The Golden Child vs. the Black Sheep

[barnhart]

Some children are much harder to love than others. Sometimes a parent must put in two or three times the effort just to keep the relationship "normal".

[Soloist]

Some children are much harder to love than others. Sometimes a parent must put in two or three times the effort just to keep the relationship "normal".

Wife: I think you are right, and then you sometimes have to worry about the good child feeling less loved and appreciated because it’s just taken for granted that they will pick up the slack and do whatever mom and dad tell them to, and they feel like they have higher expectations than their troubled sibling.

On the other hand, something that I have occasionally seen, which makes me cringe, is when parents take their child’s rebellious behavior as a personal betrayal toward them, and when they talk about how rebellious their child is at bible study or wherever, sometimes with the child sitting right next to them.

Something I have to work on is not getting upset over what a child did right in front of their siblings. It’s easy to see how negative that ends up being in other people’s lives, but also easy to fall into doing myself.

[the-real-steve]

Some children are much harder to love than others. Sometimes a parent must put in two or three times the effort just to keep the relationship "normal".

I agree with this. I have often said that I love my children all the same, just differently

On the other end of the spectrum, it is easy for an olde child to feel like the younger siblings get away with a lot more, and I think that can be true. To that end, we've mellowed a little as we age, and perhaps we as parents allow a little more slack than we did 20 years ago. But that isn't what this is about....

[Jeff Altweg]

In my Amish childhood , there were 11 children , I was about in the middle , got very little ,almost no attention, from parents or other adults, An Amish upbringing is quite often a very cruel experience , not at all like depicted in modern culture....It was drilled into all of us that any good feelings about oneself is holfmut,(Pride),

[barnhart]

Jeff A, that sounds like a hard experience to navigate. What has helped you recover from that? What advice do you have for other Anabaptist church leaders?