Have you ever felt alone in your parenting?
Has your child ever gotten a different answer from your spouse than you already gave them?
Has your child ever sworn or used bad language?
Has your child ever shown disrespect to you by what they said?
Has your child ever lied to you?
We’ve had to deal with all of these and much more as we have journeyed to figure this parenting challenge out! Of course we had told our children that all of these are no-no’s, but until we erased these behaviors from our own lives, it was ridiculous to think that they would.
Couple First Parenting: Being the best example/model of how we want our children to act is one of the keys.
Our first big lesson about Couple First Parenting happened just as we were being called on to do a short talk at a church! We had our kids huddled in the back hoping they would be absolutely quiet and wait for us to finish. One child reached up to pull a sheet of construction paper out of a shelf and a whole box of crayons on top of it came crashing down. Our daughter yelled S.O.B. at him and we could hear it echoing through the whole church as we walked to the podium! I’m sure we were as red as beets giving our talk. HOWEVER, as we drove home we realized that we had used those words in the recent past! Kids always do what you do, instead of doing what you say. Telling them not to swear is not enough! If we really didn’t want our kids to swear we had to stop first!
We devote an entire lesson of Passionate Parent Passionate Couple to Couple First Parenting, and we first blogged about it in 2021. To learn more, check out our previous blog here.
And to learn even more, get your own copy of Passionate Parent Passionate Couple either on our website (so we can sign it) or at Amazon/Kindle.