3 posts tagged “parenting”

Parenting

(2nd post - taken from my notes from a parenting course we took in 2007 called "Growing Kids God's Way")

The Parent Factor

Unfortunately, many adults parent in response to their own unresolved childhood fears, conflicts and disappointments. As a result, they sometimes parent their own past more than their children. For example, if the growing-up years were pleasant, there is a strong tendency to employ training techniques similar to those by which you were raised. If your childhood years were stressful, the tendency is to swing to the opposite extreme of your parents' methods when rearing your own children. For example, parents brought up under unfair, restrictive or even abusive methods often unknowingly move toward permissive parenting, allowing their children to become self-centered. These parents in many ways become more concerned about their children's feelings than about their actions. They elevate psychological health above moral health, and any standard of right and wrong is subject to how their children feel, not what they do.

Parenting Extremes

Permissive/child-centered parents fear inhibiting the child, so they go to the extreme of creating an environment of unrestrained freedom, resulting in an under-controlled child. On the other hand, authoritarian parents fear spoiling their child, so they see their salvation in the power of rules and limitations; resulting in an over-controlled child. Both extremes deprive the child of basic skills necessary for healthy adolescence.

Authoritarian Parenting

• predominantly concerned with restraining evil, and little attention paid to elevating good
• although children typically conform and do virtuous acts, they do so out of the fear of reproof, not because of the love of goodness. The child hears "You will do it or else." The "or else" becomes the motivation for right behaviour, not a resident principle of the heart

Permissive Parenting

• predominantly concerned with creating the right environment for the child, and not behavioural results
• for them, child-rearing is reduced to avoidance of all the negative emotions and pursuit of all the positive ones. Thus right and wrong training are measured by how parents think their child feels rather than by the end product - their child's behaviour

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.
  
  

Here's a helpful nugget for parents taken from a recent Tim Keller sermon:

• When we are raising children, if we push them away and keep them at arm’s length in order to preserve our freedom and independence, they will grow up emotionally dependent and damaged. The only way our children can grow up with freedom and independence is if we sacrifice our freedom and independence, for years on end. Once again, it’s them or you.