How do we prepare to parent adult children?
This is the topic of our guest post over at The Musings of Mum.
The post is a “first” for Kendrix & I as it’s our first collaboration on a written article about parenting, and I’m pretty excited about that!
How We Prepared to Parent Adult Children
As our children grow up, parents have a tall order in ensuring that our parenting style grows with them.
We move from being heavily involved in their decision making process, to teaching and empowering them to make decisions. To coaching our children or perhaps only giving advice when we’re invited to do so.
A common pitfall then happens when we fail to make the necessary transitions.
Maybe the term “helicopter parent” rings a bell?
While, I’m normally very careful about making gender generalizations, I’m just going to go ahead and state the obvious here. Mother’s are notorious for not knowing how or when to adjust their parenting style as their children get older. Not that I know from experience or anything…that’s just what I’ve heard (wink).
Having adult children is like preparing for a new journey. The preparation oftentimes starts long before you get to the start point.
We present to you, that this is the case when you are preparing to be parents of adult children. My husband and I have identified five keys that we believe to be helpful in the preparation process.
However, for the sake of brevity; we’re only going to discuss 3 of these keys today so be sure to sign up for my email list, in order to be notified when the second part is published.
Key Number One: Lives of Prayer, Worship, and Biblical Study
As our older children enter adulthood, I’ve been surprised by the nature of things that they need prayer for. I told my husband that I’ve been confounded by some of their choices. This has served as a reminder that as long as we’re on this earth; prayer will be an essential part of the parenting equation.
Not only is it essential as we parent our children, but living a life centered in prayer is something that we can’t model for our children if it’s not a pillar in our own life.
We all know the challenge of trusting God’s lordship over our lives in light of all the responsibilities and activities that compete for our attention.
So we must be vigilant to reject the lie that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. This kind of mentality can lead us to breeze through the more discretionary based elements of our day like our worship & devotional time with the Lord.
You can click here to continue reading the post.
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