5:30
Writer’s note: The post-funeral thoughts continue. Yesterday I wrote how husbands have an important role in being a leader which involves being humble enough to be his wife’s cheerleader and encourager, but even more important, being able to recognize the value she produces by being a mom and supportive spouse.
The wife, especially one who is homebound, may see the world flying by without her as she is confined with growing children who may offer little, for many years, in terms of adult type gratitude.
Today I want to go another step down the totem pole and write about how you as a parent, not only fathers, will leave your children with a testimony to give one day. What will they say?
I believe one of the key elements to your children growing up is how much they feel themselves understood and valued, and that means, understood and valued in the way they are NOT like you as a parent.
It’s easy to identify with the behavior patterns that are the same as yours (as long as they are not your negative traits), but when your child starts showing that he/she learns in a way that is not consistent with yours, that can cause a lot of confusion and friction.
A key to identifying the ways your children naturally like to learn can be helped by parents who can observe their children performing different tasks, interacting with others, how they discover. Each parent will see things differently and relatives and friends will also observe things. It helps to take all of there observations in helping you better in how to adjust your expectations in how your children best learn.
So here are a few simple tips to get you started…
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5 SIMPLE STEPS TO OBSERVE YOUR CHILD
1) Observe in many different situations as possible.
2) Ask the opinions of others and of their observations who see your children in different situations.
3) Be open to modifying your preconceived notions of how your child’s learning and behavioral style. Let me give you two innocent examples.
My son and I sometimes watch TV series downloaded from the internet. He consistently likes to look ahead and see what the summary is about for future shows. The information is easily available. When I grew up, I did not have the resource and am accustomed to waiting a week at a time to find out what the next show was about. I like to think patience is a virtue and the fact that he wants to look ahead seems weird, and I have an urge to discourage him from “peeking” ahead, when if I sit back an think about it, why am I getting stressed?
I heard a well known author in child learning styles, Cynthia Tobias, discuss how she could not watch a movie unless she knew ahead of time if some of the animals in the movie were going to die. She didn’t need to know which animals were going to die, but in order to watch it was important to know if and perhaps how many were going to die.
The point is, your kids can think way different from you and still be good kids, good people. It helps to develop a certain broadmindedness to help your kids be able to run with their natural traits.
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4) Listen to your spouse, it is unlikely you are clones of each other. You can learn to respect each others behavioral style, it will help you see differences in your children.
5) If all else fails and you feel overwhelmed by information, as Michael Savage sometimes summarizes it, if you love your child and the intent is one of love, that’s the best you can do. We often cannot escape the damage done by our differences, but we can continue to strive in love to do the best we can.
I’m going to tell you right now, if you are a mere mortal like I am, you’re not going to get it perfect. When all else fails, it helps to have a good understanding of many different quality traits in order to identify these in your children.
And once you identify these quality traits that your child exhibits you need to praise them because that reinforcement of who they are will stay with them for their whole life.
Hope this helps get that future testimony right.
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6:46 first draft
7:00 2nd go through,.
7:09 out of tim,e the timer is out , got to publish
I’ll see you… on the next page
Challen Yee