Family by God&#039;s Design

Investing Time & Attention in Your Children

Children have two currencies for LOVE: TIME and ATTENTION (Read Your Child’s Currency For Love for mistaken investments). When parents invest time and attention into their children’s emotional bank account, their children grow to know themselves as significant and valuable. They realize they hold a place of importance in their parents’ lives. As a result, they become...

Celebration Family Shepherds

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April 11, 2016

Help My Children Have ANTs in Their Pants…uh, I Mean Brain

If you want to increase your children’s happiness and optimism, you must teach them to exterminate the ANTs—or Automatic Negative Thoughts. Those ANTs scamper around our children’s thoughts and threaten their happiness and success. ANTs come in many varieties. Let me describe four. Absolute, Permanent ANTs (the AP-ANTs). When stressful events or bad things happen, AP-ANTs...

emotional health happiness healthy development success

April 9, 2016

Build Forts to Build Mature Children

I lived near a very small (I mean, very small!) patch of woods for part of my elementary school and middle school years. I remember the joy of going “into the woods” and finding natural enclaves under bushes that I could make into “my fort.” A few minor adjustments and additions turned those branches into...

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February 6, 2016

The E.S.S.E.N.C.E. of Adolescence

Daniel Siegel, PhD, talks about the E.S.S.E.N.C.E. of adolescence in his book, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. He describes how the ESSENCE of the teenage mind presents wonderful opportunities and frightening risks for parent and teen. If a parent tries to stifle, muzzle, or oppose this ESSENCE, the teen may rebel,...

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October 31, 2015

The Amazing Benefits of an Imperfect Parent

The October 26, 2015, issue of Time Magazine published a cover story entitled “Help, My Parents are Millennials.” The author of this article referenced BabyCenter’s findings from a survey of 2,700 US moms between the ages of 18 and 44 years and completed in February. One finding in particular caught my eye. According to the...

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October 26, 2015

A Green-Eyed Monster has Possessed My Preschooler

The green-eyed monster of jealousy can raise its ugly head in all of us. Who hasn’t felt a tinge of jealousy when our loved one gives the attention we desire to another? That green-eyed monster can even possess our sweet little preschoolers, twisting their faces with pain and filling their actions with anger. It’s not...

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September 28, 2015

Laughter is No Laughing Matter for Families

Laughter is an amazing medicine. This is not new information. In fact, one ancient Hebrew proverb states that “a cheerful heart is good medicine…” (Proverbs 17:22). Laughter is like medicine, not only to the soul but to the whole person. Consider these “medicinal benefits” of laughter: Laughter decreases the secretion of stress hormones in the...

Celebration

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September 14, 2015

Should We Give an Allowance?

Parents often give children an allowance to motivate them to complete chores. Unfortunately, I have found allowances to be poor motivators. Don’t get me wrong. Allowances often worked in our family for a short time…but then no longer worked. They would work again when our child had something they really wanted to buy (the real...

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August 24, 2015

Giving Children Freedom to Grow

We love our children. We will do almost anything to help them grow and become the amazing adults we see waiting to burst forth from the guise of childhood. We know they have greatness lurking beneath that façade of awkward teenage angst. But, our kids still need to be kids, not superstars. We need to...