What a Difference a Daddy Makes by Kevin Leman

Author:Kevin Leman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Love Them Differently

“She doesn’t look like Holly.”

It was eighteen months after our firstborn had reordered our lives when child number two, Krissy, made her grand entrance. I don’t know what I expected. I guess part of me thought, Same father, same mother, same kid, right? Or at least a reasonable facsimile.

Not even close.

Holly entered this world with a long, narrow face. Krissy sported a Charlie Brown oval. Personality-wise, Holly is a stereotypical firstborn: as a kid she was bossy, tough as nails when she needed to be, and determined to run her younger siblings’ lives. (She did that quite successfully for a number of years.) She was always trying to con Krissy.

“Here, Krissy, see how much bigger this nickel is than your dime?

Wanna trade?”

Krissy, living on the rebound, is extraordinarily relational, fun loving, and laid-back. When they were very young, you’d see eighteen-month-old Krissy wearing floaties in the pool, her little head bobbing back and forth, contentedly riding the waves without a care in the world. Holly would be networking with adults or organizing a performance.

It was inevitable, of course, that the two would become very competitive. Sometimes, the contests weren’t all that fair. Holly regularly set up singing competitions, and she insisted that Sande and I serve as judges. The problem was, Krissy sang like a bird and Holly sang like . . . her mother. It wasn’t even close.

I never understood why Holly kept insisting on these contests, as she simply did not have the equipment to knock off her younger sister. Finally, Sande and I grew tired of always giving first place to Krissy, so out of charity one time I finally said, “I think Holly won that one, don’t you, honey?”

Krissy’s face scrunched up into the funniest little ball of confusion you’ve ever seen. It’s like she was saying, “What?! Did you hear what I heard?!”

Fortunately, Chuck Swindoll gave me a wonderful piece of advice. A lot of parents have misinterpreted Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

They take that to mean that there is one prescribed way to raise a godly child and that our job as parents is to apply this one pattern to each son and daughter.

Chuck set me straight. “You know, Leman,” he said, “that really translates as the ‘individual bent’ of each child. It doesn’t mean train up a child in the way you think he should go.”

As the author of The New Birth Order Book, let me tell you that I say “Amen!” to that. For men with multiple daughters, one of the most valuable slogans to learn is, “Love them differently.” Become a student of your daughter, find out her individual bent, and raise her accordingly.

Too many parents get caught in the trap of even-steven. That’s disastrous parenting, and it’s impossible to achieve. Let me give an example here. Let’s say you have two kids squabbling over a piece of cake. The

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