Motherhood Tips 3

Thursday, 28. January 2010 by Renee Ellison

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Parenting Tip: Inconvenient vigilance
The cost of achieving Olympic gold medals is vigilance.  That means exercising discipline ONLY over my EVERY hour for TEN-plus years, with no let-up, because if I slough off for even an hour or two, it will SHOW in the end!  Then I could sadly find that if I was sloppy or careless for too many days in that pursuit, I’m not going to get the gold.  So, too, the cost for turning my cantankerous child into a magnanimous adult means vigilance over responding to EVERY attempted defiance.

If you don’t like the behavior your child is PRESENTLY displaying today, you won’t like it BETTER tomorrow.  If this behavior won’t look good on a 16-year old, don’t allow it now.  Good parenting requires truckloads of inconvenient vigilance and maintaining grit in your resolve.  Simply outwit, out-maneuver, out-smart, out-“stubborn” your child EVERY TIME when it comes to defiant behavior of any kind.  If you coddle your child through a fit now, you may find yourself STILL coddling him when he is 35 years old.  We’ve all seen it happen.

You achieve this by making your child’s every excursion into defiance VERY, very costly, not to you, but to him/her.  You can do this because in the beginning, for a few short years, God has given you TOTAL control over every scrap of food, clothing and shelter your child needs, as well as how your child will spend every minute of every day.  The implication of this is that these are the tools to get the job done.  You hold all the cards.

When your child is having a fit, pull rank.  Live above it.  Calmly and strategically make life miserable for him, in some little way, as a direct result.  Show him it NEVER works to his advantage.  Go at this training relentlessly like a horse trainer, putting a stubborn animal through the paces yet AGAIN, of cause and effect, cause and effect.  Get this message, that “he’ll never win if he is defiant”, through his little brain, into his spirit, into his stomach, in every way that you can.

It is helpful to have your child repeat the phrase, “Obedience brings blessing…disobedience brings trouble!” in and around and through every head-knocker you have with him.  Have him repeat is over and over and over again, ad nauseum, day in and day out, stay at it, ensuring that your child can not only say the phrase, but live the phrase.  (Sometimes in quiet moments, you can even start the phrase and have your child finish it: “Obedience brings……… ?”)  And then proceed to SHOW him how true it is in his little life.  Help him get the concept, intellectually AND viscerally.

You only have to do this for years and years!  You will THINK they just don’t “get it.”  But then one day, with every child, way past when you think it SHOULD have happened… poof, you’ll notice that for days now you haven’t had one head-knocker over anything!  The defiance just silently goes away.  This is the formula: “begin with the LAW, and then you can relax into grace.”  Many, many parents begin with grace and have to lay down the law in high school when drugs and guns appear.

You must thoroughly understand that your very young child’s fit/tantrum/sullen foot-dragging is not the result of a long “experience-base” with life, or of a seasoned reason.  He has no idea what is good for him.  It springs from one driving compulsion…self-indulgence.  So in the middle of the scene/crisis, don’t think it is REALLY something else, “Oh, he doesn’t feel well this time, or had a hard sleepless night.  If I pacify him just this once by giving in, then it’ll all be better.”  Nada.  Remember from whence it comes and stand like a brick wall.  It is NO GIFT to your CHILD, to let your child win.  It may calm down the moment, smooth things over, and look better in public, but all you did was bury the problem.  Stay unflinchingly FIRM.  You can always be wonderfully soft and tender for all the other aspects of the day!  It takes both a wise judicious firmness EVERY time it is needed and an habitual loving softness to reflect the true nature of God whom your child will ultimately come to love to obey over a lifetime, through this strong, consistent childhood apprenticeship under you!!!

