Our Children are Raw Materials

The FamilyLife Weekend to Remember Conference was a wonderful getaway for Allison and me. We have been blessed to go to these conference so many times. This past one was a good reminder of things we have heard, being grateful for the principles it put into our marriage early on, and gave us new awareness since we now have children. Again, we would highly encourage any one to go for their own marriage booster shot.

In our absence POPs was blessed with the wisdom and teaching from Gwladys Keating. From the stories we have gathered, she came in and made use of the chalkboard. She discussed how every strength of our children have corresponding weaknesses and vice versa. And, even the strengths of our children need to be cultivated and matured. With that being said, we should never shame our children because of immaturity. We receive our children as raw materials. They are not born perfect. Therefore when they make mistakes we come alongside with encouragement, never shame.

Shame given during an honest mistake can easily lead to having your children not try again.

The other principle I took away from what I heard is the need to be specific. This is an obvious comment when disciplining our children, but it is also necessary when we are speaking blessings. The example is if we complement someone and say, "He is handsome." Our children could easily think they need to look like that person in order to be handsome. The difference would be to say, "He has a friendly smile," or "He is so nice to everyone." This helps our children to understand and assimilate what it means to us for someone to be handsome.

Our church is filled with some wonderful people that have wealth of understanding in the Lord. Gwladys is one of those treasures, and I am glad that our class had the privilege to learn from her.