Lessons I've Learned Parenting

I think I am finally learning a couple of things about parenting after doing it for fifteen years.

I have spent a lot of energy trying to control my kids. My daughter in particular. And I have just come to the realization that what I was doing was parenting out of fear instead of grace.

She is a great kid. But, all I was seeing were all of her mistakes and shortcomings. This lead to some real struggles between us. It is not like she needed to go to military school or anything, although I am quite certain we threatened it a couple of times.

What I have seen lately is that I parent her out of the fear that she may get in trouble.

As a christian parent, I need to learn to parent with grace.

Yes, she does need boundaries, but she also needs the room to learn where those boundaries are for herself instead of me constantly pointing them out for her to see. Otherwise she will one day leave my control and venture into this big world and have never learned for herself where her boundaries are.

So, after fifteen years of parenting and a whole lot of struggles we are changing our parenting techniques. And we are learning that sometimes we the parents are wrong too. And we make mistakes too. It is no good to teach our kids that they need to be perfect or they'll never learn their need for the perfect one.