Denny and his wife had occasional disagreements over how to raise their two children. Denny was more lax and affirming, while his wife was more strict and willing to correct and guide. Denny was, on the other hand, somewhat less generous, believing the children should earn and do things on their own, while his wife loved to lavish things on their children. But on one thing, Denny and his wife always agreed: they wanted their children to be well adjusted and of good character. They didn’t want to raise broken, selfish, undisciplined children who took more than they gave and were a discredit to themselves, their family, and their maker.
Parenting
Among the many skills that benefit a family and lead to a good family life, parenting may be the one greatest skill influencing the quality of life in a household with dependent children. You and your spouse might not have great financial, housekeeping, or home maintenance skills. Neither you nor your spouse may be key employees with abundant work talents and great earning capacity. You and your spouse may also not be great neighborhood organizers or community volunteers or leaders. But if you and your spouse have strong child-rearing skills, you and your spouse are more than doing your part for your family and community. The number one role and responsibility of a married couple with minor children is to raise healthy, socially well-adjusted children of good moral character, with greater virtues than vices. Households with well-mannered, strong, courageous, adventurous children seeking to make the world a better place in honor of their maker are beacons of light and hope in an uncertain world. Make parenting your children well your household and marital priority.
Providing
Providing for your children is a first parental responsibility. For many couples, the need to provide for children goes without saying. Many parents would and do give pretty much everything to their children that they think their children might want or need. Yet providing for your children can involve more than lavishing them with material goods. Children need basic goods like safe and secure housing, good nutrition, fit clothing, the ability to play and exercise, sound schooling, and competent medical and dental care. Safe transportation can also be a necessity. These basics, though, should come not in fits and starts, with gaps, inadequacies, and insecurities, but instead in a consistent manner that fosters the child’s confidence. Consistency can be harder than quantity. Parents can also harm their children by oversupplying goods, especially when doing so to compensate for an undersupply of love, care, and supervision. Don’t give your children more than they need or things they should not have, simply to feel as if you are an adequate or great provider.
Networks
Some parents are, at times, inadequate providers. Whether because of their own broken character, illness, or disability, or due to external forces like job loss, some parents cannot supply adequate housing, nutrition, clothing, supervision, medical care, and other needs for their children all the time. Those times of unmet need require family, neighbor, friend, school, church, nonprofit, or government assistance. You may or may not like the worn mantra that raising a child takes a village. Families generally do just fine raising children. Some families need their village to stay out of their way and stop meddling with their children. Yet building a trusted social network around your family can help in times of family distress. At times, good parenting involves good networking. The parent who can reach out to neighbors, church ministries, or school families for a helping hand, such as child transport to practices or events and back, some timely meals or emergency medical funding, a little peer coaching or adult mentoring, or a referral or recommendation for a child’s activity, tutoring, or other support, can make a significantly more-effective parent than one who has no network. Build and value your parental network. You may mine gold from those hills.
Development
The guidestar for providing appropriately for your children is their development, not their pride, status, or comfort. Your family is responsible for the full development of your children’s virtuous character, physical and mental health, social skills and relations, and useful capacities. Some things your children may want you to provide and that you can afford to provide will not aid, and may instead stunt, their development. Parents can harm their children by supplying the wrong goods, unsuited to the child’s age, needs, and interests. A fancy video-game console may, for instance, stunt the physical and social development of a seven year old or distract the studies and diminish the relationships of a thirteen year old. Cell phones and other digital devices with which children access the internet and social media can be special moral, social, psychological, and physiological hazards. Keep your children’s development at the forefront. Provide the things that will aid, not stall, their development. The full development of your children is what makes a good family life.
Environment
One productive way to think of your children’s development is not to focus on the things that you provide them but the environment you create and sustain around them. Children respond to environments as much or more than things. A child doesn’t, for instance, need the perfect toy, although they may clamor for it because their friend owns it or they see it featured on their favorite videos. Buy your child that toy, though, and you may see it quickly shelved. Instead of buying things, focus on creating stimulating environments. A yard with swings, climbing apparatus, gardens, sandboxes, wildflowers, bugs, frogs, and mud pits may stimulate more play, exploration, interaction, and exercise than a hundred plastic toys of every configuration. Configure your child a bedroom with good lighting and ventilation, and a desk of the right size and height with multiple writing and coloring markers, scissors, staplers, and stacks of different kinds of paper. Add to the room comfortable and moveable child seating, rugs on which to sprawl on the floor, shelves containing books, guides, and illustrations, bins with blocks, string, and other building materials, and tool chests filled with different tools. You get the picture. Full child development requires stimulating family environments.
Efficacy
The prior section suggests that children develop most fully when they interact most engagingly and positively with their family environment. Children sitting around the house staring at screens are not developing. They are not interacting with and shaping their environment. To stimulate and support a child’s motivation to engage the environment, your family should foster your child’s efficacy. Children throw themselves into things when they know that they can affect those things. Children build things when they know that they have the means and support to do so, and that others will appreciate, respect, and protect their efforts. Children grow things, write things, compose things, and practice things when they believe that their doing so will gain the admiration of others. See that your family rewards and encourages whatever constructive thing your child does to shape your child’s environment. To keep your child motivated, show your child that your child can achieve results that the family values rather than obstructs, discourages, destroys, and denigrates.
