It's important to note there are also some situations in which children are genuinely not responsible for the problems they are dealing with. For example, a parent or sibling with anger management problems, taking out their anger on a child as a scapegoat, is not the kind of situation where it would be fair to place any blame on a child for being upset.

However, in other cases, we can see that a child’s attitude could be contributing to the problem. The statement, “My friends are so mean to me” may be hiding a deeper problem: the child has not yet learned how to communicate feelings to friends, how to be respectful, supportive and encouraging of others, or how to make healthy friendship choices. In such cases, teaching children how to first examine how they are contributing to the problem is doing them a massive favour for the rest of their life. This is a lifelong skill that can benefit all their relationships.

How do we go about this? I like the suggestions of child psychotherapists Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. They put it like this:

Your child’s attitude toward her family, for example, may be that “the family exists to meet my needs” rather than “I’m on a team in which everybody’s needs are as important as mine.” Show her how her attitude hurts her and others. Teach her the value of being in community and how her needs can be met there.

Cloud and Townsend use Jesus’ teaching about the log and the speck to provide a framework for curious questions we can ask of children, whenever they come to us with the sort of complaint that deflects from their contribution to the problem. The basic thrust of this principle is: before you look at another person’s speck, take the log out of your own eye (Matthew 7:1 –5).

Cloud & Townsend (1998) give the following four examples of questions we can
encourage kids to ask themselves:

Reference: Cloud, H. & Townsend, J. (1998). Boundaries with Kids. Zondervan Publishing, p. 90.

Warmly,
Damian Gerber
Student & Family Counsellor, St Bernard’s Primary School