Parenting On Purpose

Experience After taking the time to expose our children to different opportunities in serving others, it is also important to give them time to experience this on their own.  Especially as a child gets older it is important to look for these experiences for them to practice on their own and to reap the rewards of doing something for someone else.  It is a different experience from “having” to do something because the rest of your family is involved. One place to look for opportunities for your child is their school.  When they are telling you about their day they may mention a perfect opportunity for serving someone. There may be something that a child can do to help a teacher.  Even doing something so small as not getting involved when a group of people are picking on a student or making the big step to tell them to stop.  Or simply making a point to be nice to the student, even though it may be unpopular, is putting their needs above you own. As a child gets older another awesome way to give them a wonderful experience in serving others on their own is mission trips.  Most churches give opportunities for youth to do a mission trip at least once a year.  These life-changing experiences are such awesome lessons not only in serving others, but also teach gratitude for how much we have been given. Take the time to help your child […]

Exposure Another “E” in the training Process is exposure.  We as parents must set the example first in our service of others but secondly we must look for opportunities for our children to serve.  We spoke yesterday that this begins in our own home with serving our family members but we after this area we can look for bigger areas of ministry.  Check with your church to see if there are any families in need of meals.  In any church at any time there may be many families who could use this service due to illness or a new baby.  Make it a family service project and get your kids involved in every area from shopping for the food to preparing it. Another area of service could be checking with your church to see if there are any elderly who need help around their house with basic projects that they can’t do anymore.  Make a family service day even one day a month, especially during time off, is a great way to teach kids. There are always local ministries who need help as well in various ways.  For Sheridan House, we can always use volunteers to help with any of our events.  Looking for ways to expose your children to service in this capacity is a great way to train.  Make a day of it, often, and serve together as a family.  Service should be part of a families DNA.  To those of […]

Setting The Example Like many areas of parenting, teaching your child to serve is easy when you are able to set an example for them to follow.  There are many ways to set the example.  The first is simply daily serving your closest neighbors, your family.  It will be easy to teach your children to serve if it is already a habit that you have.  In order to create this habit, make it a goal to serve either your spouse or a child at least once everyday.   Many moms spend their days serving the needs of the small children around them.  An easy way to help create the habit in your small children is to have them help you serve “daddy.”  Maybe when he gets home from work have one of them help you bring daddy his favorite drink.  You can even make it a game to see who can do something to serve daddy first. Another way to teach a servant attitude is by being aware of who you can serve while you are out and about.  Again with children, especially on the long days they are home from school, make it another game to see who can spot a need that you as a family can fill.   Like maybe helping an elderly person load their car with their groceries, or carrying an umbrella when its raining, even taking the shopping carts back to the designated area instead of leaving it by […]

Why It’s Important To Raise My Child To Serve There are so many important reasons to teach your child to serve others.  Serving others helps a child learn not to be so self centered, it raises a child to be marriageable and helps them to be great employees.  The most important reason to teach our children to serve is the fact that it grows them into becoming someone that God can use mightily. If we think back to many of the Old Testament greats, they were servants.  When we train our children to serve it is something that God may not have to do later on in life, think Joseph and Moses.  Both of these men had to spend some time in humbling experience to teach them this concept before they could be used mightily in the plan God had for them. Another reason that we need to teach our children to serve is that Jesus himself tells us how important it is to serve others.  The religious leaders tried to trap him by asking what the greatest commandment was in Luke 10:27. “He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”  How we show our love for God is by serving those around us.  Create an attitude of service in your home today!    

One Question As we head into Christmas week there is one question to keep at the forefront of your mind.  That question is, if Jesus was with your family this Christmas would He feel celebrated and at the center of this event?  Our entire Christmas discussion boils down to that thought.  Remember that we will be held accountable for the spiritual guidance of our children.  Don’t miss the huge opportunity this Christmas week to point your children to the birth of their Savior! Check back next week for a daily family devotional on each of the Christmas characters.  

