Looking for ways to parent with more emotional health?
Here’s nine. (Start with, like, two.)
This morning as my 14-year-old scarfed down chicken-maple sausage links before school, I pulled Tim Keller’s devo (for adults) on Proverbs off the kitchen’s half-wall, where it sits by the fruit bowl. These pages have become to me a quietly cherished part of our routine.
There’s something about Proverbs’ concrete wisdom and word pictures for developing young brains that makes this book wonderfully tactile. (And bless the person who divided it neatly into 31 chapters, one per day of the month.)
This week has dabbled in the frenetic at my house. Uh. More than usual.
Rather than writing you a half-baked post, I’m pulling from the archives some chalkboard art of a printable prayer–an artistic version of this challenging Franciscan benediction:
This is one of those posts where I’m not an expert, just a mom. (Um, most of my posts?!)
But maybe these small ideas will help. And if I’m smart, I’ll keep this short, right?
I still recall with vividness my son’s drawing, proclaiming my anger issues to the world.
It was in red marker (his favorite color). Chunky hands rested on wonderfully slim, stick-figure hips. “I made you look mad, but you’re not mad in this picture,” he explained.
I admit to being comfortably removed from a lot of social media’s ANGRY CAPITALIZATION and #%$^& words for longer than is normal.
An overseas cocoon, removed from a lot of news, swaddled me. It was a happy place where celebs were just famous people. Where yet to come was the U.S. 2016 election–when it would feel like the whole country was getting a nasty divorce.
Stress is like wearing a flannel shirt when you’re washing dishes, you know?
One minute, you’ve got your hands in the water, scrubbing, the edge of your cuffs kissing the water. Next minute, the water’s bled up to your armpits. (For this reason, my husband’s told me that in Boy Scouts, they always said “Cotton is death”: If you’re wearing cotton when you’re active in the cold, it absorbs your perspiration, and can quickly bring you to hypothermia in bad weather.)
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