Happy Children's Day

Every year in the month of May, it is our tradition to celebrate the unique gift of mothers to each of us. In June, we also set aside a special day so that we might recognize fathers as well. The question is, where is the special day set aside to celebrate and appreciate children? For those of us who are parents, we may be thinking that everyday seems like “Children’s Day”. From the moment they enter our world, they seem to consume our thoughts, our time, and most definitely our depleting resources. Yet, since they don’t have their own official day of celebration on the calendar, I thought it might be best to provide a gift of sage advice from an article that I came across a few years ago. It relays a speech given by Microsoft Corporation Founder Bill Gates at a high school graduation. In the speech, he provides “11 rules of life” for which he passes on to the current generation of graduates. (Parents, since most of our children will spend more time drawing on this article than reading it, you can dispense this information to them at the time which seems best.) In the speech, he noted that these “11 rules”, though valuable for life, would probably not be taught in their school curriculum.

Rule #1: Life is not fair—get used to it!

Rule # 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule #3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a company vehicle until you earn both.

Rule #4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule #5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: They called it opportunity.

Rule #6: If you mess up, it’s not your parent’s fault. So, don’t whine about mistakes; learn from them.

Rule #7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So, before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule #8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule #9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule #10: Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule #11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one…

While your children probably won’t fully appreciate your gifting them with such blunt wisdom, it will certainly benefit them (and all of us!) in the long run. Without question, children surely are a gift from the Lord (Psalm 127:3). But perhaps the best gift which we can pass on to them is that of discipline. Rather than making them feel as though they are the center of the universe, better yet to show them that Jesus is the center of the universe. And any claim against His authority will not end well.

While our children are precious to us, the Bible also states that “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child” (Proverbs 22:15). It is the parent’s responsibility to goad it out. (This is not the responsibility of the grandparent or the teacher.) Just how do we get folly out of the heart of a child? The second part of Proverbs 22:15 gives us the answer: “The rod of discipline drives it far from him.” Do you think it was just by chance that God put so much cushion on our back sides?

Happy Children’s Day,

Jason