Our church is working through The Christian Parenting Handbook together. Well, the church is offering the study, not all of the church comes, but many of our parents are faithfully attending. This coming week we will be looking at the strategies given in chapters three and four. As I was looking over the Companion Guide I read this:

There are too many parenting tasks in a day to think that challenging every misbehavior is reasonable. When parents take a little time to study a child and develop a strategy to move forward, it can make the training process much easier and certainly more effective. Furthermore, kids view their parents differently seeing that they’re trying to help instead of simply criticizing them.

~ The Christian Parenting Handbook Companion Guide

Last night my husband leaned over and whispered something in my ear… He was asking if I had noticed a particular issue in one of our girls behavior and wanted to know if I concurred. I whispered back that yes I had been noticing it as well and was pondering what action to take, or if there was really a need for action concerning it.

What we have learned in our fifteen years of parenting together is that if something is a character issue we both will be alerted to it. We also have learned to assess the situation before we act… both of us had been monitoring this same issue for several months and taking mental notes… although, as of yet, we didn’t know the other had noticed the issue as well.

So when my husband leaned over and whispered in my ear what he whispered and I concurred… he said something that I love to hear… He said, “I’ll coach her on that, that’s a character issue, and it needs dealt with”

He will “coach” her on it.

This is a terminology that we have learned to use to describe the way we choose to parent our children. We watch them. We study them. We mull over what we see in them for a while. We mentally put a plan of action together before we ever call them out on the issue we see that needs addressed. We watch to see if this is a one time thing or a short phase or is it a reacquiring part of them that will be a struggle for them for the rest of their life if not changed. We also watch and pray so that we can be guided by the Holy Spirit to discover the root of the problem we are seeing. We don’t want to just keep the weeds cut back, but to yank them out by the roots.

Watching them for a while, and waiting for the right time, helps us to talk to them without the aggravated emotion of parental frustration. My husband also usually addresses the issue separate from its occurring. This way, hopefully, it is not addressed in a criticizing way, but in a let’s work on this together way… I believe this also helps to keep our girls from responding with defensive antagonism and they seem to listen better.

We have chosen to view our family as a team. A team works together to bring out the best in one another in order to accomplish one goal…

 But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart

and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 

1 Timothy 1:5

Do you and your spouse have a parenting plan?