A big thanks to all you wonderful friends; for reading my posts, for commenting, for over looking my errors and for tolerating my blunders sometimes.
I cannot do this without the support of all of you.
If you read my last post, you already know that giving up on the children is not an option but, what can we do to help them?
For starters, while not giving up on your kids, please parents, “DON’T GIVE IN”
Don’t give in to pressures from these kids: the puppy faces, the temper tantrums, the silent treatment, the door banging, refusing to eat or come out of the rooms, you name it….”the American Kid Syndrome” if you like.
Don’t give in to their emotional war. You need to be strong and equipped too to help them out.
You can do it, “We can do it”. We only need to balance things off but we can only do that if we are willing to apply counsel from God.
Let God guide us and be our strength.
Children require a measure of discipline and responsibility in addition to the love we shower on them.
They need our support but that also means a lot of our time.
We need patience and humility too if we hope to succeed. The book of Ephesians 6:4 encourages fathers{parents} not to provoke their kids but to bring them up in discipline and mental regulation of God. That’s difficult right? Well, not really, just some work on our part.
We need to have enough courage to say no when we need to do that and mean it too. We tend to believe that we show these kids love by letting them have their way but truth is: they are watching keenly, most times, they know what they are doing. They only want to know what you will do. I am a big culprit here but i am working on it. We need to follow through when we apportion boundaries.
These children are smart trust me, some of them are smarter than i and you: they know which things to say, which strings to pull.
They know how much we love them, they know our weak points and they use these to manipulate us but they also know when we are serious.
We also need to give as much time as we can to them, they need us to listen when they talk, you may need to get their opinion on matters when you make family decisions, they need the feeling of relevance. They need a lot of patience from us, i am working on this too, i tend to be very inpatient some times. They need understanding and a lot of love. Parents most importantly need to be humble enough to acknowledge it when they make a mistake.
We need to be humble enough to say “I am sorry” when we need to after all parents do make mistakes too.
One more thing, we don’t have to expect them to be happy when we discipline or correct them but we still need to do those. Who likes to be corrected anyway? I am sure most of us felt same way when we were their age. It may not be as bad as it is today but can we really say how our parents must have felt back then?
Our parents didn’t give up on us so, we won’t give up on our kids.
Our parents didn’t also give in to us so, we will try not to give in to emotional manipulation from our kids. I am happy that my parents didn’t give in to all my tantrums and our kids will look back in the future and be grateful that we neither gave up on them nor gave in to their pranks.
In my next post, i intend to talk about me and some of the stupid things i did when i was growing up. My mum deserves a lot of praise!!.
THANKS GREAT FRIENDS FOR HANGING OUT WITH ME!!
LOTS OF LOVE!!!