Orange Parents

Some things are so routine, you don’t even have to think about them.

Like . . .
eating a sandwich.
watching the news.
brushing your teeth.
driving a car.

But in less time than it takes to do any of these, a parent can. . .touch the heart of a child forever!

Be careful how you measure success.

It’s not what you learn about your kids.

Our culture is saturated with parenting resources that educate us about family issues. Most books and materials end up in a box or on a shelf. Every parent struggles with how to assimilate what they know into daily practice. Just knowing more doesn’t make you a better parent.

It’s not what you give to your kids.

Most parents will pay any price to provide what they think their kids need physically. It is easy to become so preoccupied striving for a better lifestyle, education, or neighborhood that you miss what really matters.

What is real success?

It’s what you do with your kids.

It has more to do with how you spend your time than how you spend your money. Children need a relationship more than they need things. But when parents come home at the end of the day, there’s not a lot of energy or creativity left over for relationships. The fact is there is no substitute for time. Parents need to rethink and reprioritize how they spend it.

It’s what you leave in your kids.

An inheritance is what you leave TO your children. A legacy is what you leave IN your children. One is temporary while the other is forever. Most parents plan, work, and strategize to leave an inheritance, but few have any systematic plan to leave a legacy. Issues like faith and values cannot be simply taught. They have to be transferred from one heart to the next through a special kind of relationship.

It’s more than quantity time.

Spending a large amount of time with your children doesn’t automatically establish the right kind of relationship. It usually takes something more deliberate or more intentional if you want to leave something significant in your children.

It’s more than quality time.

Sometimes there is a tendency to think you can make up for missed time. Planning a special vacation or weekend can never substitute for the lack of routine time together. You can’t cram for relationships any more than you can get physically fit in a weekend or a week.

It’s the quantity of quality times.

Having a successful relationship with children requires consistent planned effort. Moses gave a farewell speech to Israel in the book of Deuteronomy. In Deut. 6:7, he gave specific instructions for the parents to know how to pass their values along to their children. He said, “Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

It’s as simple as a routine.

Significant relationships need a practical routine. By rethinking and reprioritizing the routine, a parent can establish healthier relationships with their children. Why don’t you start a new routine by simply marking a few opportune times during the week or the day when you can intentionally invest in your kids.

What are some of the most significant things you do as a parent each week to establish a routine? Any ideas that other parents can borrow?

Also check out the Parent Cue App. This app is designed to help remind parents to pause and make the most of everyday moments—with prompts for videos, activities, and discussion starters.

“They grow up so fast.”
“You better enjoy them while you can.”
“They will be gone before you know it.”

That’s what old parents like me say to young parents.
I’m not really sure why.
It’s probably because that’s what someone said to us when our kids were young.
So we feel like we are responsible to pass it along.

One day I am fully expecting a young mom or dad to respond with. . .
“Actually I wish they would grow up a little faster.”
or “No. I haven’t enjoyed them at all today.”
or “That’s sad. Why can’t they go somewhere now?”

Okay, so maybe no parent would dare say that out loud.
But what is a parent supposed to
feel
do
say
when someone makes them feel like time is running out with their kids?

Admit it. Don’t you sometimes feel like it’s just another way of saying. . .

“You better get your act together as a parent because you’re running out of time. The future of your children is coming like a freight train, and if you’re not careful you will miss out on what’s important and mess them up for the rest of their life.”

Maybe the next time an older parent says something like that to you, you should drop to your knees, grab them around the leg and burst into tears. Then ask them, “Oh no, how did you know that? Please tell me what am I supposed to do?”

Okay, that may be a little too dramatic. But the point is time is moving faster than many of us realize. Somewhere there is a clock counting down the number of weeks you have left with your kids before they move on. If you stop to think about it, a lot can happen in a single week!

Here’s a list of possible milestones for a child growing up today:

Considering the potential of what can happen in a week, let’s spend this next week on Orange Parents thinking about how to simplify the daunting task of 936 weeks of parenting our kids through childhood. What if we started thinking about how to parent just one week at a time?

First, what milestones would you add to this list?

Rosanna Marie Photography

By Jared Herd

After nine months of painting, hanging, woodworking, assembling, and hammering, my son, Dane Everett, came into the world. The pregnancy process is such a fascinating time, beautifully built into the rhythm of life by God. I thought the nine months would drag on, but we loved and needed those nine months to ready ourselves. And I now consider it an act of grace that one’s wife doesn’t run in with a pregnancy test crying one morning and the next day you are handed a crying infant. That would evoke all the emotions of a car crash for me, and the nine months make it feel like a pot of gold at the end of rainbow.

