That’s not fair!!

Every parent has heard it. The whining. The complaining. The attempts to manipulate the situation.

The younger children think it is not fair that the older children have more freedom and more responsibilities. The older children think it is not fair that the younger children don’t have the same expectations and still get to do “baby” stuff. Funny how neither the older children nor the younger children think you are treating them fairly.

When did we buy into the idea that everything has to be “fair” when we parent children. Our children think “fair” means that we treat every child in exactly the same way. As parents we know that we need to treat each of our children differently based on their individual personalities, their skills, and their needs. The fair way to treat children is to give every one of them an equally good chance of getting to heaven based on our parenting.

When our children whine about how life is not fair, it is perfectly okay to tell them that life is not fair. If life were fair, Adam and Eve never would have sinned and we would all be in the Garden of Eden. After all, it’s not really fair that all people are paying the price for Adam and Eve’s sin.

Life isn’t fair and when children expect life to be fair, they get angry when it doesn’t seem fair to them. Children cope better when they know it is a world filled with sin and fallen people, rather than expecting perfect people and perfect situations.

As a parent, it is perfectly okay to say, “You’re right. That’s not fair. Life is not fair.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.