’re persistent, really persistent. I think I used this illustration once before, I want to use it again about our son. We had a rule that said before you come down in the morning, make your bed.

Just as sure as morning came, he would come bounding down the stairs and he would hit the bottom step and you would hear my wife call out, “Dick?”

“Yep.”

“Did you make your bed?”

“Nope."

“Then go on upstairs and make your bed.”

He would plod plod upstairs to make his bed.

How long do you have to tell a fellow to make his bed before he does it automatically? Twenty years. We often said that if that fellow ever got that kind of persistence directed in a positive way, he would sure go places.

It turned out that way, too. That’s why you have to supervise people in a business. How long do you supervise people? As long as you have your business open. How long do you have to help people overcome resistance? That’s no problem to you if you will accept the fact of resistance and that’s just the way it is. If you have the responsibility for getting something done, then it’s a matter, first of all, of setting limits.

That’s a job for you and your partner to agree on. Setting the limits and then you spend the rest of your time helping your children overcome their resistance to those limits. How do you get them to want to keep the limits? I don’t know. That’s not our job. What limits do they want to keep? That’s not the question.

The question is: What, in your judgment, in your considered judgment between you and your partner, is in the best interest of your children, and what are the reasonable limits that have to be carried out? They should be reasonable, reasonable according to your judgment, and not according to theirs.