Training Our Children

Prov 22:6 says "Train up a child, in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
I like to watch various court cases on YouTube because I find the judicial system interesting and how laws vary from state to state. Disclaimer: I discovered over the weekend that some cases are fake after looking up a case between a mother and daughter one particular court show that seemed rather "off" and discovered they were scripted  almost word per word from the 1959 movie  "Imitation of  Life" but that's not the topic of this post.

One of the shows I've been watching in the past week has been Judge Judy. Judge Judy Schedlin is a very tough judge and it would be hard for anyone to pull the wool over her eyes. She's served in criminal and family court.
Lately the cases I've watched have been ones involving teens and their parents. In almost all the cases, the parent denies any wrongdoing from their son or daughter. They believe what their teen has told them which usually a lie and after much probing from Judge Judy(and she is good at it too) the teen will fess up to the truth. The teen is left embarrassed. The parents are embarrassed and ashamed. Then there are the parents who after all the evidence proves their teen is at fault, they want to blame the plaintiff. e.g. "If she didn't let me drive her car I wouldn't have wrecked it."" He/she gave me beer so that's why I got drunk."(Excuses!)

I'm left wondering why weren't these teens and in some cases young adults trained as children to know right from wrong? Raising children is hard but I do know we as Christian parents need to raise them in the ways of the Lord. There is no 100%  guarantee they will stay in the faith or not get into trouble with the law. We need to know that we did our best in raising our children with godly values. We need to constantly pray for them that they will make right choices when they are adults and stay grounded in the Word of God.
 But I do believe children who are raised in godly homes are less likely to get into trouble with the law than those that are not.
 At church on Sunday our pastor put up this quote by A.W. Pink "We are ever so prone to regard sin lightly, to gloss over it's hideousness, to make excuses for it."
Ladies those are chilling words. Parents need to stop making excuses. Discipline them when they need it! Spend time with them and pray with them. Watch who they hang out with and monitor their use of social media.

That's all I have to say on this subject. I just needed to talk about this subject because there are far too many young people getting into trouble with the law.