I know I’m going to come off sounding hard-hearted with the words that follow: I don’t like toys.  I don’t like playing with them, I don’t like buying them, and I certainly don’t like PICKING them up!

Thankfully, three of my four kids are beyond the age of toys but my youngest is definitely giving me a run for my money.    She has a love-hate relationship with her toys.  She loves to get them out and play with them but she hates to put them away.   This creates quite a conflict between the two of us at bedtime when I walk downstairs and view the disaster that she has managed to create throughout the day.

We all know what the experts say:  MAKE IT HER PROBLEM.  Make it important to her so she wants to pick them up.  I don’t think those experts have ever met my daughter.

Thus, began the conflict last night.   When I walked downstairs, I made a decision not to yell, but to follow through with my own, often given, parenting advice.

I began calmly: “Mikayla, you can either pick up your toys, or Mom will pick up your toys.”  (Great start!)

She responds, “You can pick them up, Mom!” (Predictable!)

My return: “That’s fine, Mikayla, but if I pick them up then I will take them with me and do whatever I do with toys I don’t like.”  (Did I just say that?)

She looked confused for a moment and then agreed to pick up her toys.   I returned upstairs reveling in my parenting victory with smugness!  When the time was up, I walked downstairs and despair hit me.  She had picked up absolutely NOTHING, not even one toy! Didn’t she care about her toys?  Was the problem that she didn’t believe me?   I was frustrated.  My perfect plan had failed.

I had no choice. I began cleaning up the toys myself as promised. The sobbing soon began, followed shortly by the yelling from both daughter and mother trying to be understood and heard.  This was no easy task.

The expert advice kept ringing in my mind:  make it her problem.   However, as I carried the toys upstairs to their new spot, I found myself encouraging her that it was only temporary.  Obviously, this would be frowned upon by the experts.  That night we both cried ourselves to sleep.  She cried over losing her toys.  I cried over my perceived failure as a mother.

What is my point?

Doing the right thing for your kids is not the easy thing.  In fact, it is almost always the HARD thing.  Love compels us to do what is best for our kids, not what is easy.

But experts live in a perfect world.  Parents, however, live in the real world; an imperfect world with unpredictable kids.  So do your best to follow through and make it their problem but don’t be surprised if the best parenting plan doesn’t work out the way the experts predict.  The toys had to go temporarily if I really wanted to make a change and teach her to be responsible.  However, our tenderness towards our children should be seen as a good thing.  It means that we care about their pain!

A good parent is motivated by love and compassion, not by a set of expertly laid out rules that refuses to acknowledge the hearts of our children.   Our difficulty in doing the hard things is a subtle reminder of why children are best raised by loving parents and not by the government.  The government has only rules void of any compassion.  Unfortunately, it will only reproduce children void of compassion and hearts incapable of love.  I think that our society is already filled with too many of those kids.   If we want children who care, they must have parents who care.   So, perhaps it wasn’t such a failure after all.

Maybe I was a little too eager to return those toys to her this morning.  Maybe I will put up with those rotten toys for another day.

Maybe in our little imperfect world, our hearts are too closely attached to make it her problem alone.