Loving The Middle Years

I have discovered that there is a whole in all parenting plans and books. It seems that as soon as you are done training toddlers, if you did a splendid job of it, that your kids should run on their own pretty smoothly. Good training is like riding a bike, and once those training wheels come off, you just sit back and watch your kids ride away. The problem is, this is not how it really works! Discipleship is never ending. There is never a point that you reach that is "the Point". There is no DONE in parenting. You leave the toddler stage to enter into a whole new world, a whole new game. Thankfully the manual for this next stage is the same. The Bible always speaks to us as parents. It speaks to us in the consent and insistent age of 2 year olds, it speaks to us in the early wisdom age of the 7 year old and it continues to speak to us as we raise up our children to love the Lord. But it does seem that in parenting books this age is skipped. It does seem that this is the age where kids are given a lot of freedom without the right equipment for the job. When kids are young you need a lot of energy and a whole lot of patience and self disciple to do the same thing every day. When they get a little older they learn how to function in your home (they do not stick there fingers in the outlet anymore). And they really are able to play with friends without stealing or hitting! But, but, but....They still need you. They still need to be guided, they still need help and they still need bounderies. They are able to hang out with friends (siblings included) pretty effortlessly but issues still arise. It is a different set of issues but there is plenty to talk about and ample room for teaching and instructing. If these issue are not coming to you, you have a whole different issue. You need to know who your kids are with. You need to know what they are playing, how they are playing (or not playing!) and where they are playing. If your kids are playing with other kids out of earshot, you should ask questions in the car on your way home: Who did you play with? What game did you play? What did you talk about? And then you interact with what they tell you. If they are constantly having issues with the same kid(s) make sure to be observing the situation first hand so that you can help your young lady or young man, deal with it properly. Basically, you need to oversee there free time. This is not the stage that we let go of our kids!! We need to invest in our kids at this stage and teach them how to interact in the world they are in. When kids are toddlers we teach them the rules and boundaries of home life. They have rules all over the place. These rules are teaching them how to live in your home and how to live in your family. These rules are put into place for protection, function and to maintain peace, joy and some kind of order in the home. Really, the rules are in place for everyone's good. So by the time your kids are 5 they usually have the rules down. Yes, they may still break the rules but they know the standard. But these middle years are when their world begins to expand a little bit. They go from home, to playground, to school, to more school to work to starting their own families. Their world just keeps expanding!! It keeps getting bigger. And as it gets a little bigger, they need our help! They need our wisdom to apply to their new situations. They need guidance and guidelines for this next step. Because of this, I am going to try and focus on this for a little bit in my next posts. I am in the thick of it right now with a 8, 7, and almost 6 year old. And this is really me trying to figure out what I am doing right now with my kids. And as I go on this journey, I hope to please the Lord and help my children grow in grace and beauty!

Happy sweeping! And for those of you with older kids, much of that sweeping is in attitudes and spending time talking through things! We rarely spill milk anymore but there is still plenty of sweeping going on!