christian parenting

Do you doubt your parenting? Do you find that you wonder if you're messing your kids up? If you're doing it right? If you're too strict or not strict enough, if you yell too much or don't yell enough, if you try to figure out the schedule and it's overbooked or it's not full enough. Are they engaging? Are they learning? Are we having family time? Am I giving them all that I can for God? It's endless questioning if you let yourself. We need to know that we are good parents. When you're raising your kids, it's important to trust the truth, not the feelings.

If you can provide that safe framework for your kids in all of those areas I just mentioned, it's going to do a world of good.

Bonus Tip: If you love their parent, assuming that their parent is a healthy person in the household with you, you stand up for truth, and don't name call, this is also helpful.

Don't name call, belittle, put anybody down, even nicknames or comparisons among kids, like, "oh, you're the pretty one" or "you're the smart one" or whatever. Don't have favorites. Don't name call. Don't beat up on other people. If you're not doing those things or you're working to not do them, you can really put a healthy home together. Again, it's about relationship, not rules. With a healthy relationship in place, you are a good parent. So doing those things should keep you busy for all of your raising kids journey because it's a constant thing of refining and growing both yourself and in growing your kids up and raising them well.

Now, if you have other parenting tips that you would like to share, please go put them in the Facebook. I would love to hear from you or put them in an Instagram to me. I'd love to know your thoughts on what's worked for you parenting wise. And that could also help other people too.

But I want to tell you that the comparison game is absolutely a trap. It will trap you every time because comparison breeds dissatisfaction. Comparison is like taking an orange and making it wish it were an apple. It may very well be a piece of fruit, but it's not red, it's not smooth, it doesn't have the same taste, It has a different seed structure. And yet, oh, this fruit should look like the other fruit. That's ridiculous. That just diminishes the value of the piece of fruit you do have. 

You have been given your kids. They are beautiful gifts. They're your fruit that you are to nurture and care for and encourage, right? Those are the things that God has given you. Who they are, their characteristics, their hearts, their minds, their bodies, their spirits, their experiences, their parents. God designed everything uniquely for them. And you as the parent, get to nurture that and build that up to model and direct. And you alone need to make those decisions for your kids, you and your spouse, of course, assuming the parenting for your kids, but it's up to the parents or the guardians or caregivers or if they're grandparents listening and they're raising the kids. Whoever is the appointed person for taking care of the children, god has ordained you to do it and to do it well. And you will do it uniquely because you are not any other person on this planet and your kids are not any other person on this planet. And therefore you have a unique relationship, a unique bond, and a unique calling and a unique direction and a unique style and a unique way of going about things. Enjoy being the creative, amazing person that God made you to be in whatever way he made you to be it. And the same for your kids.

Let them be who God created them to be in the ways that God created them to be it. Don't try to make it something for them or you that fits into society's norms because you won't fit in. You were made to stand out. You were made for such a time as this for these people. You are shepherding and stewarding.

You may need to make choices right now as it's the middle of July, for things like what school or what teachers or what style or what curriculum or cyber, home, school, public, private. You may need to make decisions about do we do sleepovers? Are we having big birthday parties? How many birthday parties can we afford for them to go to? And what types of gifts and budget do we have for that? You might have things like can they sleep over? Can they join this sports team? Do we have enough time to run them back and forth between band camp and other things? Or should we limit the number of activities? Do we need to put them in every activity. Do we need to carve out more time at home? This kind of piggybacks on the episode that I did about how to make this connection with your kids in this parenting and the ways to go about that.

But this is how you make the choices. How you make the choices matters. The choices need to be God honoring and for your needs and your kids' needs together. It's a family unit, and you're not leading anybody else's family unit. You are stewarding the one you've been given. It's not better than or less than other people and their way of doing it, and neither are their ways better than or less than yours. Now, some of the ways that people go about things, there are some things that are better or worse, right? Things go better when you encourage versus criticize, right? There are things that build up rather than tear down. Of course, that stands to reason.

Whether someone participates in sports or band or art or doesn't participate in all these activities but ends up doing some sort of service or job or how much time they put into homework, it's all variable. My husband did straight A work and was valedictorian, and he never studied. I got A's, but I had to put in the time much of the time, especially in college. Okay? There are people who study all the time and get DS and they're still doing the best they can. And there are people who never study and get F's or DS or A's, right? Everybody's unique. It's not a grading system. We all need to find out where we're talented, where we're gifted, and work with how we've been uniquely designed and created to be. And that includes the design for your family and each member in it.

Enjoy the uniqueness, celebrate it, be proud of the uniqueness, own it. It's so nice now that my kids are all newly in this young adult phase, this launching phase, to be able to go, you know what? We were right. Not in every single thing we ever did or said. I'd love to be able to report that that was true. It wasn't so much right or wrong, but we were right about the things that were most important for us, for our family, and we set those as the intentions for how we parented. We were going to teach them the Lord's love and model it for them. We were going to take them to church regularly. We were going to encourage them to care for people and do volunteer service.

