Are you modeling the fruit of the spirit for your children? The fruits of the spirit consist of love,joy,peace,patience,kindness,goodness,faithfulness,gentleness and self-control. The two most important 'fruits' being the first and last. The fruits of love and self-control are two of the most important character traits we as adults can model to our children and serve as filters to all the other fruits. Meaning if we are not displaying love and self-control then we cannot effectively show all the other fruits because we must build off of love and self-control for all the rest. Without having love in your heart how can you possibly show joy,kindness or goodness?
It's the same with self-control. If you have no self-control it's very difficult to show the fruits of faithfulness,peace,patience and gentleness. As someone who has tried on my own to obtain self-control and show love to the unloving, believe me it is almost impossible to gain these on your own. If you need help, humble yourself before God and ask him to help you display love and/or self-control in your life. He WILL answer your prayers if you are desperately serious in your request.
In every aspect of life we need to approach people with an attitude of love. If we approach situations and people without love then we are doing a disservice to our kids. Children learn best by observing and modeling us. That is why we need to have genuine love in our hearts-not just an act we put on in front of certain people. This is also why we need to ask for God's help here. Not many of us have a naturally loving spirit so we must continuously seek God's help to get to this point. Once we obtain a loving spirit towards others, we very easily pick up the characteristics of joy,kindness and goodness because these are all offshoots of love. Self-control may not be as easy to model to kids because how many times do we as parents lose our tempers with our children?
Kids see us at our worst because they tend to make us crazy as times and they are always beside us constantly observing. Consciously keeping the fruit of self-control on our minds, helps us to be less likely to lose our tempers or act out in situations we cannot control. What type of reaction do think a child would have if we are dealt a bad card in life and we just laugh it off saying "Well I guess I'll just be glad because being mad isn't going to help me at all!" Children who are beginning to frame their world will see the appropriate response. Then the next time they are put in a difficult or incontrollable situation they would know that they could make lemonade out of the lemons they have.