Ep.1010: How Parental is Our Parenting?
Five parenting principles that can change your children's future
CHAPTERS
Theme Scripture: Proverbs 29:17
We are losing our grip. Really. There is a battle for our children raging before us and we are losing it miserably. Raising children does not at all look like it once did a few generations ago. Back then, parents were expected to control their households and children were expected to grow up within that control. You might argue that such an arrangement was a little rigid. Perhaps. Now children and their feelings have become the idols of their parents' lives and those parents dutifully bow before and serve the desires, hormones and natural immaturity their children display. You might say that such an arrangement is a little - a lot - permissive. Absolutely! So, what do we do about it? How do we think, act and respond to our present parenting crisis? How do we swim upstream against the current of pitiful parenting and grab hold of and apply principles of powerful parenting?
It may seem foolish to even have to say this but the first place to start a conversation about parenting is to ask if the parents in question are really adults. Seriously. Do they think, feel and respond as adults or might they be parenting their kids while clinging to their own protracted adolescence from which they have never matured? Let me give an example of what I mean. A simple question: what does it mean to care for your kids? On the surface this is a no-brainer question! I presume we would all agree that caring for your kids means you feed them, give them comfortable shelter and provide them with an environment in which they can grow. While that is a good start, it is here where the easy part ends and the challenge and failure begins.
Caring for your kids does not mean that you make sure they don’t ever feel bad about anything. That denies them the needed experience of coping with disappointment and hurt feelings. Caring for your kids does not mean you always give them choices in every aspect of life. Sometimes it is just time to go to bed or turn off the electronics. Choice in all things denies a child the opportunity to learn how to act with respect when things are not the way they want them to be. Our issues in these types of things are simple but troubling. Our caring about their feelings gets interpreted as caring for them. We feel for how they feel. In actuality, caring for our kids is a series of actions that rise far above their feelings and our own, for the purpose of teaching them to navigate the pathway to adulthood. What rights and privacy should children have?
Check out our February 26, 2018 podcast, “How Parental is Our Parenting?” to gain some insight on how all of this works. We talk about five parenting principles which begin with caring for your kids. These principles put the responsibility, privilege and joy of parenting in order. Just because parenting can be tough does not mean it cannot be fun, rewarding and successful.
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