Children love your parents

Proverbs 23:22 (NLT)

Listen to your father, who gave you life, and don’t despise your mother when she is old.

This proverb tells us that we should honor our father when we as a child are under his authority. A mother’s love for their child is a great love. She spends hours a day caring for the child, seeing to its needs and ensuring the child is cared for. Therefore just because we have become independent adults is no reason to let go of our love for our parents and despise them for they did they best they knew how to do.

Sheila Kissinger, a social anthropologist, writes in her book, Ourselves as Mothers: "Becoming a mother is a biological process, but it is also a social transformation, and one of the most dramatic and that a woman may experience. The home is supposed to be a haven of love and good feelings. Thus it comes as a great disappointment to many women when it proves not to be so for them. For home is also a place where the ugliest and most destructive emotions are experienced, where there is disturbing interpersonal conflict, and inside four walls these raw feelings are concentrated and mixed together as if in a pressure cooker. She hates what she has become. Happy as a woman may be to have a baby, and although she may enjoy being a mother, she must now pay the price of motherhood the total and virtual annihilation of self."

Being a parent can be a tough job. Often it means sacrificing a lifelong dream to become the caretakers of your children. And where do you find the training for this job? You learned things from your father and mother; if you were fortunate enough to have both a father and a mother.  Even then our parents were not perfect so some of the things we learned were flawed. And unfortunately those flaws can carry from generation to generation. We may have learned from books, but that doesn’t mean we can always apply what we have learned and integrate it into our lives. No, life is trial and error. It is hoping to do the best, it is trying to give a great effort, but it is also realizing there are times we will fail. And when we fail we try to make our failure right.

Through it all God is teaching you and your children. You may do something that one day your child comes to resents something you have always resented in your life. Just maybe they will break the cycle of a generational flaw and pass new hopes to their children. Maybe they can learn a new way to handle emotions, problems and such to take care of their life and do it according to how God would have them act. Children listen to your father, who gave you life, and don’t despise your mother when she is old for they both have their love for you.