Over the next few weeks leading up to the release of Lead Your Family Like Jesus, Phil Hodges, one of my co-authors, and I are going to be answering questions that my amazing launch team queried us with. I hope you can learn from some of our answers. Parenting is a constant learning process, and I hope you’ll be encouraged in what you read.
The LYFLJ book talks about the world’s formula for self-worth: “performance + the opinion of others.” How have you helped your children overcome that kind of thinking?
Phil: Here are three ways you can help kids overcome that type of thinking.
1. What you notice impacts what your kids will think is important. Catching them doing something right in areas of character like courtesy, honesty, kindness, and serving others can create a healthy influence in their long-range priorities. What gets noticed gets repeated.
2. Keep things real in how you respond to their successes and failures. If you are timely and specific in your praise and correction, your children can get a clear picture of what a good job looks like.
3. Keep the drama under control. It’s better to respond to spilt milk with restraint than blow it out of proportion. The bigger deal you make over something, the more likely your kids will hide their failures from you.
Tricia: I love Phil’s answers! One thing that helped our family was creating a family identity. We discovered we were about dinner times, hanging out, serving, watching sci-fi (well, most of the family), and reading books. Those things became cool. I believe having a strong family identity made it so our kids didn’t have to go looking for their identity elsewhere.
We also kept lines of communication open and talked a lot about make good choices and seeking God’s approval. We made sure all our kids felt that God’s opinion was the most important!
*Photo credit: Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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