Your Child's Journey

wisdom for the big steps little children take

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Is My Child Normal?

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Are you afraid your child isn’t normal? Just about every parent has this fear at one time or another. The media reports huge increases in autism rates. There are more and more children being diagnosed with mental disorders like bipolar disorder. Then there’s the preschool and kindergarten teachers telling parents their boys are hyperactive. So what is a parent to do?

I’m going to give you some common sense considerations to help you decide if there is need for intervention.

1. When looking at the benchmarks for development, is your child young or past the average age for that skill? For example, a baby usually learns to sit unsupported between 4 and 9 months. If your baby is not sitting unsupported at 6 months, this is not a sign of possible developmental delay. If however, he is 10 months and still not sitting well, then you should let your pediatrician know and seek further evaluations. Also, if your baby was premature or has had serious medical conditions in the first months of life, he may lag behind developmentally for as long a year and not be considered delayed.

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Raising Moral Pagans

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I recently read a post called, “How to Raise a Pagan Kid in a Christian Home” and his follow up, “Five Keys to Guiding Your Kid to a Faith that Lasts.”

I was challenged and that started me thinking. So, I’m going to share some quotes from his posts and add some comments of my own. In the months ahead, I’ll share more ideas for ways to help your children have their own strong faith.

Barrett Johnson, the author of the posts said,

“Too many times, (Christian) parents have it as their goal to make their kids good and moral. It is as if the entire purpose of their family’s spiritual life is to shape their children into law-abiding citizens who stay out of trouble. The only problem with this goal is that it runs in stark contrast to what the Bible teaches. The gospel is not about making bad people moral, but about making dead people alive. If we teach morality without the transforming power of the gospel and the necessity of a life fully surrendered to God’s will, then we are raising moral pagans.”

Veggie Tales creator, Phil Vischer, said in an interview,

“I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, “Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,” or “Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!” But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality. . .

“And that was such a huge shift for me from the American Christian ideal. We’re drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god.”

Challenging, isn’t it? Praying for our children, teaching them to say grace at the table and at bedtime, and taking them to Sunday School won’t be enough to make them Christian. Just saying the sinner’s prayer isn’t enough without also helping them become disciples of Jesus.

Actually, there is no absolute, sure-fire way to guarantee your children will become disciples of Jesus. Think about Adam and Eve. They had the perfect environment and the perfect Father, yet they chose to disobey God’s one rule. Our children are growing up in a very broken world with much less than perfect parents. Add to that mix the inherited bent to sin and it is no wonder they are sinners in need of the salvation only Jesus provides.

Barrett ends his first post with this.

“What we need is kids who fully grasp the reality that they have nothing to offer, but who intimately know a God who has everything they need.”

His Five Keys are these:

Clarify Your Parenting Goals
Have a Biblical Theology of Life-change
Help Your Kids to Fall in Love with Jesus
Operate With an Accurate View of the Gospel
Teach Your Kids to Daily Submit Themselves to God

This article cannot be long enough to cover all of these. Please read his blog post, Five Keys to Guiding Your Kid to a Faith that Lasts and begin thinking about ways you can help your children know, love, and obey Jesus instead of becoming moral pagans. I will continue in the next few months with other thoughts on this topic.

Decisions and Choices

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Happy New Year! I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year’s season.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making decisions. I’m not talking about resolutions. Those mostly get broken before we get out of bed on January 2.

I’m looking at choices instead of resolutions. A resolution is what you intend to do. A choice is what you actually do.

Life is made up of hundreds of choices every day. Many of these choices are simply instinctive. Those are the ones we make without even realizing we made a choice. We get in a pattern but may never recognize it is a rut. Ruts resist change. So getting out of a rut takes deciding to change and then opting for different choices.

We start with a decision. A decision is a process of analysis that cuts off some options.

Here’s how it works. We make a decision after considering the results we want and consequences we want to avoid. The decision makes certain options no longer available to us.

Let’s take an example from parenting. We decide we want children other people will like. That’s a good decision. It’s nice when we like our kids, but it’s even better when others like our kids. The consequences of leaving this to chance mean our kids may or may not be liked by others. Making a decision means cutting off some options. For instance, letting them stay up so late they are screaming and running around when our neighbors would like to sleep, or giving them whatever they want, whenever they want it so they become tyrants.

Now we get down to the nitty gritty. We make a decision in a sane moment of contemplation, yet we make the choices moment-by-moment. Neglecting to consider the little choices means we allow ourselves to slip away from the good decision we had made.