It was the night of January 8, 2012. I had just finished watching Tim Tebow knock off the Steelers, and like most American males, I was running around the house tebowing. We finished dinner, went to bed, and around midnight Rosanna let out a noise of grimace that only a woman who is two days overdue can make. Subsequently, I ended my tebowing and immediately shifted into The Black Eyed Peas “I Got a Feeling”—in particular, the line that says, “Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night.” This excitement continued as I drove us to the hospital at 3 a.m., on the foggiest night in Georgia history, all the way up until 11:29 a.m., when Dane was born. I was so excited in fact, that the doctor told the nurse to keep an eye on me, because she feared I was going to pass out. As Rosanna pushed and cried, she still managed to laugh.

I don’t remember all of it, but I do remember a complete reordering of my value system the moment he was born. I felt a literal shift in my spirit (and continue to feel it) towards the things of life that matter most. To be more specific, how I spend money, how many hours I work, how much I turn my cell phone off when I walk in the door, how I settle disagreements with Rosanna and others, and many other areas of life have shifted, or perhaps a better way to say it is that things that seemed to have an inflated sense of value have been put into their proper place. That has been a beautiful gift Dane has given to me.

Perhaps the most profound lesson I’m learning is that God’s activity is here in this moment. There are days I want to sprint ahead to Dane’s first steps or T-ball practice, but just like pregnancy is preparation and cultivation, so is this period. God has me in this moment with Dane, not the next one. I see God’s brilliance in that more and more. Perhaps you find yourself unsure of your current place in life, or unsure whether you want to be in it, but staying focused on the present, not longing for the past or just hoping for the future to hurry up, allows us to experience a gift. I look forward to a lot of moments in the future, but for now, I’m grateful for what lessons I find about marriage, life, and humility that come in the form of a dirty diaper.

Jared Herd serves in multiple capacities at Orange. He is also considered by many to be one of today’s freshest communicators, traveling the country sharing the hope of Jesus with a humorous and captivating approach that has reached thousands of teenagers and college students. Jared, his wife Rosanna and son Cane live in Cumming, Georgia.

Today’s highly technological and connected culture requires that parents step up their game when it comes to guiding their kids through the use of technology and social media. I saw this article on CNET recently called “ How Instagram became the social network for tweens ” that really brings to light some aspects of parenting that are entirely new for our time. Here’s an excerpt:

Just like Facebook, you technically have to be 13 to have an Instagram account. And, just like Facebook, Instagram is more or less a social network, dark sides included. Kids post photos, their followers comment… and then those not invited to said birthday party or shopping excursion get hurt feelings.

Many of us adults discovered Instagram as a nifty photo-sharing app that’s lets you spruce up your photos with cool filters. But it has all the functionality of a social network, which Instagram founder Kevin Systrom says was by design….

According to Nielsen, for example, Instagram is the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17, with 1 million teens visiting the site during July. Nielsen doesn’t categorize Instagram as a social network. While Flickr was top photo site for the overall population in July, Instagram was the favorite among teens, Nielsen found.

Add to that an earlier Nielsen study on growing popularity of Facebook and social networks in general among teenagers, and yet another on how teens tripled their mobile data consumption between December 2010 and December 2011, and the picture becomes clear.

Also, a Pew report presented over the summer about teenage online behavior found that 45 percent of online 12-year-olds use social-network sites and that the number doubles to 82 percent for 13-year-old Internet users. The most popular activity for teens on social networks is posting photos and videos, the study found….

We parents have been advised over and over again by educators that our tween-age kids are just too young for Facebook. Most are just not mature enough to gauge what’s appropriate for posting and to know how to respond to cyberbullying or contacts from strangers or spammers.

But with Instagram our guards were down. We never really imagined how it would be used. When my daughter asked permission to download the app, I was frankly excited that she was showing interest in photography. I love using the app and was unaware of the age restriction.

I had heard stories of kids on Instagram who had lost friends over not being included in activities posted to the site. But I only really caught onto Instagram’s ubiquity as a tweenage social network the day before school started this year, when my daughter’s middle school sent out class schedules to individual families using its password protected Web site. Within an hour of viewing the class schedule, my daughter had scribbled out a chart of who was in each of her classes. When I asked how she had figured it all out, she responded, “Everybody posted their schedules on Instagram.”…

Read the full article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57508430-93/how-instagram-became-the-social-network-for-tweens/

There are a lot of things to consider when helping our children navigate the world of technology, apps, and social media. Things like telling the truth, being kind, relationships, bullying, purity, thinking about the future, privacy, etc. . . These are all factors that kids need to learn to think about in such highly public forums as these.

I think one of the most important aspects of parenting kids through this is maintaining an open relationship of trust and love, so that your kids will be comfortable sharing their thoughts with you, and so they  will respect you enough to listen to what you say.

How are you helping your children navigate in a hyper-connected world?

Matt loves his wife Jessica and their two sons, Patriot and Azlan. He has a passion for making a difference, marketing, technology, and sports.