Raise your children to believe in their God and to believe in themselves. Teach them the only way they can learn, by your example! That hard work equals a house and a decent car in the driveway. That real money is made in the transaction not by the hour. Build their concept of God so big He can never fail and his love for them unending. Then help them build dreams that are as big as their God!!!
When you sign on as a parent, when you adopt or foster a child, you become responsible for what’s in their head. Wanna know what’s wrong with our country? Look at what parents are allowing in their children’s head. Wanna know why kids are shooting up schools, sit down and play one of their video games … Great kids come from great parents that prequalify what goes in their head, that choose their circle of friends and who become their primary teachers.
You don’t give out participation trophy’s but when your child achieves something the whole world needs to know about it. Place what he built on the dinning room table as a centerpiece. Give him a welder, a set of tools and get out of his way! That centerpiece becomes a rat rod in the driveway that leads to an engineering degree later on? I have found my snap on tools rusting in the yard more than once but I got a boy that knows how to wrench. The Garage is a mess sometimes but you should see what drives out of it!!!
Buy her a pad and pencil and encourage her to write, one day she will run a newspaper. Instill a love for reading and she will be the author of several books by the time she’s 20. Put her in front of a piano at 5 and at 25 she will have an internet business selling them and teaching lessons world wide. Because you taught her to pursue her own dreams, because you supported her through the process.
Give him a fire truck at five and he will be running toward a burning building instead of away from it. He will choose a career that serves his community, not just provides a paycheck. He will fall in love with a beautiful girl and build his dream home out of an dilapidated 100 year old farmhouse. He will start a business and teach his kids to do the same. They will all be in church on Sunday morning. Dream job, dream house, dream girl… living the dream as a family… because that’s what was put into their head. That is the pattern and blueprint they were built by.
Let her experience life and deliver her baby brother at 10 yrs old and she grows up to run a pregnancy center and marry a preacher. Drive her to piano lessons and she will turn around and teach her siblings …put a love for music in her and today her home is filled with joy. Let her see a man that lays down his life for his family and she will find someone that will do the same.
Water and cultivate that heart of compassion and watch her grow up as a caregiver to those who desperately need someone to help. Put her on a pony at five and she owns the stable at 30… buy her a cowboy hat and she will find a good man to put under it. Teach her to believe she is unstoppable and when that storm comes that would have destroyed her she will come galloping out the other side as a testimony to her faith.
Teach him to fix things instead of tossing them out, that he is destined for greatness. Make him an overcommer. A boy that believes in his dreams becomes the man that achieves them! Don’t overwrite your dreams on his. Teach him to think for himself and drink upstream from the herd. Let him pick his own path, find his own trade and he will be happily married, drive a nice car, and own his house when he’s 20. He will spend his honeymoon in Alaska living out his childhood dreams.
Let her grow up watching her siblings launch out into their dreams and she will have dreams of her own. Keep her heart close to yours and let her know she can be anything she desires to be, that you are there to help her in that quest, but it’s her decision, her life choices. Fill the home with praise and worship and one day when she picks up a microphone all of heaven will show up to hear her sing.
Parenting, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi is not a one time thing… it’s an all time thing. You better have a long term plan and a life long commitment to be there for them regardless. There is never a day that you are not Dad, that you are not Mom! I would highly recommend putting Jesus Christ smack dab in the middle of that plan, but I have seen countless Christians who fail as a parent, whose children do not follow them in the faith, so I’m sharing what we did and trying to explain why it worked.
It’s buying a little boat to go fishing and tubing with the family. It’s a camper or a tent and a 15 passenger van to travel to places every child needs to see, coasting back into the driveway with $1.87 in your pocket, but you did it. American dolls when you can’t afford it, treehouses and caves that are the envy of the neighborhood. Bon fires and kick-the-can late into the night and getting up early to clean the church and get ready for Sunday Service. 
It’s dragging your butt out of bed at 3:30 every morning and punching a clock in a blue collar job to make sure there is a roof over their head and three square meals a day on the table. But it’s also being married to one of the most compassionate and loving individuals on planet earth, a woman of great wisdom and countless worth who endured 12 years of barrenness waiting for this thing called a family.
Heidi has been their biggest fan and lifelong advocate, the love of my life, the best half of the equation…. a helpmeet to me and a Mother to her children. They were raised to be givers not takers, to be the head not the tail, above not beneath, blessed and overflowing from the true source of happiness peace and joy… Sir, if you want to raise successful kids, love their mother!
It works, it works every time. It’s duplicable. Feel free to borrow it, nothing new under that sun, I learned it all from successful parents around me and dug the rest out of an old book that’s been around since the beginning of time.
Raising Kidz
01
Aug