It’s a badge of honor for some, and an explanation for others.
This powerful phrase, “strong-willed,” has been treated as a fact since it was popularized by Dr. Dobson in 1978 in his book, “The Strong-Willed Child.” In that book, parents were told that children who struggle in certain ways are strong-willed. This was a relief for parents struggling with argumentative and rebellious children. Now their child had a label! Now it was explainable why they were struggling!
This phrase was applied specifically to selected negative behaviors and used as the reason for them. And therein lies the problem.
The idea was that some kids are unique in their strong-will. They demonstrate this through the behaviors outlined in Dr. Dobson’s book. A child with a strong-will is one who wants to wear pink pants when you want them to wear jeans and will fight you over it. It’s the child who purses their lips for hours over eating a bite of eggplant. It’s the kid who outright rebels against your authority, resulting in confrontations galore.
If you believe in this theory, then I would ask you, what kind of will does a teenager show who is well-behaved and doesn’t do any of those pesky confrontational behaviors, but watches pornography and, in spite of you pursuing every possible avenue to get them to stop, persists?
They go to the library and use the computers, wake in the dead of night to view it online, and learn how to circumvent all the parental controls on the devices at home. Yet that same child is fully willing to eat whatever you put in front of them, wear whatever you want them to wear, and do the chores you ask them to do. They don’t fight you. They don’t argue. They rebel under the table, so to speak. They continue to do what they want, when they want, but it hardly interferes with your life at all. Is that child part of the “strong-willed” club or not?
What about the child who is happy to go along with things as long as it doesn’t take much effort? They struggle with the sin of laziness. They will not openly fight you. They hate arguing. Frankly, arguing takes too much effort. However, if you want them to do something difficult or energy-intensive, you will find it impossible.
Are they weaker-willed than their sibling, who would rather die than eat that piece of meat? Why would you think so? They persist just as stubbornly in their desire as their sibling does.
Or what about the child who is so prideful that they can hardly interact with anyone without putting them down? You address it, and address it, and address it, yet they continue in their pride. They continue in their desire to be at the top of the heap. You punish, you reward, you explain, yet the problem does not go away; in fact, it persists. But there are no open battles about it. They avoid conflict. The discussions about their pride are met with agreement or even passivity. Yet are they not strong-willed?
What about the child who constantly covets what others have and complains insistently about what they want. They are never content, and they are envious of everyone around them. You notice it and address it, yet they persist and persist and persist. They will not give up this desire. They want what they do not have. Are they not also strong-willed?
Name a sin, and I will show you how it is a strong-willed response. The fact that you struggle with sin is evidence of your strong will. And we all struggle with sin.
What about the husband who shuts down when his wife tries to work out a problem, refusing to talk at all? What about the wife who refuses to stop pestering her husband morning, noon, and night? What about the child who manipulates others or lies consistently? It is a daily problem. Are they not strong-willed?
Outright rebellion and covert rebellion are both rebellion. One is not stronger in will than another. Only the world sees things as superficially as that.
If you persist in any sin, you are demonstrating what a strong-willed person you really are. We all struggle against our flesh, and our flesh is strong-willed. We struggle in different ways—with some verbalizing their struggle, some confronting others, and still other people trying to avoid confrontation, all while still following their own will in the ways that matter most to them.
The strong-will persists, but it doesn’t look the same in every person. Because not every person has the same desires or priorities.
Strong-willed, sinful, natural inclinations are not synonymous with virtue, either. A virtue is not something used for sin on one hand and good on the other. It is also not something you are born with. The virtue of perseverance, for example, is demonstrated by enduring suffering admirably, relying on God to bring about comfort and justice at the proper time. That is commendable. That is virtuous. However, our nature is not credited with it. People are not born with that inclination. They are born sinful and willful against God. A virtue, such as perseverance to the glory of God, must be cultivated by the person performing the action, and it is always contrary to the desires of the sinful nature. God gets the credit for that desire within a person, and it should be desired by all who profess the name of Christian.
Parents have used this label of “the strong-willed child” for too long as an excuse to give up on their kids or as a badge of honor for sinful inclinations. It is neither. We are all extremely willful and unbelievably stubborn in our own ways, and we all equally need to repent and seek the help God provides, and the salvation only found in Jesus Christ.
So I will say it again and again: stop labeling your children. Look beneath the surface and to your children’s hearts, so that you can encourage your children to turn to Jesus and not to go with the waywardness of their sinful, willful, selfish nature.
