Every parent dreams of the day their children leave the home and stop eating all their food. But before this can happen, there are three things you must do to prepare them for adulthood:

1. Establish with your child their eternal and God-given value.

Your child should never be confused about their eternal value, uniqueness in this world, and their unbelievable physical and emotional strengths. Your job is to pound into their little brains that they are the most important people on earth and should always be treated as such. Not in a spoiled way, but in a way that can uplift the their human spirit and convince them that they can accomplish anything.

Amy and I accomplish this in different ways, but my favorite is to tuck our children into bed and say something like, "Who is the most incredible 7 year-old on the planet? And who will daddy never stop loving … no matter what?"

2. Encourage your child to make his or her own decisions.

Our job is not to control our children but rather raise them to make wise and honoring decisions. This can't happen if we do everything for them. So we must give our children the chance to fail from their own decisions. Sometimes they are going to fall flat on their face, but we must be there to help them back up again and remind them how much we love them.

3. Teach them to value others as well.

If you're going to help them learn about their own tremendous value, then you'd better make sure they treat other people the same way. This is such a critical relationship skill that we can only make our children's lives better by establishing this attitude from the beginning.

Our 7 year-old son Cole returned home from school one day with a writing project he'd completed at school. His penmanship was great and his sentence structure was wonderful, but his message was horrible. It basically established a global theory on why boys are so much better than girls and that girls are actually pretty pathetic in all things compared to boys.

This isn't abnormal for a boy his age to do, but it wasn't very honoring to girls. So I sat him down and explained how this was not very nice toward girls and had him rewrite the paragraph in a more honoring way.

© Copyright 2004 Smalley Relationship Center

Print this page

E-mail this page

Bookmark this page

Back to top