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Reaching Higher Newsletter from |
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Mothering Tools for Stronger Families
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Shirley's thoughts:
Recently a letter to parents of a school circulated on social media. The school leadership explained that the teachers can’t teach, because of classroom disruptions caused by rebellious students who have no desire to learn and no respect for teachers.
Conversation followed about possible disciplinary steps the school could take to attempt to solve this problem.
This is one of the many signs in SA today of a breakdown of discipleship, mentoring and training in families, in homes.
As home educators, we are the primary and probably the only educators of our children. We can’t and don’t send our children to school and expect teachers to deal with any discipline issues. We are forced to deal with them ourselves.
Mother Teresa said, “The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.”
Homeschooling heals families as it forces parents to learn effective ways to train our children’s hearts and characters.
As a younger parent, I soon learned that I needed a wider range of ‘tools’ in my character-training tool box, than the forms of discipline and punishment that were used on me growing up.
I grew tired of being the “mean mommy” that was regularly dishing out punishment and negative consequences. I realised that I needed to be more pro-active at reaching the hearts of my children.
(Click here for some recommended parenting books to help you learn new strategies.)
While punishment and behaviour-modification techniques might get quick results, I knew that I didn’t want my children to obey merely out of fear of punishment. I wanted them to choose to have respect for one another and respect for their parents. I wanted them to choose obedience, kindness, sharing or whatever the appropriate behaviour was, for the right reasons.
As I began to focus on teaching and modelling respect TO my children, I began to see that they had greater respect for others in the family too.
I also learned to train them to try to handle conflict resolution and negotiation with siblings among themselves instead of always stepping in, dominating and taking charge. I figured there won’t always be a mediator to step in and moderate in arguments and relationships issues in adult life, so they should learn these skills, sooner rather than later.
I don’t want to become an interfering mother-in-law one day either!
As parents, we also had to learn more mature ways to handle our own “differences of opinion” so that we were better role models.
I’ve probably ‘blown it’ many times, but each time was also an opportunity to model how to ‘fix’ the situation by being humble, apologising and seeking restoration of peace and love!
All of the above has taken time - years - and it is an ongoing process for all parents.
We have now reached the stage where our two adult children give us tips and advice about how we should parent the younger ones! So we must have done OK!
As you probably know, the BEST parents are the ones that don’t have any children of their own yet!
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| | HOMESCHOOL CHATS
Wendy and I are continuing to share regular quick chats of 5-10 minutes each, about various practical homeschooling topics on YouTube.
Our first three clips focused on
#1 Charlotte Mason
#2 Relaxed homeschooling
#3 Testing
Click here to view the growing series of videos on You Tube.
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| Wishing you a blessed Mother's Day
Wendy and Shirley |
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