Raising Great Kids - Session Four

This week’s material from Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s Raising Great Kids, centers on developing competence, morality and Spirituality in our children. So far we have discussed developing three other characteristics in our children; connectedness, responsibility, and reality. These final three seem very challenging to me. I am so glad that we have Cloud and Townsend, experts in this area to help us.

Competence: Children tend to see our work inside and outside the home as something that takes us away from them. It is important to model interest in, involvement in, and even frustration with the work you do both inside and outside the home. Let your children see that you love them, but that you have a work life, tool.
Take a moment to evaluate what we are modeling about interest in, involvement in, and even frustration with work you do inside as well as outside the home.

Not only do you want your child to integrate work into their lives, but you also want to help them with the specific interests, talents, gifts and aptitudes God put into them. Parenting involves helping your children explore, discover, and develop those capacities that they will later enjoy and excel in.

Morality: Remember the 10 Commandments that Moses brought down to the people of Israel? We as parents also give our family our own set of commandments. Think about the set of commandments your parents gave you as you were growing up. Some possibilities are “Thou shalt not speak the truth about certain issues. It will make your father angry”; “Thou shalt not make a mistake ever. You should already know how to do it before you are told”; and “Thou shalt not be independent. It is an abomination.”

Cloud and Townsend say, “No family would put such commandments on the wall of the kitchen in embroidery to be memorized. But commandments like these are memorized because they are experienced by the children and become part of their own conscience. Later in life, when a relationship calls for direct truth or independence, the child’s conscience will not allow him to bring forth those qualities. As a result, his adult relationships will suffer.

What we want is for our children’s conscience to be his friend, not his adversary. And we want the focus of that conscience to be relationship, reality issues, and reality consequences. We want the conscience to work toward protecting love with God and others and toward aligning oneself with the reality of God’s created order more than with petty rules. “

Your laws become part of your children’s conscience through identification, imitation, modeling, and experience. Using these methods we can construct a conscience in our children around the issues. Remember how you relate to your children is forming their conscience. Their brains are recording your responses to them. It is necessary to make sure that the rules we give them are focused on love, corrected by love, and built in the context of love.

Our final characteristic is Spirituality, a child’s connection to God.

Helping our children shift from immature to mature dependency on God the Father---that, in a nutshell, is the challenge of raising kids who will one day come to love and serve the Lord. More than any other character capacity, spiritual development is caught more than taught. Children will internalize more of what you are with God and with them than what you teach them about God.

Closely related to the challenge of developing a setting that encourages a child’s spiritual life and commitment to Jesus is the question of when and how to help our child make a decision of faith.

We have discussed a lot of things during this study. Let’s do a quick review.

Responsibility Continuum – transfer responsibility to them by adulthood

Ingredients for Growth: Grace, Truth, and Time – Children need to know that you are on their side that is grace. Children need to know that you will give them reality that is truth. Children need to spend both quality of time and quantity of time with you.

Elements of Growing Character: experience and internalizing – this is how they will get character developed in them, through participating in the experiences of life and experiences you place before them and then internalizing these experiences

6 Character Traits:
Connectedness – the ability to form relationships; remember the attachment Goals?
Responsibility – taking ownership of their own life and seeing their life as their problem; remember that they gain responsibility by practicing self-control, delayed gratification, and setting and receiving limits.
Reality – the ability to accept the negatives of the real world; remember the 5-step process of embracing reality? (Protest, reality remains, metabolize the reality, grief, problem solving and resolution)
Competence – the development of everyday life skills as well as their God-given gifts and talents; teaching them that work is part of life, and helping them discover gifts and talents.
Morality – an internals sense of right and wrong – developing a conscience in them that is a friend and helper.
Worship/Spirituality – learning that God loves them and is in charge of life; learning to seek God on their own

To close out this session, I would like to have us end with a time of prayer. Pray for your children to develop the six character traits we have talked about these past few months. Also, pray for each one of them to one day make a decision for Christ.