Parenting is Heart Work, Week 4

In the curriculum, Parenting is Heart Work, the video series, week 4 talks about A Toolbox of Consequences. This session gives 7 categories of tools, or consequences, for your toolbox. This is important because not every child needs the same consequence for each discipline time.

The corresponding chapters suggested to read along during the week are Chapter 10 and 13.

Chapter 10 is titled, Teaching Your Child's Heart.
The part I want to focus on is this:
     Children develop thinking patterns, paradigms, that determine what they believe, how they relate to others, what they expect from life, and how they feel in a given situation. These paradigms give children a grid for evaluating life and for making decisions, and they change as a child grows. Unfortunately, sometimes the conclusions kids come to are naive or inadequate, creating problems both for the child and often for the parents and others. When their grid is faulty, children make poor judgments and react unwisely. As children grow and develop, new information is assimilated into the paradigms, and conclusions are adjusted, sometimes radically.

Your job as a parent is to look at yourself as a teacher and a coach. You understand life better than your child, even though they want to tell you differently, and you need to be able to guide them away from faulty conclusions. This is why having many tools for consequences is important as you guide your child and not just correct them.

Chapter 13 is titled, Constructive Correction.
     Children develop the opinion that correction is an attack and they must defend themselves at all costs. They believe correction means weakness, and weakness must be hidden. Angry reactions are perceived as strong. Blaming someone else is considered insightful. Pointing to other factors that caused the problem somehow seems mature. Justifying, rationalizing, and blaming are ways children skirt the issue and miss correction's benefits.

Frustrated parents sometimes contribute to the problem by correcting in counterproductive ways. They may be embarrassed and angry when their children need correction. They seem surprised and caught off guard and end up responding in unhealthy ways.

You may have children who are like that. You may be tired of always arguing with them. If that is the case, you may want to finish reading chapter 13. You can come to our parenting class to learn more, or you can purchase your own book through the National Center for Biblical Parenting

God bless you as you parent the heart.