But with all that said, I know I have to water my grass - because I live in south Texas and if you don't it will die. Then I'll have a brown yard. Then I will get cracks in my yard and it will make my foundation crack. I know you are saying to yourself "I thought this was a parenting blog, why is he telling me about yard work?"
Well since you asked, I'll tell you. We water the grass because it has to have water to grow. We have to give our grass what it needs to be able to thrive. In the same way we have to give our kids what they need to thrive - physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually - because that is what we do. So what is it that they need to thrive?
Physically, they need you to show them affection - hug them, kiss them, put your arm around them, high five, fist bump, just make physical contact so they know you love them. Take every opportunity to show them physical affection. This is easy to do when they are little and cute but it is important even when they act like they don't like it when they are teenagers.
Emotionally, they need to know that you love them - they need to hear the words come out of our mouth. Our kids need to hear the greatest three words in the English language: "I love you." But they also need to hear words of encouragement and affirmation. We need to tell them when they do things good and right and not just bad and wrong.
Socially, our kids need us to help them learn how to fit in - in other words not be socially awkward. How do we do that? We have to help them not stick out like sore thumbs but we don't want them to be consumed by trying to be popular. To do this, we need to give them safe social environments to learn how to interact with peers. I think one of the greatest places to do that is sports teams and church student ministries.
Spiritually, we need to help our children see that God is the most important relationship they have - they need to see that God is our most important relationship. We must model what it means to put God first in our lives. It is a great idea to have some type of regular Bible reading together as a family as well as praying together as a family. I've found recently that the best time for us as a family has been supper time. I pull out my iPhone and use Youversion to read a portion of the Bible and then we talk about it for a couple of minutes.
Now that we know how to give them what they need to thrive, we need to keep one more thing in mind. Just like when I water my grass, we can over do it. Sometimes we see these four areas and we just pour into those areas and we can overwhelm our kids. We can end up watering the road or making a pond in the backyard.
Physically, we can crowd our kids and take away the specialness of the affectionate touch we give. Emotionally, if we say those three words all the time they can begin to lose meaning. Socially, we can put so much pressure on our kids to "fit in" that we can take away from who they are and cause them to focus on being popular and fitting in more than just being who God made them to be. Spiritually - there's no way to over do this, right? WRONG. If we push too hard in this area, we can make our kids feel like they can never measure up. We can also make them think they can just rely on the fact that we have a great faith so they are good to go. So give them what they need but don't overdo it.
One last thing - sometimes we just need to let our kids be kids and remember that if we are giving them what they need, they will still make mistakes and sometimes it is just part of being a kid.
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