The Best Parenting Advice I Have Ever Gotten

There are so many experts out there who can give you parenting advice. You can search Pinterest for any parenting advice that you want, and more than likely you’ll find every opinion that there is to be had about any parenting topic. My own parenting board has 272 pins giving advice from dealing with back talk to reducing arguing among siblings, to how many steps you can follow to be a better mom.

Although Pinterest is a wonderful resource for parenting tips, there are also many good parenting books out there. These are some of my favorites:

Bringing Up Boys – Dr. James Dobson

Bringing Up Girls – Dr. James Dobson

Shepherding a Child’s Heart – Tedd Tripp

Making Children Mind Without Losing Yours – Dr. Kevin Leman

Have a New Kid by Friday – Dr. Kevin Leman

Parenting with Love and Logic – Foster Cline, M.D.; Jim Fay

I love these books. I have read them over and over many times. They give wonderful tips about how to raise your children to be respectful, loving, good members of society, and how to raise them in the love of the Lord.

When Super Stuffy was born, I had my own great ideas for how to parent him. When he was a baby, I made sure that he learned how to sleep by himself. I was only going to feed him breastmilk, and when he was able to eat table food I was going to make my own.

In comes reality. He was not getting enough nutrition from breastsfeeding, so I had to put him on formula. When he was old enough for table food, I just didn’t have the time to make my own. I was able to teach him how to sleep on his own, but it was difficult because his extremely tenderhearted daddy had a hard time listening to him cry.

Enter his toddler years. As soon as he was on his feet he went everywhere. His favorite thing to do was grab the steak knives from the dishwasher and start to run. My parenting strategy was going to be the same as I was raised on. When he misbehaved, I was going to spank him. However, as he ran away with a steak knife, I knew that chasing after him was the last thing that I wanted to do.

When he was a year old my husband and I took a Love and Logic class. This is the basic premise of Love and Logic:

There are three different kinds of parents:

• helicopters – those who hover and rescue
• drill sergeants – those who command and direct
• consultants – those who guide their children

Helicopter parents don’t prepare their kids for the harshness of the world very well because they are constantly rescuing their children from their mistakes.

Drill Sergeant parents are so in control of their children that many times in order to get some control the children fight back as they grow.

Consultant parents guide their children but allow them to make mistakes and learn from them when the price tag is small.

Love and Logic emphasizes real world consequences and empathy. If my child forgets his coat, he lives with the real world consequence of being cold. If he doesn’t want to eat his lunch, then he lives with the real world consequence of being hungry. It gives as many opportunities to give my child as many choices as possible.

I loved Love and Logic. I still do. But there is, in my ability, an extreme disconnect between a wonderful theory and being able to put that theory into practice. I was able to use some of the techniques, but I was at a loss on some of the others.

Then I found a class discussing Dr. Leman’s book, “Have a New Kid by Friday.” The subtitle for his book is “How to Change Your Child’s

Attitude

Behavior &

Character in 5 Days

WooHoo! This would be awesome! Even though Super Stuffy and now Bear Bear weren’t really old enough to have horrific behavior, these strategies would allow me to head off that bad behavior.

Ten strategies that Dr. Leman gives to have a new kid by Friday:

10. Be 100 percent consistent in your behavior – easy to say, very hard to do

9. Always follow through on what you say you will do – again goes back to consistency

8. Respond, don’t react – this is so hard to do when the kids are constantly picking at each other. Sometimes I would just rather go and hide in my bedroom

7. Count to 10 and ask yourself, “What would my old self do in this situation? What should the new me do?”

6. Never threaten your kids

5. Never get angry – yeah right! PMS anyone?

4. Don’t give any warnings

3. Ask yourself, “Whose problem is this?” – the problem with this one is that there are some times when you need to intervene. Too bad there isn’t any trick to be absolutely sure when that time is.

2. Don’t think the misbehavior will go away

1. Keep a happy face on, even when you want to do…something else

                        (How to have a new kid by Friday, Dr. Leman, pages 84-87)

These are all wonderful things to do. How I wish that I could follow all of these consistently.

After all of these different strategies, what is the best parenting advice that I have ever received? The best parenting advice that I have ever received came from my mother-in-law. She said, “Throw the books out.” Wait a minute. There’s a lot of good things in these books. And these are experts, they must know what they are talking about.

It took me a long time to figure out that my mother-in-law is an expert as well. She raised three scrappy boys, and she has seen it all. No matter how “expert” the expert is, he/she does not know my family situation, and she/he does not know my children. The discipline that I use with my children has to apply to my children, it may not work for anybody else.

It has been said that kids don’t come with an instruction manual. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if they did? I am still a fairly new parent. I have not tread the teenage waters yet. But in the ten years that I have been a mama, I have learned that I am still learning. I do not go to school anymore, but I am a student of my children. It is my job to learn my children and respond to them as their mama in the way that fits them.

I still use some of the advice from my favorite parenting books. I still love Love and Logic, and I still love Dr. Leman. When I go through a particular problem with my children, I look all over for advice to help me with that problem.

But every piece of advice that I cling to needs to be filtered through my children. It needs to fit them. With my children, I absolutely do not want to be the type of parent that just lays down the law without taking their needs and concerns into consideration. I will allow some discussion and negotiation.

Sometimes I don’t get it right, but the wonderful thing is that the relationships that I have with my children are wonderful. They know that they can come to me when they have a problem. We are also learning how to resolve our conflicts in constructive ways. If I have a good relationship with my children while they are young, then that will carry over to their teenage years and gives us a good foundation when things do get a little bit more difficult. God gave me the children that I have. He will give me what I need to raise them to the best of my ability.

My favorite mama quote, and the one that I go to when I get discouraged is this one from the movie “Mom’s Night Out”.

“I’m not enough.”   (Do you ever feel that way as a mama?)

“Not enough for who? You. Not enough for you.

No matter who you are, no matter what you do, or how far you run, Jesus will always be loving you with his arms open wide, just for being you.

You all spend so much time beating yourselves up. Must be exhausting.

I doubt the good Lord made a mistake giving your kiddos the mama He did. So you just be you. He’ll take care of the rest.”

                            (Bones, Mom’s Night Out)

What is your best parenting tip that you have ever gotten?  Click the link below to share!

Submit Tip