I hear crying coming from the family room, where my three and six-year-old children are playing. I’m sitting in my chair, reading a book, and I don’t really want to be interrupted. But I get up and go in. The struggling stops as I enter the room, and reddened, tear-streaked faces look up at me. “What is going on?” “He was pushing me!” “I had the tricycle first!” “But you […]
Read More →What are you going to study next now that you’ve finished the Child Training Boot Camp study? I’m sure many of you already have plans for other studies, but if you would like to continue studying child-training issues on your own, here are a few suggestions: Pick another area of sin that your family is struggling with and use Blue Letter Bible to study it in the same way we have studied the […]
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Are you ready? Today we start our child-training “boot camp”! We’re going straight to God’s Word, because that is where we’re going to find the real answers to the challenges we face as we seek to raise children who love and obey God. I still remember the season when our first three children (all boys) were little and stretching my patience and “wisdom” (ha!) to their limits. God drove me into His […]
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I’ve been so busy trying to get our house ready to put up for sale (we get the photos taken today and list it this week), that I’ve neglected to remind you of our new study that is going to start tomorrow, July1! This month we’re going to do something a little different. Instead of spending the whole month of July studying one chapter like we normally do (and like we will […]
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Disobedience is a like a weed. It’s like the wild morning glory that torments me all summer long. I pull a vine out of a bed of flowers, only to find it sneaking back again two days later. Besides poisoning it, the only way to actually beat it is to dig down into the soil and carefully pull out all of its long, ropey root. The root is the real […]
Read More →There were no older women in our church when I was a young mother. So I looked for my older women in the bookstore. I brought home Edith Schaeffer to hold my hand as I learned how to make a house into a home. She taught me about family, about prayer, and about teaching our children God’s law. When she met her Savior face-to-face a couple years ago, I still […]
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We aren’t born knowing how to handle conflict. It’s not something we grow into either, like learning to walk or talk. I never could have imagined some of the things I’ve had to say to my preschoolers: “Don’t you know you can’t just take his toy because you want it?” “Do you really think hitting your sister is going to make her do what you want?” “If he’s yelling and […]
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We can’t change our children’s hearts and make them cheerful about obeying us, but we can certainly encourage cheerful obedience, and we can help our children see why they can obey with joy. We’ll talk about teaching older children to respect parental authority (as Daniel promised last week) in a future post, but for today let’s look at the attitude behind true obedience. We’ll look at 3 reasons for cheerful obedience, and 4 ways to encourage cheerful […]
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Last week we considered what obedience looks like, and how our own example is an integral part of teaching our children. Today I want to look more closely at some tactics for teaching young children to obey. My children are still young (ages 1, 3, 4, and 6), and I’m thoroughly convinced that these early years are the prime time to be teaching obedience. (Next week, you’ll hear from my […]
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We recently considered why it’s easy to let our children disobey, and why teaching obedience is important. You all raised so many good questions that we’ve decided to spend several more posts working through the practical elements of teaching our children to obey. Today I want to define what I mean by obedience and then consider the first “strategy” for teaching our children to obey. In upcoming posts, Mama and […]
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