A BBC program called "The world's strictest parents" takes out-of-control teenagers and places them for a couple of weeks in very strict families to be turned around. In the first episode some English kids stayed with an American Christian family. I was greatly struck by that family's policy on honesty. The family knew that the most important thing for the father was that they were honest with their parents. One of their sons saw one of the visiting children do something wrong and just said, "You do realise I have to tell my father what you've done? It would be terrible to set up a secret within the family".

Anyway, it really inspired me to aim high. At the moment my four year olds will do something wrong and then hide it or lie about it and we do our best to train them into a more godly way, but we're SO FAR from what I saw in that American family that I wonder how on earth to achieve it. I'm reminded about a quote from Luther I read (but not authenticated) that was something like "When you sin, sin boldly", which has also been inspiring me. It will set my children up very well if they are used to confessing their sin in repentance without hesitation.

1) I've always been careful to never hide it from my children when I do something wrong and indeed I go out of my way to tell them so they see it's OK to admit to doing something wrong. I need to do the same with other people, not just with my children.

2) I was thinking for when they're a bit older (maybe 8 years old) we can have weekly meetings where we will go round the family and tell each other our sins from the week. This would be so that they end up comfortable confessing and appropriating forgiveness.

3) Show strongly I'm upset when they do hide what they've done wrong. Be more upset at the hiding than at the wrong itself.

Has anyone here got a family where total honesty reigns? If so how did you do it?

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Paul
No denomination, affiliated with FIEC
"Deliver me from worldly dispositions, for I am born from above and destined for glory" - Valley of Vision
"They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation" - Peter

Interesting. Yes, I'm a stickler for honesty myself. I won't say that total honesty reigns all the time, but that certainly is the goal.

I always think the best way to achieve it in a family is to make it worthwhile. People learn to lie when the lie benefits them. They tell the truth when telling the truth is the better option. Consequences are always far less in our household for telling the truth. I can't totally remove consequences, because I don't want to set up the 'I-can-do-whatever-I-want-and-then-tell-Mom-and-she-can't-punish-me' situation. But my kids all know that the bigger sin is always telling a lie, and that it will bring swifter and harsher punishment. I'm always careful to differentiate in those situations. THIS punishment is for not cleaning your room, and THIS one is for telling Mom you cleaned your room when you didn't.

The other thing that is important is not to lie yourself (I'm not saying that you do, but this is just generic). If you tell your kid that you will take him or her to the store to spend their allowance on Tuesday, and then Tuesday rolls around and you don't feel like it, you are still obligated to go (unless something seriously preventative happens--car accident, illness, etc). Stand by your word. Don't make promises that you don't keep. Hold yourself to the same standard that you demand of your children in regard to honesty.

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Caroline
OPC
Schenectady, NY
Blog: The Unlikely Calvinist

Rev. Dean, I am not sure that the goal should be 'extreme honesty' as witnessed in this program but rather biblical integrity of heart that can walk honestly before God and can distinguish what needs to be confessed to man. I would not class all sins even in little children in the second class, and I think the goal of teaching honesty in a family setting is to teach most of all the relief and goodness of confession to God, and the wisdom and discernment (and guts!) of knowing when and how to confess to men.

Personally I am not sure why it would be imagined that a child in whom the Holy Spirit has not worked integrity and conscientiousness would feel more comfortable confessing sins in front of the whole family than to a parent privately. This would have only made me more uncomfortable telling the truth than I already was as an unregenerate child. I would imagine it would be more helpful to establish in every possible way a bond of trust with each child so that they know they can come to you, as we know we can come to our Heavenly Father, and that you will respond as our Father does in pity even when discipline is required. I would also expect that the more this analogy serves to teach a child about God, the less the parent might hear about some facts of a child's sinfulness: as we grow in grace we understand that God can deal with our sins in the Cross adequately, and that confessing some things to anyone else can only hurt other people and can rectify no wrong towards them.

Personally I am also not sure about always encouraging one brother or sister with either a tender conscience or perhaps a self righteous and gossipy spirit to feel responsible to divulge every bad deed of his brothers or sisters. Some things are not our business or ought to be covered in love, and this needs to be taught in a family too. Again part of teaching about this is teaching how we are to discern what sins of others need to be told, and how to go about doing that (it would be better to encourage the sibling to tell themselves, or help them to tell in some way if possible) We had the 'lighter punishment for telling about offenses' rule growing up too: the conscientious one of us would have told in any case, and in our family it only served to make the rest of us suspect her motives. I don't know that such explicit rules are necessary when discipline in a family is not about courtroom style justice anyway, so punishments can be tempered in each situation to helping each child learn about righteousness, and how to fight against sin.

