Raising Kingdom Kids by Tony Evans

Author:Tony Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Family, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / General
ISBN: 9781624054136
Publisher: Focus on the Family
Published: 2014-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

9

LOL, SMHS, AND CC (CULTIVATING COMMUNICATION)

People today benefit from the most advanced information systems ever devised. Those who died just fifty years ago would be astounded if they came back to life and saw the incredible ways we can communicate today. Through television and satellites, we can watch what’s happening on the other side of the world as it occurs. Social media have changed everything we used to know and understand about communication. Over 1.2 billion people use Facebook. Over 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook alone, not to mention Instagram. And since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s an awful lot of communication right there.

Families can sit in the same room these days with everyone on either a mobile device or a tablet and go hours without communicating with each other. Tweets are substituted for talk. Posts have taken the place of conversations. Words have been reduced to mere letters—acronyms such as LOL (laugh out loud) and SMHS (shake my head silly), for example. Complete sentences have lost their once-valued standing in our culture. Slowly but surely we are losing our finesse in coherent speech patterns, grammar, and the art of listening. After all, social media don’t necessarily require two-way interaction.

We call this communication, but it would be better defined as mere transmission. Communication takes place not only when a message is sent but also when it is received, understood, and acted upon. Given that definition, there is very little real communication going on today. Yet communication is a vital and critical component of a healthy family.

In addition to the lack of true communication happening in most homes, an awful lot of negative messaging is getting through to kids, and this is driving a young generation into an unprecedented depth of hopelessness and irreverence toward life.

The effectiveness of that negative communication, coupled with the scarcity of quality communication within families, is a large part of our problem in raising kingdom kids. A kingdom home should have open and frequent sharing of feelings or mutual concerns, listening, understanding, empathy, affirmation, and accessibility to discussion and information. In this chapter, let’s explore how we can create an atmosphere conducive to healthy communication patterns and skills by implementing a few key strategies and principles.

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