We are going to travel and enjoy having fun, learning and spending time together and having fun and prioritizing it. And we have a family trip coming up where they and special people in their lives are all coming with us. We're going to all go to the beach and hang out and play games and also go off on our own and do things because we all enjoy being together. This is stuff that we cultivated from very early on. Seeing new sights, relaxing, playing, having fun, enjoying each other. But we also encouraged hard work. We also encouraged following your passions and your unique creation. We have a son who's an author.

We have a daughter who's more physically oriented as far as health and fitness and training, weight training. We have a daughter who's more into ministry. Everybody took their own unique direction. That the Lord's leading them in. There's not only one way to parent. In fact, you will probably parent each of your kids in a different way. And that's okay as long as you go back to those rules at the beginning that are more like just really helpful guidelines. Not have-to's, but beneficial things to think about for your kids, for your family.

What are your goals? How will you live that out? And how will you bring your kids along to edify them so that they can go out and serve the Lord in how he's uniquely made them? Quit the comparisons. Own your uniqueness. You'll be able to look back and be glad you did.

Today's episode has to do with parenting, and it's not something that I've talked all that much about in the podcast, but I'm going to be doing more as we head back into the school season. But right now, it's still mid-July, and if you have kids who are home from school and in your space and in your home, I can imagine that there are times when you may wonder, how do I get these kids to listen? How do I get them to obey? How do I get them to do what I need them to do? They're driving me crazy because they're on top of each other and there's stuff to get done and now the house is a mess and they tear in and out of here. Whatever it is that you're going through, I want to give you a few tips for building relationship with your kids. But maybe your kids are already grown. These still work. These still work because people are the same. No matter who we are or what age we are, whether we recognize it or not, we all need to be in relationship, to be understood and cared about and to understand what the rules are.

I'm going to give you three takeaways as you try to figure out how to get your kids to listen or how to have an impact on your young adult children's lives. The first starts with modeling. Look at your own actions. Are you able to manage your own emotions? Are you able to regulate your needs? Are you able to listen to yourself when you have intense feelings and find out what needs might have some desire to be met that you are ignoring or that are being minimized, or that you're judging and criticizing yourself for? Because if you're doing that to yourself, it's likely that you're not listening to the needs of your kids with a present solution, focused mindset. Maybe you are. Maybe you deny yourself and you're just amazing at listening to your kids' hearts, but your kids need you to model taking care of oneself. It is not selfish to meet your needs and take care of your needs and notice what your needs are so that you can manage them.

It is modeling for your children how to be good caregivers to themselves as well as how to love others. They need to see you making good choices in the way you live because that's how they learn to live. The way you talk to them; that's how they learn to talk to themselves. The way you talk to yourself; that's what they see. That's how they then talk to themselves. When you can understand what they're going through rather than just beat into existence compliance or harsh correction, but understanding and compassion and grace. They learn to internalize understanding, compassion, and grace.

When you work on relationship with an open door policy that says you are welcome here even if you're not perfect, they learn relationship is more important than rules. Now I will tell you it's nice when the household rules get followed. It's nice when things are clean and the kids comply and when we have a close relationship. But if you find that you're having these stuck points where nothing is getting through and you're judging yourself as if you're a bad parent or feel like all you do is complain and grumble and correct and yell, I want you to think about these things. Are you modeling love and respect like Jesus would? See your kids towards yourself as well as to them and to your spouse. Start with modeling a well lived life.

Secondly, give understanding over insisting on compliance or harsh correction. Understand the feelings, understand the needs that they have, understand what they are not capable of developmentally, and give them options.

Give them choices, teach them, come alongside them. Understand if they don't want to do something and instead of it's okay that they don't want to do something, but they must do it. It's okay to feel that way. And when we feel like that, there are some ways we can deal with it. We can do a little bit now and we can do a little bit later. We can do it all now and get it all over with. We can do it later, but it might be on our minds this whole time. Which one would you like to do right now? A way that you come along and problem solve with them allows them to realize there's more than one way.

They don't have to get rebellious. They can listen to you, they can listen to themselves, they can listen to the Holy Spirit, they can have grace, and they will comply. They may not comply in the exact way because relationship is more important than rules. Listen, talk, show respect, and respect doesn't mean that there aren't times when someone is being willfully disobedient, that you don't have to have punishment or discipline. But you do have options to focus on modeling the behavior you would like to see, speaking with a gentle answer that turns away wrath, giving grace, love and respect, and offering that understanding and empathy while you cultivate relationship. Because in a relationship, I've never met a kid who doesn't want to be loved and valued. They may have had lots and lots of trauma on them and look like the worst kid in the world, but listening, care, love, and valuing is never going to hurt them. And they may need rules and tough love in those ways sometimes.

But if the relationship is there, the respectful modeling is there, the understanding is there, the choices of healthy ways to manage things and deal with things are there, they're going to be a lot less frustrated and so are you. Which one of those would you like to work on today? Because we can all stand to improve our relationships our care, our empathy, our understanding, and how we live our lives. To model after Jesus, feel free to go and pop into Instagram or Facebook and share the thing that you'd like to work on. I'd love to hear from you. Take care.