Selfishness seems prevalent in our society today. No matter where you turn it is displayed in one form or another. I don’t know about you, mom, but do you sometimes feel like giving up on fighting against the tide of self-centeredness? We are inundated with it and how can we stop it when we see it in our kids? Frankly, how can we stop it in ourselves? I believe that the answer is one step at at time–moment by moment.
I have one son whose heart issue is selfishness. I’m pretty sure he was born that way and being in our society has not helped him any. His issues of acting as if the world revolves around him come to a head almost daily. Since he has 3 siblings that he must share this world with, it can get pretty frustrating for him. He’s the kind of kid that wants to win every time. He doesn’t have any desire to share and wonders why he can’t always be first. I think I’ve mentioned before that he can’t even walk alongside me when we got for a walk–he’s always got to be ahead of me. I doubt he even realizes the magnitude of his selfishness, but since I’m the one who must always talk him through these issues and referee between him and his siblings, I am very aware of it.
After a long while of passively parenting his issues and getting nowhere, I began to think about how I could help him work on the heart that compels him to behave in such a selfish way. I went straight to The Word and found these verses to work with him on.
Philippians 2:3 – “Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.”
Philippians 2:4 – “Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others too.”
We talked through the above verses and then I posted them downstairs in our kitchen and upstairs on the mirror of the kid’s bathroom, but I knew that would not be enough for him. So I put some thought into what is the opposite of selfishness. The opposite is serving–serving others before yourself. I wanted him to get into the habit of considering others needs before his own. Now how in the world was I going to do that? Well, here’s the few things I came up with.
At that point in life, this particular son sat in the back of the car and would run over the top of his siblings to get in and out of the car. So I moved him to the front seat (really the middle of the back) and made him sit in the seat that had to be folded forward in order for anyone in the back to get out. This made him responsible for serving the others in the car first. He had to wait for everyone to get in before him and he had to serve them by making sure they could get out. He couldn’t just run off and leave them stranded in the back seat.
I pretty much took every opportunity I had to force him to practice being last. I made him keep alongside me on walks. He had to go last when we played games, he became the server at our meals, I had him go last while standing in line somewhere, he received things that I would hand out last and I tried to provide rewards for him when he would opt to share things. In fact, when I began rewarding him for “random acts of kindness”, especially ones that he came up with on his own, I began to see an explosion of serving others.
Although I’d like to report that everything is now “peachy” for him, I’d be lying to you if I did. Selfishness is still a struggle for him, but I continue to be ever mindful of providing opportunities for him to succeed. It can be easy to “turn my brain off” and let him slide back into “selfish mode”, but I have to keep it at the forefront of my mind so that moment by moment I can help him make choices that involve more than himself. I figure with practice he will begin to make those choices on his own. After all, I won’t be here forever. He will be an adult someday and I don’t think his future wife will like it if I keep hanging around to hold his hand and help him not be selfish. I am here to help him address the issues of his heart today…now…so that in the future he will be equipped to deal with his heart issues on his own and hopefully he’ll turn out to be a man with a service oriented heart and we’ll laugh at how selfish he was as a child. And in my mother’s heart I will know that it was not me or him who changed him so dramatically…it was purely by the power of God.
You are so creative in training your kids, I love all the good ideas! Thanks!