Selfishness Is a Human Condition

“I need help! This is our fourth year homeschooling and I don’t feel like we’ve gotten things quite right yet. I feel like I’m making mistakes with my teenage daughter who is my only one at home right now. My problems are magnified because I don’t have a clear goal for her homeschool curriculum, we start things and don’t complete them, and I get bogged down with grading her work.

“She goes to homeschool co-op once a week and has friends there. She has outlets available to her to socialize, and she is also playing soccer for the first time this year. But we are struggling a lot with her attitude lately. She seems to think that the world revolves around her and if she has to do something she doesn’t want to do, she gets in a really bad mood. If there is something she wants to do, she thinks she should be able to do it, no matter how she has been acting. I don’t know if some of this is normal teenage angst, but I don’t remember doing this when I was her age. She has not been taught to be selfish, rude, and disrespectful, but that is her first tendency. Lately we have stopped her from going places and doing things because of her attitude. ”                           ~ I need help!

Selfishness Is a Human Condition

As I read your question I remember the days when I began to see similar bad attitudes like you describe developing in my teenagers. Although teenage self-centeredness and bad attitudes are common and widespread, I am blessed to say that I have learned that it is not normal. In other words, it is not caused by being a teenager. I’m so blessed that I have learned what causes the attitudes and the remedy, and I’m so grateful to say that my four, soon to be five teenagers no longer have any of those tendencies toward selfish bad moods and bad attitudes.

The bad attitudes and resistance that you are experiencing are the evidence or the fruit of broken relationship. When relationships are broken, heart to heart communication is limited or cut off all together. Walls are built up to bring some measure of perceived protection against another, and kindness and affection are replaced with coldness and distance or even disrespect, resistance, and rebellion.

Broken relationship is the cause of the difficulties you’re experiencing, even though you feel like it has to do with your curriculum confusion. When our children are very young, we are their world and their life. All they want is mommy and their hearts are completely turned toward ours. Through the course of our lives together those bonds can be broken and the result is that their hearts are lost from ours. This process is at different levels in different families. Some suffer only partially broken relationships while others end up with their children’s hearts lost to them, and completely lost to the Lord.

The road to broken relationship is as individual as each one of us. Here are a few common causes.

Anger, frustration, and irritation directed at a child communicates that whatever the parent is angry about is more important than the child. Usually these attitudes are not a one time occurrence but a lifestyle on the part of the parent communicating a consistent message to the child of unacceptability and rejection. This parental behavior breaks relationships.

Parent distraction likewise communicates rejection and breaks the heart ties. The parent’s heart is directed somewhere else besides the child such as the parent’s friends and activities, phone calls, internet communities, trying to please someone outside the home, household chores, church service etc…

Inconsistency is a relationship breaker, mostly because it presents the parent as untrustworthy. Also when a parent is consistently inconsistent the child develops resentment over the injustice and confusion of it.

Placing unfitting burden on the child will result in broken relationship. This is done by placing expectation on the child that is unreasonable for that child at that time like bringing the world’s system of school into your home, using curriculum that is generic to press your child into a mold of information collection that is irrelevant to the child’s current needs and God-given bents and interests. Often unfitting burden is directly connected to irritation, frustration and anger on the part of the parent because the child simply cannot live up to the wrong expectations.

Failure to meet the child’s deepest needs leads the child’s heart to search elsewhere. This in turn breaks the relationship between parent and child. Sometimes the parent’s self-interest leads them to view the child as someone who is in the way of their goals. This parent doesn’t want to spend the time the child needs for character growth but opts for quick fixes such as giving in to tantrums or pushing the child into distracting child-pleasing entertainment and social situations.

Our culture fosters many activities that create broken relationship as well. Anytime we release our children into the care of another authority or no authority at all, we actually nurture the destruction of our own relationship with them. The most common activity is school, but there are plenty of other activities such as co-ops, sports, friends, youth groups etc… When our children spend hours and days in the company of others without us they have no choice but to develop their own lives apart from ours. The parents think it was all good activity, but then they are dismayed by the fruit of it when they no longer have their children’s hearts and cannot direct them away from self-centeredness or perhaps even away from destructive choices, bad friends or open immorality.

So, an over-simplified description of your difficulty is that your daughter sees you as being someone who stands in the way of her pursuit of her life. Her heart is not with you, but invested in those things that she insists she should be able to do. Because her heart is turned away from you, you have lost the ability to direct her the way you feel you ought to be able to. Instead of being discouraged or feeling beat down by what I’m writing, there is a great deal of hope because there is a way out of your difficulties.

Reconciliation is God’s plan for us. 2 Cor 5:17-19 “Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.” Message Bible

Whatever the circumstances that caused the broken relationship, God has a plan for your reconciliation. It will involve stopping your behaviors that broke the relationship and winning back the heart of your daughter with the help of the Holy Spirit. When you have her heart back, it will be easy to direct her away from self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit wants to speak to you through your conscience about the small step by step process you need to go through to win her heart back.

Self-centeredness is not a teenage condition, it’s a human condition. It is the very condition that causes the death that Jesus came to rescue us from. The death is evidenced in our broken relationships. You will be able to draw her there with heart to heart connection when you run there first for help in laying your life down to get her heart back.

I pray the Lord’s direction and favor on your efforts to win the heart or your precious child.

~ Barbie