I Have Started Bribing Them

It started as a treat and it is now a price.

That is the honest sentence and you have been avoiding it for about four months.

At the beginning it was lovely. You went out, you came back, and on the way home you all got something, and it was warm and generous and nobody was buying anything.

Then it became expected. Then it became the reason. And about six weeks ago your nine year old asked what he was getting before he asked where you were going, and you heard it, and something in your stomach dropped.

And here is the part that is genuinely difficult: it works.

They come. Every time. You have solved the problem that half the parents you know cannot solve, and the solution costs about four dollars and takes no persuasion at all.

So there is nothing to fix and something to grieve, which is an uncomfortable combination and probably why you have not looked at it.

What you actually want is for one of them, once, to come out and move around that driveway with you because it is what this family does together. And you have made that impossible, because now there is always a payment attached, and you can never again find out what would have happened without it.

By long forbearing is a prince persuaded

There is a proverb about how the immovable actually get moved, and the method in it is the opposite of what a busy father reaches for.

By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone. (Proverbs 25:15, King James Version)

By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaks the bone.

Long forbearing. That is patience with a duration attached to it, and the duration is the active ingredient.

You have a method available that works on the hardest cases, and Proverbs 25:15 has never once required anything to be offered in exchange. The verse puts the persuading in the length of the patience, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sustains a man through the part where nothing is visibly happening.

You are able to see what makes that proverb strange. It is about persuading a prince, which is to say somebody who cannot be compelled, cannot be bought and does not need anything you have.

Which is a fair description of a teenager and a surprisingly fair description of a nine year old.

And the second image is stronger than it looks. A soft tongue breaks the bone. Not bends. Breaks. The gentlest instrument in the list is credited with the hardest result, and the whole proverb is arguing that softness plus time beats force plus urgency.

You are able to reach these children by staying rather than by paying, and Proverbs 25:15 has never once made the soft way the slower way to nowhere. The Spirit of God is the one who does what long patience is credited with in that verse, and the proverb gives the breaking of the bone to the soft tongue.

What a payment buys and what it costs

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about, because half of it is already visible from where you stand.

A payment buys attendance immediately and it buys it forever.

You have bought something real and it has never once been able to grow into the thing you wanted. It is written that by long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who grows in a household what money cannot start.

Once a thing has a price, it has a price. It does not graduate. A child who comes for four dollars is not on the road to coming for nothing; he is on the road to asking for five.

That is not greed. That is a completely reasonable response to a market you created, and he did not create it and cannot be blamed for operating in it.

And the second cost is the one you have actually been feeling. You will never know. Not this year and not in ten years. Every time they come, you will be unable to tell whether they came for you or for the thing, and that uncertainty is what has been sitting in your stomach since the question at the door.

You are permitted to want to be chosen rather than hired, and wanting that has never once been a demand on your children. The Spirit of God is the one who is at work in a house where nothing is being exchanged, and Proverbs 25:15 puts the persuading in the forbearing rather than in the offer.

Nothing on offer, and go anyway

So here is the assignment, and the first half of it is a subtraction.

Go out at the usual time with nothing on offer, and say nothing when nobody comes.

You are able to end the payments without announcing a policy, and simply not mentioning it has never once been dishonest. It is written that a soft tongue breaketh the bone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing on a driveway with nothing to hand anybody.

Do not make a speech about it. Do not say we are not going to do the treats any more, because that sentence turns the removal into a punishment and a punishment has to be argued about.

You simply do not mention it, and you do not go past the shop, and when somebody asks, you say something true and short: not tonight.

Then expect the attendance to collapse, because it will.

You have a household that will test this for about three weeks, and an empty driveway has never once been a report on where this family ends up. Proverbs 25:15 credits the long forbearing rather than the immediate result, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present through the part where nothing appears to be working.

And go out every single evening through it. That is the long forbearing, and there is no version of this that skips it.