One of the things we always have to monitor is the power and influence of our voice in our kids' lives.

Hey guys, welcome to the Five Minute Fatherhood podcast.

I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor.

Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father

to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.

What's up, guys? Welcome to another five-minute fatherhood. So we love to look at specific

verses in the Bible, and there are a couple of verses in the New Testament

that are directly tell fathers what we're to do or what we're not to do. There's a famous one in Ephesion 6 we've talked about before, but there's also one in Colossians 321. I want to read this to you guys because I think this is super practical. It says, fathers, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. And I thought a lot about, okay, what does this really mean to as fathers obey this command?

And what this command is saying, you guys, is that we are supposed to monitor personally the individual

discouragement level of each of our children and make sure we don't push them past a certain point

where they're like,

ugh, I can never please him, you know, and they just start to give up. And so we have to be

connected enough with our kids' hearts to fulfill this command to understand when they are feeling

discouraged. And I know that there was a time recently where I really violated this command. I was,

you know, in a situation with one of my kids

I corrected them in a really really like dramatic way I thought oh this will help them snap out of

the situation but two days later when I was sort of checking on their heart you know they were really

discouraged and I was like oh I could tell I crossed the line and again the line wasn't necessarily in what I said. It was the way it was received. And the level of harshness was just, it obviously pushed it beyond what was actually encouraging them to step up and began to really discourage. And so that's, that's something we have to monitor. In that case, I had to,

like, apologize, like, really understand where exactly the line got crossed, you know, kind of back

off of that particular line and make sure that when, that in my discipline and my correction

and my encouragement, that I'm not crossing these lines and discouraging my kids. And a lot of,

where a lot of dads, I think, struggle with

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