What really bugs you as a parent?
I’ve just discovered Kindling Publications, a website which belongs to a family that I actually met once. They have developed some homeschooling materials and even a music CD or two, but I like the cheerful but extremely challenging parenting articles of Maranatha Chapman (what kind of parents in the 1970s would name their daughter “Come quickly, Lord” - sounds deliciously extreme to me). Maybe I shouldn’t be reading advice for mothers, but it challenges fathers too.
Maranatha’s article Learning to Flow asks parents how they react to messes and spills, to changes in plans, to having to wait (and needing to wait), to being at rest, to having things go the opposite way from your way. You might not like her answers, but from the time I spent with her, they seem to be real answers and not sham answers.
So much parenting advice seems to center on how to protect yourself from your children. Websites and books tell us, in veiled terms or blunt terms, how to preserve your own rights and feelings - while still being a good parent, of course. But what if you give up your rights to someone else, and let Him defend you? What if you could teach your children how to give and how to forgive, not because that’s what nice people do, but because that’s what God does?
What really bugs you as a parent? Maybe you will never be able to change them. Maybe you can only change yourself.
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