Daly Focus Blog
Imagine you’re sailing on the open sea. You’re out on the deck soaking up the sun, listening to the waves, and enjoying the ocean breeze. Everything around you is peaceful and wonderfully tranquil.
Suddenly, without warning, your peace is shattered by chaos. Your ship comes under attack by pirates.
Moms often feel like a similar scenario happens to them every day. They begin each morning with an expectation for how to make their day go peacefully.
Here at Focus on the Family, we regularly talk to parents about helping young children develop a strong foundation that equips them to make good choices. But when children transition from adolescence to adulthood, some veer from the path we hoped they’d follow.
We’re encouraging parents of adult children who have strayed from how they were raised and are making poor decisions on our Focus on the Family Broadcast “Building Bridges with Your Adult Child.”
Our guest, author Brenda Garrison, raised her children like many Christian parents.
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.
The stats on pornography use are alarming. Sixty-seven percent of young males view pornography on a regular basis. Porn use for this generation is no longer the exception – it’s the norm.
Many parents do the bare minimum when it comes to talking to their children about sex. They have “the talk” and encourage their children to pursue abstinence, but otherwise they sit back and hope that their kids stay pure for as long as possible.
When my son Trent was assigned his first science project in fourth grade, Jean and I agreed to let him do the project all on his own. After all, the whole point was for him to learn, right?
Apparently, not every parent shared that view.
At the end of the semester, the school held an open house, so the children could show off their work. It was pretty obvious which parents had been too involved in their child’s schoolwork.
When Dr. Kathy Koch was a child, she was swimming in a lake on a family vacation when something cut open her forehead. She made it to shore and screamed for her parents, who came running and took her to the hospital for stitches. Later, Kathy could have given in to her anxiety and stayed out of the water. Instead, she confronted her fear and overcame it.
This is how resilient people live. They don’t deny what happened, but they’re also not controlled by it.
Are your kids having trouble with their grades? Most parents facing that issue are careful to explore all the typical reasons, like study habits and the negative influence of friends. But one crucial area usually gets overlooked: the child’s learning style.
When author Cynthia Tobias was a kid, she struggled with traditional classroom-type education. Unlike her younger sister, who was a compliant and serious student, Cynthia was determined to do things her own way. Fortunately, her father was wise enough to make the most of his daughter’s learning style.
Imagine taking your four-year-old child to a nearby park. Other families greet your child, but there’s no response. Then, when it’s time to leave, your child says goodbye, but more so to the tables, and trees, and playground equipment than to the people.
Author Julie Homok described her baby girl Lizzie as happy, engaged, and developing normally. Then one day she started crawling into walls. What at first seemed like a funny accident became a disheartening realization that Lizzie was losing touch with the world around her.
Organizations like the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) used to come alongside parents in reinforcing time-honored values that gave girls and young women a solid moral foundation upon which to build their lives.
But in the 1990s, moral relativism started changing that. The word “God” was removed from the GSA’s oath. The curriculum stopped promoting traditional values. And GSA leadership began adopting a pro-homosexual political agenda.
In the midst of that turmoil, serving the GSA and the girls it represented was Patti Garibay, a local troop leader.
Parenting is the toughest job in the world.
Why?
Well, for one thing, parenting is a job you can never truly master. By the time you figure out one stage of life, your child has already moved on to the next one, and you have to start all over.
For another thing, you can never quit. You will come to the end of yourself regularly and often, but somehow, someway, you have to keep going. That small person depends on you, and God has entrusted him or her to your care.
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.