Personally I would be wary of comparison with other families. Often the children learn in this way not that they should be approved of God, but should be just as good as other people. I think teaching integrity to fallen hearts (something that will only be effectual as the Holy Spirit makes it so) will look different from family to family (varying even by things like whether people are introverts or extroverts) and from child to child. I pray God will bless your efforts in your family.

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Heidi
Indianapolis, Indiana

Patience must dwell with Love, for Love and Sorrow
Have pitched their tent together here:
Love all alone will build a house tomorrow,
And sorrow not be near. -Christina Rossetti

PS. Just wanted to add anecdotally that I grew up lying despite very strict rules about honesty and severe punishments. I struggled with habitual dishonesty after my conversion (at 16), and the thing that helped me most of all was when my kind mom, who would never even think an uncharitable thought about me if she could avoid it, finally told me after she caught me in yet another lie one day that she couldn't trust me anymore. She wasn't angry, she was sad; and there was actually no punishment involved, just knowing that I had destroyed something I didn't know how to fix. That broke my heart and I repented and God used it to change me; but if she had been the sort of mother who willingly thought evil or said such things in anger etc. it would never have had such an effect on me: I knew how it hurt her to even think such a thing, and how it was long past due if she found it necessary to say so.

dr_parsley;

I don't know that total honesty reigns but, we are a pretty honest bunch..my kids for the most part feel compelled to tell me when they do something..

They know lying brings a harsher discipline and they will have to rebuild the trust that was lost by telling the lie. They don't like having to rebuild the trust, because they know it's not going to be an easy road..so they have learned since they were younger they'd rather suffer the consequences of the wrong done..than having to rebuild the trust that was broken by lying.

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Bobbi Clark
Covenant Member
Pinewood Pres. (PCA) Middleburg

When I kept Silent, My bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. Psalm 32:3

Depending on the personality and condition of the child that sort of programmatic attempt to develop openness across a whole family could easily lead into:
Hypocrisy (in revealing things that are "OK" to have fallen in, or in revealing things that multiple children were engaged in in order to lessen the punishment)
Sentimentality (in making them think that families have to be all up in one another's business and that privacy is somehow evil)
Stupidity (in not learning to value the virtue of discretion)
Tattling (in that covering for a sibling creates a secret within the family - which also tends to the destruction of loyalty among siblings)
Self-righteousness (in that as one who has confessed openly I am plainly better than the person who held back that really bad thing they did)
Making up sins in order to fit in (whether that functions as being cool, not being perceived as too proud to admit there's a problem, or however, and whether it stems from honest lack of ability to remember or just simple embarrassment)
Providing siblings with fodder for merciless teasing (because if you have a tender heart you will reveal what you most wished to conceal, and your older siblings will pick up on that)
Provoking children to wrath through constant humiliation (in that such obligatory frankness leaves them with no inward privacy, and if they are the lone hard-hearted one, or the lone introvert, or the lone liar, they will tend to hate and despise their other family members for their mewling stupidity or intrusive inquisitiveness)

__________________
Ruben
Moderator
F.P.C.I.
Indiana

Vanities and disguises have covered us, and thereby we are naked; licenciousness hath inflam'd us, and thereby we are frozen; voluptuousness hath fed us, and thereby we are sterved, the fancies and traditions of men have taught and instructed us, and thereby we are ignorant.
John Donne

Board Rules - Signature Requirements - Suggestions?

Calvinistas Conversando
Teología en Mexico
The Howling Wilderness

Thanks for that. How I envisage it working is that upon confession, we give thanks and call on the Lord. I want to teach them what one does when one sins. i.e. never hide it but take it straight to the Lord, confess to whom we have sinned against, nail it to the cross with grief. If they can get that right from a younger age than I did (if I yet have), then it will have a huge impact on their ability to withstand temptation and appropriate gospel grace.

Of course I must remember that I don't care so much about their behaviour as I do about their standing with God. But how we react to occasions of falling down, can lead us to getting strong legs through always standing straight back up, or alternatively getting used to crawling on the floor.

I don't know what the exact format of the meetings I suggested might be, and I'm open to alternative suggestions, but the overall atmosphere of the family should be supernaturally gracious and forgiving, focused on the gospel rather than the law, but letting the law drive us to fellowship with Christ in humility. I tend to be very intentional about a lot of things in life, and I want to be intentional about how to achieve that aim for my children; to encourage the production of not only Christians, but exceptionally strong Christians.