The Tradition of a Worshipful Christmas Eve Christmas Eve can be such a crazy day in the Christmas season.  Most families have relatives come into town or they are driving/flying to see relatives.  Some parents are frantically wrapping or putting the bigger toys together.  Some families spend Christmas Eve night at a party or at a Christmas service.  A great goal would be to have everything accomplished before Christmas Eve so we can take a breath.   Like we have been talking about all of our traditions should be pointing to the meaning behind the day, Jesus birth, not all the presents under the tree.  Christmas eve is a great time to refocus our family. Remember we as parents set the tone for our home. If our attitude is hurried or stressed we will be communicating that to our children.  Christmas Eve can be a quiet time to ponder, like Mary, what God has given us, in the gift of His Son.  Taking advantage of one of the many Christmas Eve services is a great idea to help set the tone.  Don’t let it stop there, however.  After the service utilize the rest of the evening to point to Jesus.  A tradition in our house was to find baby Jesus, he was hidden for all the Christmas season, and place him in the manger of our nativity set.  The last thing we did before be was not to hang stockings and put out milk […]

Christmas Traditions You Don’t Know You Have There are many traditions that we begin to do habitually and don’t even realize it.  Sometimes these are not positive traditions, some even harmful.  As we get closer to Christmas now is the time to analyze what may be negative habits that you have made a tradition. They can be personal attitudes or can involve the whole family.  Maybe the children spend some, or all, of the family activity nights fighting.  Is there one extended family member that every year you have a difficult time getting along with?  Some spouses don’t get a game plan for Christmas spending and that leads to a fight every year when the bills start coming in.  Another big negative tradition is building up unrealistic expectations for what Christmas and the holiday season will bring and when it doesn’t meet our needs then we are left feeling depressed and empty. When we start to look at these negative traditions we realize that maybe our focus is off.  Either we do indeed have unrealistic expectations that everything will be perfect or we are simply setting our gaze to the day rather then what the day actually represents.  It will help us to fight that feeling of disappointment when we are focusing on celebrating the big gift that God gave each and every one of us.  

The Tradition of Giving Gifts with Meaning Even when times are hard it still seems that one of the easiest things to give of is money.  When we give gifts it is easy to just flippantly buy something for someone, especially as children. While, it is a very important lesson to teach children how to save their money with the end result not being purchasing something for themselves; sometimes the more difficult gift to give is giving of yourself, your time.  Because giving the gift of time seems more difficult as adults, this is a valuable habit or tradition to teach your children.  For the last few weeks we have discussed planning a family gift to Jesus or ministry opportunity.  Once that gift is planned you can then get your children excited about looking for ways to serve each other in the home and giving gifts of themselves.  Parents can lead by example.  A fun, possibly funny, idea for parents is to give your children coupon books for items of service as stocking stuffers. Something like, one coupon good for mom or dad doing one load of your laundry or helping you clean your room.  Get as creative as you want, even with something like a late bed pass good for an staying up an hour later on the weekends or a coupon good for the homemade meal of their choice. Help your kids with ideas for gifts of service for their siblings […]

What Exactly are Traditions? When we break it down what is a tradition?  Who decides the tradition? Why is it important to think through this?  A tradition is something that you do year after year.  It can be something that you do individually or as a family.  There are many areas that can dictate traditions, especially at Christmas: family, religion, and culture to name a few. It is important to think through your traditions to see who is influencing them and what your traditions are really teaching your children.  Just like we talked about last week, Christmas needs to be more then just the tradition of materialistic overindulgence.  Christmas is the celebration of God’s greatest gift to humanity His Son, our salvation, wrapped in swaddling clothes.  Are the things we do as a family to get ready for Christmas pointing to this miracle? One thing that we can do as parents to help keep the right focus is to have some personal traditions around Christmas time.   We can spend this time reading through the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to read the Biblical accounts of Jesus life.  Spend time really processing what must it have been like in the shoes of each of the characters of the Christmas story and journal your thoughts.  So often we read this story so much that we miss the reality of it and the amazing faith of the characters involved.  Spend some time preparing your heart […]

Dealing with Adult Children There are many reasons why it is difficult for parents to be consistent with “no”.  One reason is disagreements between spouses.  If mom and dad aren’t on the same page it makes it very difficult to be consistent with discipline. Another reason why some parents may find it difficult is that they want to please their kids.   Every parent should have the desire to see our children happy. However, giving in to our kids when they are unhappy because they did not get their way is not setting them up for future success. Some parents begin to second-guess themselves when there is questioning and pressure from other parents around them.  Not everyone in Christian circles will parent the same way; some will allow themselves to be more influenced by culture around them.  We need to set the standards for our children and be consistent. There are countless more reasons why parents have difficulty making sure their no means no.   If you are struggling in this area take some time to analyze why this may be difficult for you because this is such an important area for your children’s future success.  

