Saturday, July 10, 2010

Seeking Your Child's Heart

We are realizing that we are entering a new stage of parenting with our older children, ages 6 and 7.  We are moving past  the more "simple" goal of immediate, cheerful, thorough obedience and moving further into their hearts.  Our goal is more to win their hearts now, to build relationship with them, to help them grow in character and in ability to choose the right over the wrong and the "best" over the "good."  To that end, here is an article by C. J. Mahaney on dealing with idols in your child's heart that is helpful in showing you how this can be done.

So I want to do two things. I want to try to introduce my son to a study that isn’t correction specific to an occasion. I want to study the heart, I want to study anger, I want to study idolatry, unrelated to an occasion where I am bringing discipline, so that the study hopefully can have the most effect. I want to engage in a study from Scripture. I want to choose age-appropriate material. I want to choose appropriate passages. And then my study with my son is supplemented by stories from my life, because I do the same thing. I don’t cry anymore like a child but I know how to cry in adult ways. I want my child to know that no matter what the category, I can identify. Read the entire article here

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