Anyway, here's praying

Dear Rev. Dean (I keep wanting to call you Rev. Parsley!),

I'm so glad to read your desire that your children would call on the Lord in their sins and know His forgiveness and acceptance. My own suggestion would be though, not to hold the meetings. I see no precedent for such meetings as means to promote that end, and no requirement that private sins should be confessed to everyone: to require such a thing is to actually go beyond the law of Love, and that can only be legalistic no matter what kind of atmosphere one is trying hard to promote.

Also with Ruben, I do not think that mandatory public confession would promote an atmosphere of honesty for a dishonest child, or help an honest child learn trust or relief of confessing his faults; and when we learn to confess sins we are learning to trust a Person.

As to what you say about strong Christians, that is a noble desire. However I don't believe that you can produce strong Christians by any amount of intention; and I don't believe that one's idea of what constitutes an 'exceptional' Christian life should go beyond the requirements of God. Often the extrabiblical things parents do to try to produce super spirituality wind up militating against it. It was precious to me this past Father's Day to have my dad tell me that the only 'expectation' he wants me to meet is to stand robed in Christ's righteousness. Christ has met my dad's expectations. Children need not to be given burdens in that area that are too heavy to be borne.

I believe that a relationship with each of your children that has earned their trust will be of far more value in teaching honesty; and from what I have read here you seem to want that sort of relationship with each of them. If I can speak as someone who was once a child :-) they need to be able to trust you, as I trusted my mother, to cover their sins in love. One cannot produce an atmosphere of grace and willing confidences where it does not exist: and if you are gracious and your children are willing to confess their faults to you, they will do so without public meetings. If your children learn to confess faults to each other where they have sinned against each other, and to forgive where they have been offended, that will be far more Christian than learning details about each other's fallen nature that have no bearing on them.

I hope this is not offensive: I have some experience with extra-biblical practices intended to produce super spiritually that have gone badly wrong, so it's difficult for me not to feel that such things however well meant can be damaging in their effect. I think God best understands our consciences and how to keep them and believe one should seek never to bind a child's conscience to more than what Scripture requires for confession and forgiveness of sins. God bless your desire for your childrens' spiritual good, give you wisdom to best help them in that regard, and bless your family.

I think Heidi is absolutely right on this point. I'm all for promoting honesty and I think discipline should be set up in such a way that it acknowledges and rewards honesty, but parents should be very very careful to avoid humiliating their children via public confession or any other means. Whatever the intent is for the attitude to be gracious and forgiving, I'm not certain that would turn out to be the case (siblings have long memories). Even under best endeavors, it is a plan that simply runs too high a risk of 'provoking the children to wrath'.

Question: Supposing you lusted after a woman other than their mother at some point during the week. Would you confess this to your children during these meetings? Would it be wise to confess it to them? I would say no, that you should keep quiet and confess only to God and perhaps also your wife and not to burden your children or fill their minds with speculation about sins that do not involve them. The point here is that there is a difference between honesty and gossip. Some things may be true, but they just aren't everyone's business. Respect your children's right to privacy, just as you would ask that they respect yours. And this also is a good lesson for them--that we do not need to know everyone's business or get entangled in situations that do not concern us.

I think children should be expected to confess their sins to God and to the one they offended. Beyond that, it can only harm, not help. And trying to force it may embitter them.

The general rule of thumb that I go by with these ideas is to stop and ask myself whether this is the sort of plan that sounds like something that may be a story that they tell when they grow up that begins with the words, "You'll never believe what my parents made me do." That has halted me in several plans that seemed like a good idea at first in my mind.

Truth telling was a key element of our child raising - is now in our relationship with our grandchildren. Several wonderful suggestions have been made about perspective and process. I'd like to offer a tidbit on purpose.

God is the God of truth - or true truth as "the FAS" used to say. Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:17,18 We are to consider and reflect God's character as His children. We are to revere and persevere in the truth as His servants. We are to practice and promote telling the truth as His ambassadors. Acts 5 teaches the truth of rebellion in this area, "You have not lied to men but 'to God.'" v. 4, ESV

We did and do our best to share and show that Scripture needs to be the foundation and motivation for the attitudes and behavior of God's chosen ones. The above truths were discussed many times during our hands-on parenting season. They continue to be part of our ongoing ministry. A concordance study has brought the point home to many over the years. Jesus is in charge of the fruit.

__________________
Sandra, Lady of the Lake
CBA, Acton ME
http://www.viewsfromthedeck.blogspot.com

Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:16