God-Confident Kids
By: Cyndie Claypool de Neve
- How are you doing at sharing your love for the Lord with your children. Start sharing
- Memorize verses with your kids, it will help them all throughout their lives.
- Help your kids understand their emotions, don’t ignore them. God can be your (their) strength in weakness.
- Demonstrate love and confession with your children. God forgives, and you should as well.
- Ask your kids questions. Learn to listen without judging and responding so quickly. If you blow them off too many times, they will stop talking to you.
- Having the last words does not give you more power or control. When your children get angry, let them know you will talk to them when they calm down, and then wait.
- Parent out of faith instead of fear. Know that God loves your children more than you do. Instead of fearing they will fail or not make it, how about believing and trusting God with it. That doesn’t mean you don’t place rules and guidelines, but does mean must be less controlling and demanding if trust God in your parenting.
- Put down your phone. Set rules for screen time and follow them — you too as a parent.
- Sometimes, the traits that drive us crazy about our children are the same weaknesses we have in our own lives.
- Learn to parent each of your children as individuals. God made each person uniquely different.
- Our job is to raise our children to be all God wants them to be, not mini versions of what we want.
- How you learn is not necessarily how your children learn.
- Teach your children to pray, and pray with them and for them. God hears our prayers and wants His children to talk to Him. They need to know they can talk to God at any time and when no one else is around. God is always there.
- Everyone has strengths; your job is to help your children find their strengths.
- Praise more for their character and Christlikeness than their activities and performance.
- Ask God for direction and learning in your own life.
- Teach them to create time with the Lord. Life is easier when God is directing, so they need to hear from God.
- Prayer eradicate fear. We live in a world in which there are school shootings, bullying and all kinds of problems. If we don’t learn to pray and teach our children to pray, we will stay fearful.
- Teach your children to be thankful. It’s hard to be fearful when you are thankful.
- If there are past family behaviors that you do not want repeated, realize that you are not destined to continue those patterns, they can be broken.
- You need a good community to raise your children — your church’s youth group, friends, and family.
- If there are people in your neighborhood or family that you do not trust, make sure your children are never alone with them.
- Establish dating rules for your children.
- Help your children make a list of what they are looking for and want in a future spouse.
- Pray for your children’s future spouse and teach them to pray for them as well.
- Maintain strict screening time and be very choosy with the games they play and things they watch.
- Teach them that if they stand firm in the Lord, they can get through any problems.
- We must be there for support, but their journey must be between them and God.
- Kids need to know you love them before you correct, give advice, or talk to them.