“Be patient, be a good listener, be consistent…” these are just some of the more common “top parenting tips” you’ll find when searching around the Internet. And we would agree with many of those tips. However, we thought it would be fun, and encouraging, to provide you with our top ten parenting tips that have most impacted us over the years.
10) Have fun and enjoy your kids – It was very easy for us to get caught up with our parenting, our jobs, and the busyness of life and forget to have fun. This is why Family Fun Night was so important to us and our family. It encouraged and helped us to be intentional and create some space to enjoy our boys and have fun!
9) Say what you mean, mean what you say – Instead of communicating to our boys with clear instructions, we would often veil our instructions in the form of a question. “Are you ready to go to bed?” “Are you ready to leave?” Not surprisingly, the answer from our boys was always “NO!” which created way more problems and conflict than we intended! The same was true with our Yeses and Nos! Be clear in your instruction and let your Yes mean yes and your No mean no!
8) Parent during a time of non-conflict (TONIC) – Trying to parent when our boys were going nuts in Chili’s never worked! Nor did it work in the middle of the grocery store. Yes, we did have to properly deal with the immediate problem, but the actual parenting happened when there was no conflict. Parenting during a time of non-conflict (TONIC) creates a calm environment for your children to actually hear and understand the lessons and appropriate behavior you are trying to teach them.
7) Role playing – One of the most effective tools we used during TONIC parenting was role playing. And we still use it today with our teenagers! It’s a fun way to teach many things we (as parents) may think are intuitive, but actually are not. How to properly greet guests coming to our house and how to advocate for yourself with a teacher are just some of the situations we role played with our boys.
6) Marriage is the priority – Before we had our boys, we were a family – just the two of us. It is so easy to become child centered in this day and age, but your marriage needs to be the first priority. That doesn’t mean we diminish the importance of our children or our parenting. Rather the marriage priority enhances both. As the Ezzos have mentioned, “One of the greatest gifts parents can give their children is the confidence that Mom and Dad love each other.”
5) Give your child the freedom to fail – In our opinion, children do not fail. They will make mistakes and they will fall short of certain expectations, but these are important teaching moments. As parents, we never want to see our children fail, but they need to learn valuable life lessons in a loving home environment. We need to give them the freedom to grow!
4) CouchTime – CouchTime got us on the same page with our parenting so we weren’t overcompensating for each other. CouchTime got both our boys to sleep through the night… in their own beds! CouchTime improved our boys’ behavior.
3) Maintain your perspective – “Your boys are sooo good!”, friends and teachers would kindly say to us. But in the back of our minds, we were thinking, “I sure wish they were that way at home!” The reality was, they were good at home. We would get so caught up in our parenting and our boys’ behavior, that we would begin to lose perspective. That’s when The Potato Principle idea would kick in! Just because our kiddos might have a few things we are working on, we can’t lose sight of and forget to encourage the 90% of what they are doing well.
2) Speak Life – Words matter and how we verbally express ourselves has significant neurological impact on our children, spouses, and everyone we meet. Speaking words of life is not an easy skill to learn. It needs to be consistently practiced in order for it to be effective. Choosing your words thoughtfully and how you phrase them, will improve the way you parent… and your marriage!
1) Keep learning – Parenting is process and how you parent a 3 year old is different than a 10 year old. That’s why we consistently took and taught parenting classes. We knew early on that we could never implement, let alone remember, everything we learned from our very first class. But with each class we took, we could see that the investment we made in our family was paying off. How do we know? Because we LOVED the teen years and our boys, as crazy as it may sound, actually thank us for being intentional with our parenting when they see some of their peers struggling.
We hope you find this list, along with all the links to our previous letters, helpful. This is our purpose with OneFamily! Our desire, along with Lis and Dave Marr, is to equip, encourage, and sustain you with practical insights that we’ve learned from our own experiences and those we’ve learned from others in our marriage and parenting journeys.
As 2018 is quickly approaching, we would encourage you start thinking about taking a parenting class, attending a marriage retreat or joining a small group in the new year. We have many resources and events, like Gems and Ironmen, to help you get started including our own Parenting from the Tree of Life Class starting January 10th for those of you that are in the Denver Metro area. If you are located outside the Denver area, please feel free to contact us at info@OneFamilyhwl.org. We would be happy to help you get started, find a class or community in your area.
Blessings to your family this holiday season!
Shelly and Rich