Middle and High School Years As we have discussed before there are two very important keys to discipline.  The first is consistency, which is the area that we have been focusing on all week.   The second part of discipline is equally important. We need to maintain consistency without withdrawing our relationship from our children.  When we withdraw our relationship we become part of the consequence.  It is tempting to withdraw when we take their behavior personally.  We have to keep in perspective that even if we maintain consistency in our discipline they are still children and will make mistakes. Some of the ways we can communicate that the relationship is damaged while we are disciplining is through words we say, such as, “I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the night.” We also can communicate a relational withdraw through yelling or our body language.  It is our responsibility as adults to go and sit with our children after discipline and communicate our love.  We must mirror our Heavenly Father in this area.  His discipline is to guide and protect us but He never withdraws His comfort and love.   Listen to today’s podcast for more insight on this topic.

Elementary Years The purpose behind parenting is to raise a successful, God-honoring adult.  We give our children a key to success when we are consistent with no.  We are ultimately training them how to say no.  A skill they will need for adulthood is ability to say no in the face of temptation. One of the way’s we can be consistent with no is by utilizing the ICE plan.  The ICE plan begins to teach our children that they are responsible for their own decisions.  It allows the parent to be the giver of a reward for a good decision or the consequence for the poor decision.  The “I” in the ICE plan stands for instruction.  We need to instruct our children about our expectations for their behavior.  “C” stands for consequence.  We also need to inform our children of the consequence if their behavior doesn’t meet the expectations.  The “E” stands for exercise.  We need to step back and allow our children to make the decision.  Allowing them to make the decision is what helps them for the future.  We will not be there when they are older standing over their shoulder telling them what to do.  By utilizing this plan we are training future leaders by training our children to be good decision makers!    

Early Childhood Years Just like in sports, when you know the rules and the boundaries it allows for the players to have fun and enjoy themselves.  The same can happen when our no is consistent we create an environment to be able to have fun.  If our no doesn’t always mean no, we have created an atmosphere for fighting and chaos.  There will be a constant and exhausting battle for who will have the last word, parent or child. For example, a parent and child are out together at the movies.  When the parent gets popcorn for the family to share, the child sees the candy at the counter and asks if they can have candy as well.  The answer to their question is, “No, we are going to share the popcorn as a family.”  If a child has been trained that no means no, then this is the end of the discussion and the family can go in and enjoy the movie.  If a child has been trained that there are many different behaviors that can change my parents mind, then they will proceed in acting on these.  There may be whining, crying, and even temper tantrums.   A scene like this is exhausting and will ultimately cause the fun activity to be ruined for both parent and child.  This can be avoided if a parent is willing to always be consistent with no.  We have the freedom have fun and enjoy our […]

The Stages of the Development of “The Power of Saying No” – Part 1 When playing a sport like basketball or football for example, it is important to know the boundary lines.  If these lines are not clearly defined before the game begins then it becomes very easy for the players to argue among themselves if the ball was truly out of bounds or not.  If this happens, the game is no longer easy for any of the players to understand much less enjoy.   It is the same confusion our children experience when our “no” doesn’t always mean “no”. If we are not consistent with our children when we use the word  “no”, it is very hard for them to know the boundary lines.   For some parents, a no can mean that the child is allowed to argue and complain, while for others the word “no” can simply be the first step in a long whining session attempting to get us to feel bad and change our mind.  Some children have been taught that a temper tantrum will work to change their parents mind because their parents are embarrassed or overwhelmed by their behavior and give in to their desires.  Other children have been trained that if one parent says no they can get the other one to say yes and cause an argument.  It is extremely important for our children’s future success that our no means no.  You have to have clearly […]

Working With Teens The question of parents with teens is sometimes; what if I haven’t started this yet, is it too late?  The answer is a resounding… it is never too late!!  Teens are constantly faced with destructive behavior, from tearing each other down, violence in their culture and media, music, and some are even destructive to themselves. This stage more then ever may need a redirection to things that are constructive. In order to teach the life skills of constructive input and patience, there are many areas we can look to.  Because they are older, a teen may be trusted to help with a household or simple car repair.  Teens can be taught to cook a whole meal themselves.  There are many projects that teens and parents can do together.  Mission trips are great for teaching these skills, as well as serving others.  Take the time to look for long-term projects that you can do with your teen.   Remember it’s never to late!