If you haven’t read a Francine Rivers book yet… then you have a few gallons’ worth of tears the rest of us have previously shed. This two book series shines a light on how our parenting and our experiences can impact our children for generations.
Extremely cold, aloof and unhappy people generally did not come from loving and emotionally healthy families. Loving and emotionally healthy children generally do not come from hyper dysfunctional and unloving families.
I highly recommend these books although I must say I wanted to quit reading many times but kept pushing through in hopes that the end result would redeem some of the pain.
Life ain’t always pretty and these books don’t sugar coat, but they are encouraging and helpful when thinking in light of our parenting ideas and strategies.
Good questions to ask ourselves in light of these books.Â
What's in this post...
(1) Am I over-correcting to avoid mistakes I felt my parents made?
If our parents “never” let us do something do we make a point to always give that privilege to our children? Do we think our parents were too strict and thus give our children too many freedoms? Or vice versa.
Do we remember always having hand-me-downs and now buy our children tons of too expensive clothes? Often the problem is that a child feels a lack of love or security and then, when they grow up, they parent by over-correcting, and this is not always a helpful practice.
(2) Am I hiding what I’m really feeling assuming my children know?
Children are not mind readers.If you never tell them you love them, odds are they think you don’t. If you never praise their work, efforts or output, odds are they don’t think you noticed/cared/appreciated it.
Children need to be explained what you think, what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you feel about them. They need to hear it a million times and then, when they ask to hear it again, they need to hear it the million and second time.
(3) Do I dig around and search until I find out what’s really the matter with my children when I sense something is up?
In the books a child hid something that was devastating with lifelong effects because she was scared. All the signs were there that something had happened but no one pushed it. It only came out 40 years later. Have you ever thought “I know something is up with Jackie O but I can’t figure out what.”
Parents have an intuition and if you feel that something is going on, it is your job to find out what. You may have to get wise, dig dig and dig some more, pray, offer an ear, or even investigate by other means, but it is your job to make sure they are safe.
As they get older sure there will be things they don’t want to share with you, but particularly while they are young, we need to be diligent they aren’t hiding something that is tormenting them.
Great reads. Finished both in two days… by the end I felt I needed to finish so I could get my life back. Now those are good reads.
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