A Parenting Moment: My Son Wanted to Kick a Cop

An unusual experience in raising my son illustrated the need to pray to God for guidance in raising our children.

God is clear that He gives children as a blessing (Psalm 127:3-5). He has a plan for their lives and loves them even more than we do. He gives parents the special responsibility of raising them according to His standards. So how much can we expect His help in rearing them?

In raising my two children, there were many occasions when, having reached a point beyond my ability to understand what my child needed, I went to God in prayer asking for detailed assistance—for Him to inspire in me the very words or actions required for good results.

Often I received startling and immediate responses that solved the problem. One such example was particularly memorable.

Kick a police officer?

Shortly before my son turned 5, an age that psychologists agree is a definitive turning point for understanding authority, we exited a post office one morning and were heading to the car. He had been in a bad mood to begin with and promptly announced that he was going to go “kick that police officer” who was coming out of the adjacent sheriff’s department!

Uh-oh! This required immediate handling! I was also mindful of Leviticus 19:14, which says we are not to “curse the deaf” even though they can’t hear. Just because the officer did not hear the “threat” did not mean I could let this slip. I could not let even a thought of being disrespectful to an authority figure go. This was serious.

I explained to my son that police officers spend most of their time helping people, and he should be very sorry for what he had just said. Right now the thing to do was to go over and apologize.

My son was rigid with fear as I half-dragged him closer to the officer who was walking in our direction. Briefly, I summarized the problem to the officer.

The officer got down on one knee and looked my son in the eye, gently explaining he was not going to hurt him. We never did get the apology, but the officer just smiled, saying he was sure to see worse things that day, and off he went.

The reinforcements begin

When we ask God for help, we’re never sure what we are going to receive in response.

On our drive home, there was a rollover accident by the side of the highway. The same deputy was there, assisting at the scene; and I glanced bemusedly in the rearview mirror, watching the expression on my son’s face as he craned his neck for a closer look. His mouth was open in astonishment.

After we got home, the boy was quiet for a long time. Then he came to me, admirably, and said, “Mom, I made a mistake. I should have apologized.” So I asked him what he thought we should do. “I’ll probably never see him again,” he said. I suggested we could pray and ask God to put the officer in his path again. So we did.

A week later, as we were seated at a Fourth of July concert, we spotted the uniformed officer crossing the park lawn. This was the chance my son had been waiting for, and he rose immediately to do his duty.

I was moved to see them shake hands in the distance!

Not over yet

After the apology, God’s hand in the training lesson magnified itself in an unforgettable way. Everywhere we went we ran into the deputy! I got used to hearing the greetings in the supermarkets, parking lots, everywhere—and my son came to regard the officer as a friend.

This continued for some time, but the final meeting was the most formidable of all.

Stranded … almost

Our family was traveling back from the Feast of Tabernacles in Arizona. Since we lived in the middle of the Rockies, the return drive crossed a very long and lonely stretch of high desert that climbed in altitude from the south.

In the loneliest stretch of all, still hours from home, our car broke down. We had a towing service, but no cell phone, and were very, very far from any houses or towns. What to do?

It wasn’t very long before a vehicle slid up and stopped behind us, a black-and-white sheriff’s Chevy Blazer, and out stepped, amazingly, our son’s officer friend!

He recognized us right away, and explained that, while he could not offer us a ride due to the prisoner he was transporting, he did have authority to do something else for us. He radioed a Colorado state road crew that was working nearby and basically commandeered them to come and pull our car to the next town!

We never saw the officer again because he transferred to another part of the state, but there was never any doubt God’s hand was in these very unusual circumstances.

We have to do our part in setting the right examples and providing the right teaching, but we need to pray often for parenting guidance and never underestimate God.

To learn more practical principles that you can apply to your parenting, read our article “Parenting Advice.”