Are You Exasperating, Excusing, or Empowering Your Children?

Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

Over my 35 years of experience in school leadership, I have observed three parenting styles: Exasperating, Excusing, and Empowering.

Exasperating Parenting 

To exasperate means to irritate or frustrate someone intensely, often to the point of anger. It involves actions or behaviors that provoke or annoy someone repeatedly or excessively, leading to feelings of frustration, impatience, or failure.

Parents who exasperate their children often have the best intentions. They have high expectations for their children and want them to succeed.

The problem is not the motive; it is the method.

Exasperating parents bombard their children with relentless admonitions to do better and work harder or criticize the smallest mistakes or failures in the classroom, on the athletic field, or at home. Their children’s efforts or performance are never good enough. Like verbal gnats swarming around the face on a hot summer day, the parents are constantly in their children’s faces, demanding more and better. It is irritating, suffocating, and exasperating. Children are left feeling defeated and deflated.

In Ephesians 6:4, Paul warns parents about the danger of exasperating their children: “Fathers, [parents] do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (NIV).

Excusing Parenting

Whereas parents who exasperate their children often expect too much, excusing parents expect too little.

They reflexively assume the best about their children and the worst about teachers or coaches. They blame everyone and everything but their children.

Typically, excusing parents do not take seriously the sin within each of us, including in their children. A parent once told me that “My child never lies.” I suspected the parent was naive, lying, or duped by the child.

Excusing parents fight to ensure that their children avoid the consequences of misbehavior or laziness. Bad behavior or failure to do the hard work required to succeed is blamed on others: “The teacher is bullying my child,” or “The coach is biased against my child.” The child is never bad or lazy. This is what some have labeled lawnmower parenting. The lawnmower parent runs ahead of their child, mowing down every obstacle in the child’s path.

Though well intended, these parents undermine the development of their children’s character, learning, and future. Preventing their children from experiencing the consequences of misbehavior or academic laziness is as detrimental as preventing a doctor from treating a wound. The treatment may hurt, but is ultimately healing. Likewise, allowing children to experience the consequences of misbehavior or laziness will hurt but will eventually teach lessons that will bless the children for a lifetime.

Empowering Parenting

Empowering parenting performs the high-wire balancing act of high expectations without exasperating or excusing. These parents expect their children to do their best, be responsible for their work at home and school, respect their classmates, and obey their teachers and coaches—failure to do so results in proportional and appropriate consequences at school and home. Empowering parents do not excuse misbehavior or laziness, nor do they protect their children from the consequences. They don’t blame others for their children’s failures. They care for but do not coddle their children. 

They are also not verbal gnats in their children’s faces. Commensurate with their age, the parents allow their children increased responsibility and independence. They are rigorous without railing at their children. They expect their children to obey, demonstrate good character, and do their best in the classroom. Their children are expected to wrestle with academic concepts and issues independently. They are expected to take responsibility for their learning and school work.

As a result of being empowered, children grow confident in their ability to take increased responsibility for their behavior and learning. They are willing to take risks. They are allowed to fail and learn from it. They mature. Children raised by parents who empower them are more deeply rooted in their Christian faith and better prepared for college, careers, and life’s inevitable challenges and hard knocks.

Parenting is Hard

Parenting is a high-wire act that balances high expectations, support, and freedom with accountability so that children can learn from their successes and failures. 

Loving parents empower their children; they do not exasperate or excuse them. Such parenting requires Solomon's wisdom, the triathlete's stamina, and a tender heart wrapped in alligator skin. It is hard but an invaluable blessing to the children raised by tough, loving parents.

Just as Solomon prayed that God would grant him the wisdom to rule the people of Israel, we must pray that God will give us the wisdom to raise our children well.