Orange Parents

Happy 2012! The new year is a time to celebrate new beginnings and make new resolutions, but it’s also a time to rewind and revisit some of the top moments of the year before. I hope you’ve been able to take the time as a family to reflect on the most meaningful moments from 2011. The new year is a great opportunity to discuss with your family some of those favorite memories or even some of the more difficult ones. What’s your best memory? What do you have to be thankful for?

At Orange Parents, we’re thankful for your readership and interaction with us over the past year, for sharing our posts, and spreading the word. We’re thankful for great authors like Carey, Reggie and Kendra as well as our guest bloggers. Thanks for your wisdom and wonderful insights on parenting.

And here is your favorite post of 2011:

HOW TO RAISE A JERK
by Reggie Joiner

This is a picture of Eli. No, he is not a jerk. He just made a face that fit with our title. Eli is a typical eight-year-old growing up in a good home with parents who want to make sure he develops good character. But parenting any kid like Eli can be confusing.

Some leaders say too many who work hard at building children’s self-esteem are raising kids who will exhibit a lifestyle of entitlement and egotism. Other specialists say those who talk about children being innately bad are raising a generation that feels inferior and insignificant. Every expert has an opinion and it’s hard to know where the line actually is. Many promote their agenda by pushing the opposing opinion to the extreme.

One of the keys to parenting with balance is helping your children develop an attitude of humility. Every child has the potential to grow up and understand why it’s important to “put others first.” There is just a fine line between raising kids who have a healthy self-esteem and kids who are too egotistical. A life of arrogance that goes unchecked can result in a sad and lonely existence for someone, and frankly there are enough self-centered people around. How does someone develop an overinflated sense of self-worth and entitlement?

Here are a few ideas to help you effectively raise a jerk:

• Protect them from the consequences of their own mistakes.
• Make sure you do whatever they can do for themselves.
• Keep them away from anyone who thinks differently than they do.
• Try to give them everything they want.
• Tell them over and over again you just want them to be happy.
• Convince them that they are more special than other kids.
• Always take their side when they get in trouble with their teacher at school.
• Always take their side whenever they are in a conflict with a friend.
• Keep insisting that they are the best player on the team.
• Don’t give them consistent opportunities to help or serve other people.
• Never require them to do chores.
• Reinforce their prejudices about people from different cultures or backgrounds.
• Make your relationship with them more important than your relationship with your spouse.
• Rarely express genuine gratitude to those who help you.
• Teach them to talk more than they listen.
• Never let them hear you say “I was wrong. I am sorry.”

Maybe you can add a few ideas of your own… on how to raise a jerk.

LOSING YOUR MARBLES
by Reggie Joiner

I got a message from a friend named David Wills a few months ago. It was about losing his marbles. He sent it to remind me about something that happened several years ago at our church. We handed out jars of marbles to every family. There was one for each child in the home. There were enough marbles in each jar to represent the number of weekends children had left at home before they headed to college. For example there were jars with approximately–

468 marbles for 4th graders
364 marbles for 6th graders
208 marbles for 9th graders
104 marbles for 11th graders

Some parents used calendars to calculate the exact number of weekends for each individual child. They kept the jar in a visible place in their home and removed a marble each passing week to illustrate how much time they had left with their kids. It was a sobering visual reminder of how fast time goes.

David sent his post about marbles because he had literally used his last one. He dropped his son off at college that weekend and drove home. Looking back, he was shocked that he had lost his marbles so quickly. As a young parent looking forward, it’s easy to take for granted how little time you will actually have to spend with your kids. That’s why the marble visual is so powerful. It’s a practical way to illustrate Psalms 90:2 which says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

What if you decided to apply this principle to parenting? Go ahead and estimate how many days or weekends you potentially have with your kids. Establish a tangible reminder that you and your family can look at everyday. It could help you become a wiser parent. Why? Because knowing the number of days your kids have left at home can make you more intentional as a parent.

You will tend to be more intentional about–

Leaving work early
Watching your kid’s games
How you spend Saturdays
Driving them to school
Helping them with their homework
Going to church as a family
Tucking them into bed
Eating meals together

When you remember the days with your kids are numbered, you will tend to make a better plan for your day.

Why don’t you number the days you have with each of your children? See how it affects the way you parent.

As we close out the year spending time with our families and gearing up for a whole new year on Orange Parents, we thought we would re-post a few of our top blog entries of 2011. We wanted you to get a chance to catch up on what you might have missed out on. Here’s one of this year’s favorites.

RAISING BEAUTIFUL GIRLS
by Kendra Flemming

I have three girls. When they were little I was all about the hair bows, the ruffled socks, and the cute shoes. I loved getting them ready for the day. They were so cute!

It was so easy back then.  I thought they were beautiful. Their daddy thought they were beautiful. In their little world, who else mattered?

Ah, but little girls grow up. They become sixth graders. Have you ever met a sixth grade little girl? They are just beautiful. They are gangly and unique. They are natural and fresh. They are awkward and wearing braces. They are stuck between a little girl and all grown up.

Like I said, they’re beautiful.

