Daly Focus Blog
One of the most important qualities to being an effective parent is a willingness to overcome personal barriers that get in our way. My own dad provides a sobering example of how destructive it can be when a parent stays stuck.
One of the few times he showed up to one of my baseball games, he was stone-cold drunk. When I came to bat, I was so mortified I couldn’t move. Dad yelled awful things at the umpire as pitch after pitch zipped past me.
Years ago, when Jean and I moved into our current home, the truck was unloaded, and we pulled the lid off each box one by one and looked through every item.
So much stuff went into the trash that I thought it would be helpful to get one of those big trash bins used at construction sites. It was fantastic. I was throwing stuff away left and right.
That’s when the trash fairies showed up.
I’d spend an evening happily tossing one item after another into the garbage.
For decades, sociologists have been telling us how important it is for children to feel loved and cared for. Proof of that concept came in the 1990s after a political revolution in Romania. Over 170,000 abandoned infants, toddlers, and teenagers were housed in a network of government-run institutions known as “child gulags.” The children were provided with food, but very few received loving touch or attention. Most of the children never knew what it was like to love or to be loved.
A man who knows that well is Tim Leatherman, the inventor of the Leatherman Tool. That’s a pair of pliers with additional tools stored in the handles, like screwdrivers, a saw, wire cutters, and a bottle opener. It’s like a Swiss Army knife that converts into a tool belt.
Tim came up with the idea during a vacation to Europe in 1975. Travelling on a budget, he rented the cheapest car he could afford. It broke down repeatedly throughout the trip.
What does a hero look like to you? Would you recognize one just by looking?
In comic books, heroes are easy to spot. They wear a mask or a cape and have superhuman abilities. In the real world, heroes often carry a badge and are trained to save lives. Then there are heroes like Darin Barton.
Darin was standing on a highway overpass in Denver, Colorado when a semi-trailer barreling out of control plowed into stalled traffic below him.
The great Winston Churchill once said, “Those who are unable to look back are unable to look forward.” For America to move into the future with our liberty intact, we must look backward and remember the principles of freedom upon which our country was built.
Looking backward is how Abraham Lincoln led America through the Civil War, one of our country’s darkest, most divisive, and bloodiest time periods. To keep the nation pointed in the right direction, Lincoln continually reminded the country of our noble beginnings.
At what age would you say that children become adults? Sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty-one?
Answers among parents likely vary widely. Psychologist, author, and expert in adolescent and family relationships, Dr. Ken Wilgus, encourages parents to think of their teenagers as adults in training. Teens, he says, are not big children; they are young adults. Treating them as such is a process Dr. Wilgus calls “Progressive Emancipation.”
Around age 13, childhood comes to its natural end. That doesn’t mean your job as a parent is over, but your job changes.
If you’re a parent and want your household to function smoothly, you’re going to need some rules. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to know where the lines should be drawn. If you struggle with that, try this: don’t sweat the small stuff.
An idea that helped my wife Jean and me to draw boundaries when our boys were younger was to think of their behavioral problems in terms of “levels.” Eating a cookie before dinner, for example, would be a Level One offense.
Choosing someone you want to spend the rest of your life with is one of the biggest decisions you will ever make. It requires a lot of wisdom.
When a couple dates, they tend to overlook their mate’s bad habits because they’re so caught up in the euphoria of their relationship. Even worse, they think, “That behavior will change once we’re married.”
Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that your spouse will change in the ways you hope they will.
It’s becoming controversial to take pride in America. Some say that a nation stained with injustice isn’t a nation worth celebrating. I would agree with that … if our country didn’t also correct our mistakes. And we do. The objective of a perfect society will never be obtained, so what counts is the direction we move.
Our Founders knew that building America would be a stumbling journey forward, toward our highest principles. And they gave us the greatest possible Constitutional framework with which to do it.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
