Raising Great Kids - Session Three

All notes are from Henry Cloud and John Townsend's Raising Great Kids.

Our children will grow up and ultimately need to accept responsibility for their own lives. Remember the Responsibility Continuum. As we help them in this process we also want to give them the ability to function as God designed them to function in the world. Character is the Sum of our abilities to deal with life as God designed us to.

Tonight we are going to talk through growing 3 Aspects of Character in our children, Connectedness, Responsibility and Reality. This growth takes place when a child has Development or Training Experiences and then Internalizes what they learn, the Elements of Growth.

Like a garden has essential ingredients for growth, so Character has some essential Ingredients needed for Growth. Time, both in the sense of Quality and Quantity is needed. Grace, shown in kindness, empathy, forgiveness, compassion, understanding, provision and love, is another ingredient. Truth, shown in morality, standards, expectations, evaluations, judgment, confrontation, discipline, limits, honesty, and integrity is the third. Remember that children need to know that parents are on their side. Effective parents must learn to be gracious and truthful at the same time. Remember the equation:

Grace + Truth = Growth.
Time

We will be effective in our Parenting if these 4 factors are in our parenting technique:

Value of Love – relationship is central to parenting. To develop, a child is going to need to be deeply related to her parents and others, and parents are going to have to keep relationship as a goal of her development.
Value of Truth – Children cannot be loved too much, but they can be disciplined not enough. Every parent is a dispenser of truth and reality. The goal is to have a child become a person of truth living in wisdom.
Value of Freedom – Parents must require responsibility from their children. When they do so, parents help children grow into free people who have learned how to use their freedom to choose good things—things like love, responsibility, service and accomplishment.
The role of God – Character is never complete without an understanding of who one is before God. God gave parents the assignment of bringing up children to understand him and to take their proper place before him.

Connectedness is the first Aspect of Character we will look at.
Connectedness = the ability to form relationships

As parents of young children, you have the opportunity to do important work as you connect with them and, at the same time, teach them to connect with you.

Now let’s look at the nine attachment goals.

1. Use relationship for equilibrium
2. Learn basic trust and need
3. Value relationship
4. Internalize Love
5. Develop capacity for loss
6. Develop gender roles
7. Relate to the world
8. Develop give and take
9. Teach altruism

This is how attachment happens.

Specific tasks create the ability to CONNECT. The child has his job, and the mother has hers. These two jobs interact to help the child become capable of making attachments to people.

First, the child must experience the reality that RELATIONSHIP is good and is one of the necessary elements of life. His first task is to EXPERIENCE and RESPOND to the NEED for relationship. When he is lonely, afraid, anxious, hurt or hungry, he pays attention to his discomfort and responds to it in some way. He learns to take initiative by protesting, reaching out, and getting a parent’s attention.

Closely related is the second task. The child must PROTEST long enough for help to get to him. Love and support don’t always come instantly. Children learn to keep calling or signaling, and help will come.

Finally, a child’s third task is to RECEIVE the GOOD. One of the main jobs of a child’s first year is to take in love through thousands of loving experiences.

What is the parent’s task? Simply put, a parent needs to RESPOND to the child’s needs with WARMTH, AFFECTION, and PREDICTABILITY. A parent must also respond APPROPRIATELY. And, as the child gets older, a parent must CONNECT without being INTRUSIVE. Parents must make connectedness inviting by giving a child a certain amount of freedom and emotional space. Children with intrusive parents experience relationship as controlling or enmeshing.

In parenting your child to be able safely to RECEIVE and GIVE love and connectedness, you are helping build a connected foundation inside her that will sustain her for life.

ALRIGHT! – Lets move onto our second Character trait: Responsibility.

Responsibility = the capacity to own one’s life as one’s problem.

Remember to show your child that, even when you and they disagree, you are “for” them – for their welfare, safety, best interests, and growth.

The third Aspect of Character for tonight is Reality.

Reality = the ability to accept the negatives of the real world.

So how do we teach our children to live in an imperfect world?

The Five-Step Process of Embracing Reality:
Protest.
Reality remains.
Metabolize the reality.
Grief.
Problem solving and resolution.

Teaching our children to live in an imperfect world—to face the reality about themselves, about other people, and about the world—is key to enabling them to live well in this world.