May Parenting Weekends: Measuring Your Child’s Value

Join us in sharing May Parenting Weekends! Come read, be encouraged, and share your thoughts relating to all things parent. Today’s topic: Measuring Your Child’s Value

Early in our children’s elementary school experience I learned to dread the weekly folder. Very early. Probably around week two of kindergarten.

My son has always been … verbal.

Despite living without language for the first year of his life (he lived in a Russian orphanage) and then suffering recurrent ear infections, people complimented his vocabulary from the time he was just two years old.

He’s always had a lot to say. 

I really wasn’t surprised when his kindergarten teacher noted in the dreaded weekly folder that he talked during lessons. What surprised me was my son’s explanation. I asked him if he was talking a lot during school and he quickly explained the problem: “That lady is always interrupting me!” 

Continue to read at Community Moms.

Parenting can be a bit rough at times. With a little encouragement, we can all become better parents to the glory of God!

April Parenting Weekends: Mom, Your Rules Are Unfair

Join us in sharing April Parenting Weekends! Come read, be encouraged, and share your thoughts relating to all things parent. Today’s topic: Mom, Your Rules Are Unfair

Being a Mom sometimes feels like being a Drill Sargent. There are those days where I have to remind myself that I’m the parent and not their friend.

They may think that my rules are one-sided, but their attitudes are lopsided.

I will not argue with my six and five year old. It would be so much easier to give into their demands. But they need to know that rules are non-negotiable.

I fear that my kids will go astray if I don’t teach them in the way they should go. I believe a home needs boundaries and a firm foundation to stand on.

Our solid rock that we live on is the Holy Bible. 

I will do whatever it takes to protect them from the snares of this world. Our world is filled with traps just waiting for my loved ones to fall in. They will literally be devoured if they don’t know what to watch out for or how to act in defense.

I want my children to learn to fight for themselves, but first they must see that they are worth fighting for. Boundaries keep children safe. When children feel safe they feel valued and cared for.

Continue to read at Community Moms.

Parenting can be a bit rough at times. With a little encouragement, we can all become better parents to the glory of God!

 

April Parenting Weekends: More… Boundaries

Join us in sharing April Parenting Weekends! Come read, be encouraged, and share your thoughts relating to all things parent. Today’s topic: Boundaries, by Beth Biggers

My son has a milk moustache. It mixes with the peanut butter and jelly already mucking up his lips, his cheeks. He is out of his chair – dancing.

“How does my skeleton make me move, mommy?”

He sings a made up silly tune as he dances, whirling around, experimenting with all the angles his body can make. He knows he is not supposed to be out of his chair until he is excused from the table.

I let him dance.

I answer his questions.

I remind him, gently, to sit down and finish his lunch.

He obeys with a full smile, milk moustache in all its glory, nourishing the skeleton that makes him move.

His skeleton does make him move, or rather, it allows him to move. It gives his body form and substance, makes his movements meaningful and deliberate. It allows him to walk and dance and run. It will enable him to do hard work and to hold his wife. This structure which houses his organs, his heart, his soul, is rigid. But within that rigidity, because of that structure, my boy has complete freedom of movement. 

It is helpful when enforcing boundaries with my children to remind myself that it is not my duty to raise children, it is my duty to raise adults. Right now they ask endless questions and poop their pants with virtually zero social consequences. One day, a day too swiftly approaching, that will change. I do not want to raise men who are a thorn in the flesh of society. I do not want to raise men who grieve the Holy Spirit. I want to raise strong, confident, godly, gentle, responsible men who love Jesus and love their people well. But I want to raise my men. I want them to be selfless, but to be wholly themselves.

Continue to read at Community Moms.

Parenting can be a bit rough at times. With a little encouragement, we can all become better parents to the glory of God!

April Parenting Weekends – Tight, But Not Crushed

Join us in sharing April Parenting Weekends! Come read, be encouraged, and share your thoughts relating to all things parent. Today’s topic: Tight, But Not Crushed

Today, Tanya, from God’s Character, will be talking about setting boundaries.  To read more posts from Tanya you can go to God’s Character.

I remember seeing a photo some time ago of a person in an area with a fence going all around it. The person in the fenced area did not want to be there because he thought that he was being restricted and caged in. So over the fence he jumped, only to realize that he was on a plateau.

For our family, setting boundaries is not about restraint. Setting boundaries is about protection, much like in the analogy of the fenced plateau.

When I was younger, I remember that we had chickens at some point. My earliest memory of holding a chicken was how I could feel all the bones and I was so scared to hold it too tight that I might break it’s bones. And so I did not hold it tight enough and it got away. Parenting sometime can be a lot like holding a chicken. You don’t want to hurt your children so you try not to squeeze them too hard. Yet you don’t want to be too lax and let them get away and get out of control.   

Continue to read at God’s Character.

Parenting can be a bit rough at times. With a little encouragement, we can all become better parents to the glory of God!