It’s easy to see from just about every parenting blog and umpteen facebook posts, that it’s easy to lose perspective with our parenting. In our quest to find balance between work and home life, often times we find ourselves losing ground, with no plan for how we are going to parent or maintain a connection with our spouse. In the many years that we have been leading parenting classes and coaching hundreds of parents, we have seen this happen in varying degrees with every family.
With two high school aged boys, we are not that far removed from the days when they wore us out on a daily basis and we struggled to maintain our own perspective. Many times we would feel defeated, tired and in over our heads with parenting. As a result, we would get so overwhelmed that we would not take the time to talk to each other as parenting partners; but rather, we would over compensate for each other in our reactive, ineffective, loss of perspective approach with our young boys. We became inconsistent with our resolve which created difficulties in our parenting and it actually became a source of conflict in our marriage. And we knew something had to change…
Something did change. We took a parenting class called Growing Kids God’s Way, by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo (the new curriculum is called Parenting from the Tree of Life). At the time it was hard to commit to the time required to not only attend the class, but also the money we spent on childcare. Yet, to this day, we believe it was the best investment we ever made as it not only revolutionized our parenting, but our marriage as well!
Taking this class put us on a new path with a new perspective. This is what it did for us:
- We learned to parent as a team rather than undermine each other, helping our marriage and our kids.
- We gained insight to see that building character and teaching right behavior, was more effective than simply trying to restrain wrong behavior.
- We learned many practical parenting principles, that we could immediately apply in our family.
- Together we became intentional and purposeful in creating a “Family Identity” that was healthy and strong.
We can’t even imagine where we would be today if we had not invested in our family this way. With out a doubt, we would not be the healthy, happy, whole family we are today. At the time we did have a good marriage prior to taking the class, but it became so much stronger and more fulfilling as a huge byproduct of this investment. And it all began with a desire to gain perspective and invest in our family.
It is our desire, as we join Dave and Lis with our OneFamily initiative, that you will begin to find the same kind of perspective and encouragement we did by growing and building your own vibrant and thriving family. Each week, we will look forward to providing you with practical insights, tips and tools that will not only affect your parenting, but also your marriage and personal growth.
Blessings to your family,
Rich and Shelly