Designed for Divine Destinations

Our first ‘family’ trip is what set the precedence for our whole house of rules.  So it’s very interesting to be writing an Article on Parenting Styles.

I still remember it like it had happened yesterday.

We had to travel quite a distance, about 7 hours one way and we had decided to break the trip up a little. We drove the whole way one day, & then we promised all the children that their good behavior would be ‘rewarded’ to a trip to the water park on the way home.

Kids being kids though, they tested our patience with being loud in the car, and both sets of siblings quarrelling.

My new spouse Christian had declared a ‘quiet zone’ & so for a few hours the trip was quiet and uneventful.

Now my youngest was only 5 yrs old and used to ‘getting his own way’.  He kept asking me ‘to do this for him’ and ‘mom, can you tie my shoes?’.  I still remember Christian saying, “Ok, CJ you are big enough to do those things for yourself and if you ask one more time for your mom to do something for you, we will NOT go to the water park!”

About 15 min’s later at McDonald’s “Mom, can you cut my pancakes???”

Oops!   That was it, Christian then said “Ok, no water park!”

Being 5 he didn’t quite understand what was going on, and I don’t think it hit home until we were DRIVING past the water park.  He started crying, and the older kids were telling him to “Be quiet or we’ll never get to do another thing in our lives!”

To be quite honest, even I thought he was going to at the last moment pull in to the water park.

It set a very good example for the rest of our kids growing up as they knew when Christian said something he meant it & follow through is very important.

It also made the kids work more together as a Team to get something they wanted! Because if one child acted up, they all received nothing.

Since then we have had two more children together & it always amuses me that the four older children will tell the younger two how important it is to ‘listen when mom and dad ask you to do something!’

This was definitely a lesson that I’m glad that we all learned early in our relationship together & what I learned as a parent is the importance of “when you say something as a parent, Follow Through is the most important thing!”

Sometimes as a parent we tend to give ‘ultimatums’ but then lack the integrity to back up what we say!

I can now say from experience that this was one of the best lessons we have given to our older children, and they also know that when they want “honest” feed-back from us now that they are young adults, we are
the parents that will provide that for them!

Jody Maley

Owner of www.DesignedforDivineDestinations.com
“Where its not just about the Destination, it’s the Journey to get There!”
www.twitter.com/jodymal

Tags: article on parenting styles

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Self Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.