So my personal challenge is to look at my behavior and consider my choices. I have made some wonderful decisions in the past. I have decided to grow as a Christian. I have decided to be a loving wife. I have decided that people are more important than tasks. But often my little choices do not support my major decisions. I may choose not to read my Bible one morning, thinking I’ll do it later in the day. Or I choose to get irritated and snippy with my husband. Or I choose to not make a phone call to someone who would appreciate even a few minutes of my time. Instead, I dive into a new project with abandon.

It’s much easier to just do what comes naturally, but many times those natural responses do not reflect my decisions, but rather my selfish desires.

I am making a conscious effort to look at my behavior as choices. As soon as I realize I made a bad choice, I’m consciously choosing to do something that agrees with my decision. It is a tiny step to seeing my big decisions bear fruit.

Will you join me in looking at your choices? Let’s see if we can’t be closer to our goals at the end of 2014 by making this small change in our thinking.

Christmas 2013

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Christmas has always been a special season for me. My mom used to buy Christmas gifts all year and squirrel them away. Each year she selected one gift to be the gift. It was for only one of us, but we were all excited about what that gift would be and whose it would be.

We woke up Christmas morning with a tree that was decorated over night and surrounded by gifts. We took turns opening the gifts one at a time so everyone could enjoy the thrill of seeing what each one got. Then the moment would come for the gift to be given and opened. It was always perfect! We all celebrated!

Christmas was about giving. We always found some way to make someone less fortunate than us happy too. A few years, we went to an orphanage and brought Jean home to share our Christmas. We each bought her a gift from our allowance and we tried to make her feel like a queen for the day. Some years we bought gifts, wrapped them, and took them to some family who lived in the poor part of our community. We always took food, as well as gifts.

Most of all, I remember the Advent Wreath and how the story of the first Christmas came alive to us little by little through the month before Christmas.

Here are some of the things we have practiced in our own family that you might like to incorproate into your own celebrations:

1. Do not go into debt for gifts. When we didn’t have enough money to buy expensive gifts, we bought ‘meaningful’ gifts. Sometimes the nicest gifts were the homemade coupons we made offering our services to those we loved that could be redeemed throughout the coming year.

2. Make the emphasis giving rather than receiving. Help your children learn to enjoy the delight their gifts give to others.

3. Find ways to reach out to those in need during the season. Get your kids involved in Angel Tree or Shoebox or some other outreach to the needy. Have them help buy, pack, and wrap the gifts; and when possible deliver the gifts. These encounters really leave a lasting impression on youngsters.

4. Remember to tell the story of Jesus’ first coming to our world so it becomes a part of their foundational beliefs. Then teach them to anticipate his second coming, too. The hope of heaven helps us through rough times we will face.

If you have stories of your Christmas, past or present, that you would like to share, please email me at: Diane

May you have a blessed Christmas season. Delight in the preparations and may your faith be contagious!

Blessings!
Diane

The Power of a Look

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I’ve been reading a book by Elisabeth Elliot called, Let Me Be a Woman. It is a compilation of letters she wrote to her daughter before her marriage. In one chapter she tells a story about a time she was too busy and her daughter knew it. Here’s the story:

“When you were small there were always Indians around us, and I had many things on my mind in the running of a jungle mission station. I was sometimes tempted to pay little attention to your small needs. You knew it at once. You knew whether it was an opportune time to get away with something. You would try it, and my preoccupied, “Val, leave that alone,” you would ignore. You knew you could safely ignore it because my attention had already turned back to the thing at hand. I learned very soon that I had to give my full attention to you when I spoke. I do not mean that I gave you my full attention twenty-four hours of the day. I see mothers who very nearly accomplish this and they do it to the destruction of their poor smothered, harried children. I mean that when a matter needs the mother’s attention it must get her full attention for that moment. I had to turn from my work and turn to you.

“Your eyes would open wide when I stopped what I was doing and looked at you. Slowly, slowly, your hand would drop when I said your name. In the moment of pause and silence you assessed my seriousness. Either I meant it or I did not, and there was no dissimulating with you. You knew which it was and acted accordingly.”

I experienced the same thing with my children and now again with my grandchildren. That look says, “I see you and what you are doing. I have something to say about that and I expect you to listen and obey.” That look has some important components that I want to talk to you about:Your attention, your authority, and your child’s development. [Read more…]