Home Management Tip: The sure road to relief
Since maintenance of a home in all its details won’t go away, SOMEBODY has to do it (your children will help, of course, but the buck stops with you), the only relief you’ll get is if you seek to IMPROVE the way you do it all!  Make is a private game with yourself and the tyranny of it will go away.  Instead of running FROM it, tackle it!  Engage yourself in a mind-game of an “improve-a-thon” and you’ll grow incredibly polished and capable in domestic skill.  Work at little ways to shave your minutes in all your domestic pursuits over jobs that you do over and over.  Look for ways to add luster, beauty and efficiency to each household routine.  Look for ways to conquer reoccurring domestic problems and functions.  And relentlessly look, just like Sherlock Holmes, for ways to do it EASIER.

Become a QUEEN of your total domain.  Enjoy your kingdom.  Enjoy MANAGING it, much like the president of a large corporation, making it exactly as you want it, lovingly stewarding it under God to the best of your ability.  It has been said that: “an institution is really the lengthened shadow of the man at the top.”  So, too, is a home.  The woman establishes the climate in far more ways than you now know.

If you really get INTO IT, you’ll join the ranks of keepers at home who realize that they have one of the loveliest, most varied and interesting jobs on the planet.  Think of the countless women in China who work in a warehouse attaching the same widget hour after hour everyday for years on end.  Come to see homemaking as the blessing God intended, and count yourself fortunate.

Kitchen Tip: Diving into oranges
Slice oranges and lemons by digging the tine of a fork into its skin and see-sawing it back and forth around its middle, like the equator of the earth, then do the same vertically, to the north and south poles.  This divides the skin into four sections.  These four pieces then peel off easily with your thumb.  Done.

Sewing Tip: Grow a progressive servant-hearted tailoring skill, slowly, incrementally, quietly, and deliberately
We have a next door neighbor who is so intelligent he could have gotten a law degree or a degree in medicine, but he CHOSE to work with his hands in carpentry instead, and he has never regretted it.  Slowly, methodically, as he has extra time, he works on one project after another on their house, slowly transforming it before the eyes of all the neighbors.  Outdoor French drains, a new window now and then, re-laid front and back porches, etc, etc.  He has all his tools neatly lined up in his garage…a work of art just to see the display of them.  He putzes with great joy, making endless beautiful improvements.  His love of his work is contagious.  His relatives and friends, including his wife, like to go to his garage just to WATCH him work!

Why not adopt the same attitude and grow the skill of sewing, slowly and deliberately?  (And/or encourage your daughters to grow the skill, too.  It’ll benefit the entire family either way.)  Become better and better at it, aim to become an expert at this and/or gourmet/healthy cooking.  Both of these skills enrich ANY home.  The home life is far better WITH them than without them.

Instead of watching a movie (which doesn’t really change your life in any significant way) or doing some other entertainment, try getting a sewing book or sewing DVD out of the library to study it.  Find a person in your city who could give you a lesson now and then.

Marriage Tip: Share emerging thinking
Men aren’t mind readers.  They don’t even pick up clues from you much of the time as other women might tend to do.  You simply must do the work necessary to communicate with your husband.  One of the best strategies is to bring your husband along in your TEMPORARY thinking, your EMERGING thinking on lots of topics that involve you both.  That way you can reach conclusions TOGETHER and save him the shock of your FINISHED thinking

Learn to function as one mind, by talking often, posture most of your talking as tentative…don’t boss.  And ask him questions to draw him out.  Listen attentively to him.  Even though his ideas are different, or perhaps even threatening to you at first, often you’ll discover that his thoughts may uncover a blind spot of your own on the topic, giving you both a much better, larger conclusion.

Devotions Tip: Sizzling dross
When you have devotions, Scripture runs over your MOTIVES like an intense laser light, burning off the dross.  There is a reason your mind darts off here and there: it is subconsciously applying the Word.  It is experiencing shame, or it is being inspired by a loftier attitude.  The Lord can’t do his work through Scripture, if you don’t read His words.  Don’t be talked out of spending SOME time for devotion, simply because today you can’t do lengthy devotions.  Even just five minutes of it, on a rushed day, gilds one’s character with the gold of an increased personal holiness.  The more light, the more gold.  Just think of it as getting one more beauty treatment at a celestial spa!