Parenting

Parenting

My son Benjamin recently turned 2yrs (Feb.23) and has since made it clear to us that he is now in a new stage of life - the "terrible twos". His will of defiance is constantly testing the patience of his parents. Although his vocabulary has increased exponentially over the past year, the one word we still constantly hear from him is ... "NO!" (in a loud disobedient tone accompanied by hand flailing). As such, I will soon be investing more time in learning about parenting/discipline.

Jeanie and I took a parenting course a few years ago called "Growing Kids God's Way" and found it to be very helpful. It was a big investment in time and energy (we travelled to Aurora, which is about 1&1/2hrs from Toronto, every Fri night for about 5months in the middle of winter), but we both received valuable paradigm-shifting life-lessons - both from the perspective as parents and as children. I'll try to share some of what we learned in the next few posts. Here are a few points from the introductory session:

• The primary consideration in early parenting is the child's heart and not simply outward behaviour
• The heart is the center of all of life and behaviour, and is that portion of man that God looks upon and searches  [Ps 139:23; Proverbs 4:23]
• The general goal of heart training (the portion that parents can impact) is to help a child gain personal self-control
• In early parenting, external pressure is necessary to bring about acceptable behaviour even though a young child has no cognitive understanding of the reason for the behaviour. With adults, beliefs precede actions; with children the opposite is true - actions precede beliefs.
• If the child does not learn to resolve conflict early in life, it will be much more difficult to do so later in life.