No Ordinary Days

This episode is dedicated to mothers and the inestimably valuable sacrifices they make on behalf of their families. We cannot thank you enough for all that you do.

Isn't it strange how things of little to no importance have a way of crowding out the truly important? Take for instance the inordinate amount of time we spend bickering with other people or fretting about the future or worse - engaging in both of these activities on social media. All the while life - beautiful, real, soul reviving life - is going on around us. But what if we don't have eyes to see it? What if we're so engrossed in the things we see while we're looking down we've lost the ability to look up? May it not be so with us parents, for of all people, when it comes to beauty, we have the most to lose.

Mentioned In This Podcast:

⁠The Well Ordered Homeschool Planner ⁠

⁠Character Badges ⁠ - Character and Habit program for children ages 3-13

⁠Chalk Full of Design⁠ - Handcrafted, Educational chalkboards for children! Enjoy screen free learning!

Over the course of our parenting journey it is certain that we will make mistakes along the way. Regret is waiting to greet us as we make our way to the finish line and he's there to collect a debt. Our job to make sure that we owe him as little as possible. How do we do this? By learning from our mistakes and perceiving the true value of our short time with our children. In this way, though our mistakes be many, our regrets will be few. Then we'll recognize that this process of refinement, this process of stumbling and course correcting, is what enabled us to reach our destination.

Yelling is a quick fix with a short shelf-life. What’s worse, it rarely reaches the heart of our children for good. In this episode we'll look at the signs that might indicate you yell too much as well as the reasons why parents feel compelled to yell. We'll also discuss some of the damaging effects it can have on our relationship with our children.

Christian parents are quite familiar with Ephesians 6:1 - 2, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honor thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise;" We may have trotted this verse out in moments of disobedience or when we felt our children were being disrespectful. Of course, as it applies to our children the second verse is true, no matter the circumstances. The Lord expects them to honor us as their parents. But applied to us? The question should undoubtably be raised - are we the sort of parents that deserve this honor? While it's true that these verses present our children with an important commandment, (arguably the most important of their years at home) it's also true that we, as their parents, can represent the greatest obstacle to their keeping it. May that not be the case. May we endeavor to deserve the honor and respect that the Lord says is our due.

We live in a day where our children, and everything they represent, is under constant threat. The time is long past for us as parents to become clear eyed with respect to these threats and to fight, every single day, on our children's behalf. It's a fight that requires sacrifice, perhaps for some even the ultimate sacrifice, but how could we give our children anything less?

Our children are on a journey back to the one who created them (as are we). Our job is to help them along their way but we are also more than capable of hindering them. We can do this in many ways, but in this episode we're going to focus on our being either too harsh or too lenient. Exclusively focusing on our child's faults to the near exclusion of their strengths, or vice versa, is at its heart a failure to properly represent the character of God to them. God is just and merciful. Your children need mercy and justice in their lives. They need us to portray God in as clear a light as possible, but when we're out of balance, we can actually be the thing that is obscuring our child's line of sight to him. In this sense, parenting is an exercise in getting out of the way.

Mentioned In This Podcast:

⁠The Well Ordered Homeschool Planner ⁠

⁠Character Badges ⁠ - Character and Habit program for children ages 3-13

⁠Chalk Full of Design⁠ - Handcrafted, Educational chalkboards for children! Enjoy screen free learning!

When it comes to your identity as a parent, what's the message you're trying to send to your child? That you know what's best? Conveying that message is understandable but it has a fatal flaw - you don't always know what's best and you of all people should know that you aren't perfect. With that in mind there is a better and more effective message to send to your children - that you want what's best. This message doesn't require you to be right all the time, but it does require humility and a willingness to admit when you're wrong, yes, even to your child. Let's face it parents, despite our best intentions we often make mistakes. It's OK to say you're sorry.

We as parents would love it if all we had to do was to tell our children what to do and they just did it. Of course it almost never works like that. Not only are nearly all of the tasks we give them difficult for them to carry out (due to their lack of experience) they rarely see the value of the tasks seeing as how they're, well, children. In this episode we discuss how we need to approach the issue of getting our children to help around the house (or even acquiring qualities of sound character) the same way we would teaching them to ride a bike. Just as importantly we discuss how getting what we want from them means giving them what they want from us.