Parent Newsletter

Here’s an important reminder: Time is short, life is precious and money can’t buy happiness. All we have is right now and how we use that time is a tithe of sorts to the Lord. Of the 24 hours – the 1,440 minutes – available to us each day, parents actually spend very little time with their children. In fact, the average father spends only 3 minutes a day with his kids! So, how about you? Do you need a little help getting your priorities straight? 

I’ve said for years that one of the greatest problems parents face is the breathless pace at which we live our lives. Our overloaded lives are a product of the many roles we’ve assumed. Most of us have responsibilities associated with being children, parents, spouses, neighbors, volunteers, and church-members, just to name a few. Most of our responsibilities are by nature good, even noble. Yet, unmanaged, they can cause our lives to spin out of control and do great damage to our most important relationships: our relationship to God and our relationships within our family.

Getting young people involved in mission and service is not an option for Christian growth and maturity – it is a necessity. There’s no doubt, lives can be, and are, changed as young people have the opportunity to see and experience serving others firsthand. Unfortunately, there is a growing “downside” to having many opportunities to serve:  the danger of kids overdoing it. We’re seeing a rising number of kids “burning out” on the types of activities that should have a positive influence on their lives.

Margin is the space that exists between ourselves and our limits. The unbalanced life will not be kind to the areas we neglect. Financial pressures, over-commitment, fatigue – each eats away at a person’s margin until there’s no more margin left. Then what? How you answer the following ten questions will speak volumes about the kind of life you’re living now – and how this lifestyle will affect your family in the future.

In a last month’s edition of HomeWord’s Good Advice Parent Newsletter, we asked our readers to answer our poll question: Should parents prohibit their kids from participating in church and youth group activities as a method of discipline? Here are the results of the poll and selected comments from those who responded.

Our children aren't becoming wimpy because we're teaching them to be humble and training them to embrace patience. They're going out into the world as wimps because we parents are ignoring the broader counsel of God, pushing away character traits that make us uncomfortable and pretending that being disengaged from the world is actually about holiness and purity, when more often it's about fear, lack of preparation, and a lack of love.