Parenting On Purpose

Communication Blockers (part 1) For many, the summer is a down time for the family because the kids are not in school there is extra time to do some fun family activities.  With the start of the school year, for some even this week, the family day to day activities begin in full swing.  Even [...]

Utilizing Grandparents and Other Adults A last great venue for teaching communication is one that is sometimes overlooked.  It is the grandparent.  In today’s transient culture many families don’t live down the street from each other anymore.  In fact, many don’t even live in the same state.  The tragedy of this is that for most [...]

Bed Time Another great venue for communication is bedtime.  When children are small it is so important to create a bedtime routine.  Many of these routines include reading to your child and singing before they go to sleep.  The important thing about these sweet times with our children is just getting to be with them [...]

Drive Time Many moms today spend countless hours in the car, aka the family taxi, because of the many extracurricular activities their children are involved in.  Some parents sacrifice their time driving their kids to Christian school or braving the carpool line. We can turn these times into communication training because we have a captive [...]

Communication Opportunities: The Family Dinner Table We have already addressed several reasons why communication is so important.  Next we will discuss a few venues for communication.  Each of these venues we can use to “zone out” as a family but we have discussed the fact that we need to be intentional in creating opportunities for [...]

Talking Through And About Conflict This week we have been talking about the importance of making communication training a priority in parenting. We have also mentioned that knowing how to communicate is a vital characteristic to have for a successful marriage.  Teaching your child the basics of communication is important because it will lay the [...]

Teaching Your Child Communication By Example There are many things that we teach our children by simply showing them how to do it.  One of the most important and sometimes difficult things about parenting is that we must always be aware there are little eyes watching everything we do.  This means our words and actions [...]

Helping My Child Share Feelings In A Positive Way One of the most important aspects of communication is the ability to share ones feelings. Although this seems such a basic form of communication it can be easily overlooked in the training of our children. Yesterday we talked about how our current culture is so distracted [...]

Why Is This So Important? For the next two weeks, we will be talking about training your kids to communicate.  This is one of those valuable tools that will help your kids be marriageable and employable in the future. There are many adults today that have not been trained how to communicate.  Because of  the [...]

The Importance Of Receiving Forgiveness There are many reasons to focus on teaching forgiveness. One of which is learning how to forgive enables your child to have a successful marriage. It helps your child avoid a life filled with bitterness and resentment. As they learn the cost of forgiveness it helps them to understand what [...]

When Your Child Is Hurt This may be one of the most if not the most difficult thing about being a parent, watching your child hurt. Whether it is physically hurt, being sick or emotionally hurting it pains us to see. Many of us would do anything to carry that burden for our child.  So [...]

What Forgiveness Is Not Forgiveness is not a feeling, much like love. It is a choice, an action or a journey; forgiveness is something we live. Depending on the level of wound, forgiveness may be something that we must choose daily for our lifetime. Jesus reminds us, “You have heard the law that says, ‘Love [...]

Forgiveness Is Not Natural, It’s A Discipline Forgiveness is a significant part of any relationship, but some areas of forgiveness don’t even seem natural, especially when it’s forgiving someone who has hurt us deeply.  We discussed yesterday how our example, especially in this area, is critical.  What do my children see when they observe my attitudes [...]

Why It's Important To Teach Forgiveness is not something that is focused on much in today's society. We want our children to stick up for themselves, to be on top of the "pecking order". It's not a very popular idea to turn the other cheek or "love your enemies." We unfortunately can see the emotional [...]

Perfection vs. Fun There is such pressure for performance and perfection in today’s culture, from how we perform at work/school to our appearance.  A great way to defuse this pressure is family fun.  Especially fun at a parent’s expense, this helps model for a child how not to take themselves to seriously.   In our house [...]

The Value of Food Coloring With the explosion of social media there is an overwhelming amount of information on how to have fun and create fun family memories. From blogs, like this one, to pinterest we have no excuse to not have creative family time.  We just have to make the time. There are two types [...]

It Doesn’t Have to Cost Money Today’s society has such a warped view of what fun is.  For many of us fun is wrapped around getting something new or paying someone/something to entertain us.  Many of us pay to take our children places for them to be entertained.  We need to teach our children what [...]

It Relieves Stress We touched on the concept of fun as a stress relieve a little bit yesterday.  It is amazing that fun can be like a mini vacation from life. It is amazing how just a few brief moments of fun can lighten the load of a stressful situation.  It also helps us as [...]

Why It’s Important To Have There are so many stressors on every member of the family today, financial, relational, and work/ school related stress to name a few.  The home is suppose to be an environment that will shield us from those stresses.  It is our safe place and shelter from the world around us.  [...]

Attributes Of A Friend-Part 2 We are continuing yesterday's study on what it looks like to be a best friend. Here are some more attributes and verses to study through. Best friends strive to become great encouragers. Hebrews 3:13 "But encourage one another daily... " Best friends strive to be Self-Sacrificing . Philippians 2:4 "Each [...]