A Mom's Musing: Life as a Parent

 Let's start out with a good cry, shall we?  The following story comes from the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech given by Astrid Lingren, called Never Violence. "When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor's wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn't believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking - - the first of his life. And she told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, 'Mama, I couldn't find a switch, but here's a rock that you can throw at me.'   All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child's point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no dif...

My outline for this blog will come from The National Extension Parenting Education Model. Within the model there are seven focus categories: Care for Self Understand Guide Nurture Motivate Develop Advocate In my first post, we covered Care for Self. Today I would like to touch on Understand . The Thinker, 1904 by Auguste Rodin It's a funny thing, how we encounter coincidences. The opening story for this material in my university class discusses a long-time practicing OB/GYN and a mother about to have her 10th child. She feels like she's beginning labor and the doctor says she won't be delivering  for a few days still. Who do you trust? In my own life, just this past month, my youngest daughter had her braces taken off. Her teeth were perfect! She got her retainers and we when home. A few days later, she said that her jaw wasn't closing right, and that her front teeth were grinding together. So we made another appointment, went back in and the orthodontist said that he t...

 This was a second reading for me - years ago a friend recommended it to me. Now, I'm recommending it to you.  One of the most powerful and applicable messages in this article is the idea of pausing . Giving yourself time to ponder and cool down before reacting. When we take this time, we change our 'reaction' to an 'action'. The whole world can change in that short span of time - especially for our children. Original Image: Sara Farnsworth The article, The Parenting Pyramid , was written by the Arbinger Institute and can be found here . I will surely do it an injustice by trying to sum it all up here, so please, go read it for yourself. But just for my own benefit, I'll try to do a simple recap.  Often as parents, we seek to correct our children. Their speech, their manners, their fashion sense... We often are overly eager and zealous about correcting our children. And while there are things that need correction - often what is really needed is teaching . As ...

 I had every intention of starting this blog and keeping up with my posts every week. I wanted to go above and beyond. Not because I wanted to be better than anyone else, or that I wanted to impress the teacher but because I really feel passionate about learning how to be a good parent and I wanted to be able to review years down the road, everything I was learned during my time in this class.. Well, here I am, 5 weeks into the 7 week course, and I'm just starting... But as they say, it's best to begin at the beginning, so that's what I'm doing. Original Photo: Sara Farnsworth I had this misconception early in my parenting career. I felt that because God designed us to multiply and replenish the human race, that parenting skills would just come naturally. That our protective instincts would just appear spontaneously when our first child was born. I thought that God would inspire me and strengthen me to meet any and all challenges that come along with parenting my indivi...