I remember like it was yesterday when my daughter, who is now 18, was in sixth grade. She used to get ready for school in my bathroom every morning.

One morning she was fixing her hair. She first put it up in a ponytail, then huffed in disgust, and took down. Then she curled it. Then she straightened it. Then she pulled it back. She was getting more and more frustrated with her hair. I offered to help.

She said, “Mom, I hate my hair.” I couldn’t believe my ears. This was my kid who was born with a full head of beautiful dark hair. Total strangers would stop me to tell me how beautiful her hair was. She undeniably had the most beautiful hair in our family, and yet when she looked in the mirror, she hated her hair.

Clearly she was not seeing what I saw.

Our girls need us to reflect back to them the truth about who they are. There is so much more to them than what they look like. They were created to be so much more than a pretty face. But this world works against them. It reflects something totally different back to them.

In the eyes of the world, our girls don’t measure up. They aren’t thin enough, tall enough, or beautiful enough.

Very few women make it through those early years completely unscathed. But if our girls are to grow up and thrive with confidence in spite of the standards of this world, they need our help.

Here are a few ideas:

Recognize and praise their non-appearance strengths.
Are they a fast runner, a great friend, a creative writer, or an excellent dancer? Celebrate the qualities that make them unique.

Encourage and teach them how to take care of themselves.
Teach them that they need to get enough rest, exercise, eat right, shower, take care of their skin, and brush their teeth. When these things are lacking, it takes a toll on their confidence.

Don’t allow yourself to obsess, publically talk about, or criticize the physical flaws of your girls.
As moms we can be the worst. Imagine a mom talking to Aunt Betty….“Have you seen Sarah’s front tooth? It sticks way out in the front and it’s huge!” We look at it like it’s a medical or dental issue to be taken care of. Braces are a good thing! We have to remember that our words are a reflection back to our daughters of how we view them.

Celebrate uniqueness.
Point out the unique qualities that you see in them that make them special. We all know that young girl who looks ordinary to the average observer, but when she smiles, the whole room lights up. Point out and celebrate the differences more than you celebrate the sameness.

Teach your daughter from the beginning that God made them.
What if your daughter grew up believing that the God of the universe who created her uniquely knew her by name, had a plan for her life, and loved her? How would this change the way that she viewed herself and her purpose in this world?

Some of our girls will struggle with this more than others. It’s our job as parents to keep reflecting back to them a healthy and true sense of who they are and who God created them to be.

As we close out the year spending time with our families and gearing up for a whole new year on Orange Parents, we thought we would re-post a few of our top blog entries of 2011. The following article was written by Carey Nieuwhof

GRACE AND DISCIPLINE

No one would pretend that raising kids is easy.  It’s a constant tension between grace:

I love you.

I see value in you.

I will never quit on you.

And discipline:

You can’t write on the walls in crayon;

hit your brother on the head with a mixing bowl;

be out with the car til 5 a.m.

I know I feel the tension very deeply within me. Often I feel that if I express too much grace, I will lose the battle in trying to correct my kids’ behavior. It’s easy to withhold grace and love and communicate harshly thinking it’s the only way to teach them.

But that style communicates that love is conditional, that it’s dependent, that it’s only there if they measure up. And conditional love is not grace. Grace is undeserved kindness.

If we think about it, it’s also tension we feel within the nature of Christianity itself. And maybe working through our faith tension provides insight into how we might parent.

Christians believe we are saved by grace through faith—and not by our “works.” In other words, we can’t earn our salvation. You can’t be “good enough” to get into heaven, and the standard in eternity is not whether our good deeds outnumber our bad deeds. Christ died in our place for our sins, and our response is to trust Him with our lives.

This is so clear on the one hand, but confusing on the other. What about our deeds? Where do they fit in? Do you just ignore them?  If they can’t save you, why would you change? Exactly how does that work?

Here’s the clarification on the faith front:

We don’t change in order to be loved. We change because we’ve been loved.

Liberating, isn’t it? You don’t change long-standing habits and patterns so that Christ will love you; you change them because He loves you.

As a husband and an adult, when I mess up, Toni can greet me one of two ways. She can start with grace or start with discipline. When she starts with discipline, I tense up, get defensive, and, if I don’t stop myself, will start to blame someone or something or dig for excuses. (Not proud of that, I’m just being honest here.)

But when she starts with grace and tells me she loves me, that she’s disappointed, that there might be a perfectly logical explanation, and she begins with empathy, I melt. I come clean. It’s so much easier for me to be genuinely sorry and resolve to change.

Are our kids any different?

What if we just adopted a stance of grace first, discipline second, as the default at home? What if we decided that change is a response to love, not a condition for it?

The best way I know how to do this is to consistently communicate in a way that gives the relationship value. Try this:

Don’t discipline when you are angry in the heat of the moment. Wait until you have calmed down. Even if you need to stop something in the moment, have the conversation when you are rational again.

Start with how you feel about them (that’s the grace part).

Then let them know how you feel about what they did and what the implications are (now the discipline).

And, in the same way we change most deeply because we’ve been loved, our kids can change because they’ve been loved.

What are you learning about this? What’s helping you parent and discipline with grace?