Tolerances

Hello, Nicoleen. Thank you for these Wednesday mornings. If it was not for these calls and our mentor, it would be easy to just go back full-time into our old ineffective and unhelpful parenting methods. I am incredibly
grateful.

Here is my question: What is the single most effective way to lower my tolerances?

My husband will easily lower his tolerances if I pave the way because I believe he has a natural tendency toward lower tolerances, but I get in the way. I tend to have incredibly high tolerances which is not helping my youth, my calm, or helping our relationships and unity. I am noticing that the youth are disrespectful repeatedly and sometimes it seems it is a habit, they will argue and not disagree appropriately, they interrupt when we are talking to adults or on the phone, and they tend to not execute their consequences immediately (this delay tends to make it nearly impossible for me to keep a tally which leads to the youth saying, "I don't think I have 3 chores" and then, I second guess myself because so much time has lapsed). There are a lot of negative side effects to high tolerances for everyone. I know some of my difficulty in lowering my tolerances has to do with laziness and questioning my abilities to execute TSG effectively, but mostly laziness. It is a lot of time and energy to monitor and execute chores and go through the Rule of 3 with 5 youth. A loss of privileges and chores are challenging to implement with a jam packed extracurricular schedule which leads to us being away from home a lot.

Please help me to not be lazy about this by answering my question and giving me a pep talk. We took the 3 day online live class with you in January, attended some of your talks at a conference, and have a mentor. We homeschool and I have a 17 month old who thinks sleeping is WAY overrated (Can you use TSG to get a 1 year old to sleep more? Haha). We do have wonderful youth overall who are helpful, want to have fun, believe in Jesus and the truth of His Word, and bring us so much joy and laughter. Kids really are a gift from the Lord. It seems like all I do is dump on you their struggles, but they are full of beautiful gifts and talents. I struggle to bring out the best in them because of my own sinfulness and would like lower my tolerances to improve our relationship and better equip them to handle their sinfulness and the sinfulness of others. Thank you.