The Key to Your Child's Heart by Gary Smalley

Author:Gary Smalley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

5

Giving Yourself the

Freedom to Fail

Discipline in the Home

Communicating Emotionally with Children

Building Friendships in the Family

The Value of Being Together without Spending Much Money

What They Didn’t Like

The Long-Term Effect of Words

Gaining a New Perspective

The Principle of Empowerment

YOU REALLY FIND OUT what it means to be vulnerable when you ask your grown children to rate your successes and failures as a parent. That’s exactly what Norma and I did last Thanksgiving. We were having a family meeting with just the five of us in the living room, and I said to our children, “I’m thinking about revising our parenting book, The Key to Your Child’s Heart, and I was wondering if the three of you would like to help?” Kari, Greg, and Michael responded virtually in unison, “Yeah, we’d love to help.”

I wasn’t sure they would want to help me or have anything to do with the revision, so their sudden, unanimous response surprised me. Getting down to business, I said, “Can I ask each of you a couple of difficult questions? Can you really be honest and share what you appreciated about the way we disciplined you as children and what you appreciated about us as parents? And then can you describe what you wish we had not done as parents? What would you have done differently? How would you have done it differently? Tell me what you don’t plan to do as parents yourselves because of what your mother and I did when you were growing up. I remember several times when all of you said, ‘Boy, I’ll never do that with my kids!’”

I said that I thought this was the kind of information a lot of parents would like to know. So in this chapter I would like to share some of the positive and negative aspects of our own parenting.

As parents, Norma and I did what I suspect you are doing as readers. We looked around and saw the large number of families around us who were hurting and falling apart. Like you, we started a search to find reliable training methods for raising our three children. Because our own parents were dead and since every day counted when it came to parenting, we talked to anyone who seemed to know something about parenting or who seemed to be good role models.

One of our best sources turned out to be our own godly pediatrician, Dr. Charles Schellenberger, and his wife, Dorothy. We sought out Charles’ advice almost every time we visited his office—which seemed to be practically every week with our kids’ runny noses and whatever.

Now that all three of our children are grown and out on their own, our questioning of what they appreciated about our home was a chance to evaluate some of the methods that we had discovered and applied. It was interesting to hear their varied and precise remarks. Before I summarize that, however, it might be helpful to know how the three of them turned out as adults and what they’re doing these days.

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