166
After she had calmed down a little, I asked Shannon how she
and Gerald normally disciplined Robby.
“Well, we don’t want to alienate Robby, or quench his
spirit,” Gerald began. “Being negative is so.. .so.. .negative. So
we try to reason with him. Sometimes we’ll warn him that ‘you
won’t get ice cream tonight.’ Sometimes we try to praise good
things he does. And sometimes we try to ignore the bad behav-
ior. Then maybe he’ll stop it.”
“Doesn’t he push the limits?”
Both parents nodded. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Shannon
said. “It’s like he doesn’t hear us. He keeps on doing what he
jolly well pleases. And generally, he’ll keep it up until one of us
explodes and yells at him. I guess we just have a problem child.”
“Well, there’s certainly a problem,” I replied. “But perhaps
Robby has been trained to not respond to anything but out-of-
control rage. Let’s talk about boundaries and kids....”
Of all the areas in which boundaries are crucially important,
none is more relevant than that of raising children. How we
approach boundaries and child rearing will have enormous
impact on the characters of our kids. On how they develop val-
ues. On how well they do in school. On the friends they pick. On
whom they marry. And on how well they do in a career.
The Importance of Family
God, at his deepest level, is a lover (1 John 4:8). He is rela-
tionally oriented and relationally driven. He desires connection
with us from womb to tomb: “I have loved you with an everlast-
ing love” (Jer. 31:3). God’s loving nature isn’t passive. It’s active.
Love multiplies itself. God the relational Lover is also God the
aggressive Creator. He wants to fill up his universe with beings
who care for him—and for each other.
The family is the social unit God invented to fill up the world
with representatives of his loving character. It’s a place for nurtur-
ing and developing babies until they’re mature enough to go out of
the family as adults and to multiply his image in other surroundings.
Boundaries