Your concern is to unmask your child’s sin, helping him to understand how it reflects a heart that has strayed.
This is only one conceern and it is not the main concern of child training. Parents who primarily see their children in terms of being sinners and therefore keep their focus on sins might drive home the theological fact that we are all sinners but communicate these children are always sinning, that nothing is acceptable to God or parents or others, that there is nothing commendable about their lives. This violates the very things Colossians 3:21 (do not discourage their hearts) and Ephesians 6:4 (provoking the child to anger).
I know many who have grown up with this type of family dynamic. They are angry or depressed people who are living out of a life filled with shame. Their internal voice keeps telling them how they always sin and are therefore always failures.
There was a father of two children who refused to commend anything the children did because he believed since the children were sinners, nothing good could be found in them or in anything they did. The one child is now a professed atheist.