Society
For their full development, your children also need to interact positively with others. Helping your children participate socially and constructively with you, with one another, and with others is a big part of a good family life. Every family event, from rising in the morning and cleaning up for the day, to meals, chores, and play together, is an opportunity for positive social interaction. Pleasant small talk with your children, including greetings, high fives, hugs, observations, inquiries, challenges, and celebrations, are all helpful and appropriate. Regularly attempt to arrange supervised play times for younger children with playmates of their own age, and then facilitate unsupervised or lightly supervised play times with friends of older children, in safe but stimulating indoor and outdoor environments. Supporting your children’s education, addressed in the next chapter, can ensure ample social development. But the home remains the key developmental ground.
Stages
Children obviously proceed through stages, with different needs, interests, and developmental opportunities at different stages. The growth of children within your family is fantastic, all the way from infancy to adulthood. That their growth stretches over a span of around two decades makes that growth less obvious. Your day-to-day proximity to your children further obscures their rapid changes. Yet an indication of how rapidly your children change is that teachers may barely recognize them after just a three-month summer break. Your child’s mental and emotional capacities may develop more or less quickly than your child’s physical capability. Parents must observe and listen closely to their children to notice some of those changes. Understanding your child’s developmental stage and needs can be critical to supplying opportunities, guidance, and encouragement, and shaping their environment for efficacious interaction. Learn about and discern your child’s development, and share what you learn with your spouse. Few things in family life can be more satisfying and rewarding than tracking and supporting your child’s development.
Challenges
Children can obviously present significant challenges to their parents and their family household. Don’t look to your children to be the adults in the home. They’re not adults. At various stages of their development, children can entirely lack or exhibit severe deficits in the capacity for consistent communication, processing, memory, rationality, empathy, compassion, and control. What looks like disrespectful, rebellious, lazy, insolent, or other negative attitudes and behaviors may have their roots in developmental limitations. Saying so is not to excuse child misbehaviors. You and your spouse need to be consistent, firm, and clear in your child guidance, correction, and discipline. Corrective actions, like do-overs after any necessary modeling and training, are appropriate for thoughtless conduct. Progressive discipline, like timeouts, brief isolation, loss of privileges, and remedial measures, are appropriate for dangerous, disrespectful, or demeaning conduct. One correction is seldom enough. Dozens or hundreds of corrections over an extended time may be necessary and normal. Set consistent and reasonable behavioral standards, and hold your children to them in a manner appropriate to their developmental stage.
Exasperation
When facing behavioral challenges with your children, avoid exhibiting exasperation in front of your children. You and your spouse will likely feel frustrated, annoyed, discouraged, and even angry with your children’s behavior, at one time or another. In seasons, you may even feel those negative emotions frequently, throughout a day and for longer periods. Stay the course. Do not let your emotions get the better of you. Continue to apply and adjust the corrective actions, progressive discipline, and remedial measures that you know are appropriate for your child. Your child may be exploring the consistency and depth of your commitment to those measures. Your child may, in other words, be testing you precisely to learn how committed you are to your child’s sound development. When you express exasperation, you shift from consistent consequences and positive corrections to blaming and condemning your child’s alleged bad character. When you point out your child’s bad character, you have abandoned correction for affirmation, albeit affirmation of the negative characteristics your child is exhibiting. Don’t affirm, with your exasperation, that your child has bad character. Instead, show your child that your child’s character depends on your child’s conduct. Keep helping your child correct misconduct, no matter how often it takes. Your battle isn’t with your child. It’s to help your child win your child’s good character.
Reflection
How would you rate the parenting skills that you and your spouse exhibit together, on a scale from one to ten? Where are your parenting skills strongest? Where do your parenting skills need the greatest improvement? Do you and your spouse meet your children’s basic needs? Are their gaps in their needs that you could use community or network help filling? How much attention do you pay to maintaining your parent network for opportunities to share support and information on raising children? Are you and your spouse meeting your children’s developmental needs? Does your home provide your children with indoor and outdoor environments supporting their activity and interaction? How could you redesign their indoor and outdoor play, study, and exploration spaces to stimulate their engagement? Do you need to remove video screens or other items that are keeping them from active engagement of their environment and social interaction? Do your children frequently do things in which they expect and achieve a desired result? Can you name those things? Can you provide greater opportunity for your children to develop a positive sense of efficacy? Are your children interacting socially under supervision, frequently enough to develop strong social skills? Are you and your spouse adept at noticing and quickly responding to the changes in your children’s developmental stages? Are you, in other words, keeping pace with your children’s development, rather than continuing to treat them as they used to be? What are your current greatest challenges raising your children? Are you expressing exasperation toward your children rather than guiding, coaching, and disciplining them through corrective measures?
Key Points
Parenting skills are the most important skill to family success.
Parenting involves providing properly for your children’s needs.
Developing a sound parental network can help raise children.
Focus on your children’s development beyond merely meeting needs.
Focus on shaping your child’s environment for stimulating exploration.
Help your child gain a sense of efficacy in bringing about results.
Encourage your child’s social interactions to develop social skills.
Recognize how quickly your child’s developmental needs change.
Face child behavior challenges with consistent corrective action.
Avoid expressing exasperation to your child that affirms bad character.