Parenting is a process that has many seasons and phases. There were times in our own parenting when we could easily get stuck in a particular season or phase. Typically we would become comfortable in the strategies that were working and forget to look ahead to the upcoming season in our boys’ growth and development. Before we knew it, Trevor and Alex had outgrown our parenting!
Three Key Areas To Watch
Evaluating kids’ freedoms and discipline while keeping your parenting strategies up to date are areas that parents need to periodically evaluate and ask, “Have our kids outgrown our parenting?”
The Parenting Funnel – In the Parenting from The Tree of Life curriculum we lead, there is a terrific teaching about children’s freedoms called the Parenting Funnel. The diagram below roughly illustrates the idea that freedoms parents provide their children must be appropriate for their age and maturity level. Behavior and attitude problems arise when we allow too many freedoms to soon (i.e., Buying a cell phone for a six year old) or not allowing enough freedoms as kids mature.
Our problem, at times, was becoming too restrictive with freedoms as the boys transitioned in to a newer level of maturity. As your child matures, both in age and their understanding of morals and family standards, you need to allow more freedoms, so they don’t outgrow your parenting and become frustrated.
Discipline: Encouragement and Correction – While it may seem obvious that the encouragement we provide a three year old is different from a seven year old, as parents we can easily fall into the encouragement “default” mode. Your preschooler may have loved the ice cream treat after the soccer game, but the seven year old might appreciate encouraging words much more. Likewise, while sending your five-year-old to their room for a “reflective timeout” may have been an effective corrective method to curtail misbehavior, a 10 year old may need to write a letter of apology to the teacher they disrespected by misbehaving in class.
Stay current and update your strategies – We took our first parenting class when Trevor was five and Alex was three. It was so overwhelming! We soon forgot about 90% of the great information we had learned. However, after taking the class again a year or two later, we quickly discovered that you hear and understand the material based upon the current ages of your children. Through the years we have literally taken or taught dozens of classes and we are still learning things from basically the same material! Has your parenting become stale? Are you out of ideas and the old ones aren’t working? It might be time for you and your spouse to rejuvenate your parenting with “new ears” and a fresh perspective.
We all want our children to grow and reach their full potential. The truth, we discovered, is this: it’s harder for the parents to move forward with this growth and development than it is for the kids, who seem to be changing right before our eyes. Ultimately, in the parenting process, we want our toddlers to move from obeying us based upon our parental authority, to respecting us when they are teenagers because of our parental influence. For that to happen, we need to stay a few steps ahead of our children and not let them outgrow our parenting.
Whether you have a 2, 6, 8 or 12 year-old, your parenting strategy needs to evolve and change with your children. We have several new online workshops and classes as we head into summer. We invite you to join us and update your parenting tools & strategy! Visit our events page to learn more:
https://onefamilyhwl.org/events/
Blessings to your family,
Shelly and Rich