Day 9: More Peace (This time with our kids)

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A friend and I were talking yesterday about if it's harder to arrive at a place of peace with our kids or our spouse. It seems so often it ends up being one or the other- like if we put the energy into one peaceful relationship, finding the energy to make another one that way too seems so hard. What do you do to prioritize healthy, peaceful relationships with your loved ones?

Dr. Gary Chapman wrote the Five Love Languages and even a version of it for kids. I believe he'd say our daughter is too young to likely have one clear preference out of the five, but boy can we see that she loves being loved. We tend to love her in our own love languages since that's the most natural way for us to show and receive love, and for me and my husband, those are different: quality time and acts of service. We both are finding we need to do both to love her well though (not to mention that we need to love each other in a love language that speaks to him/me- that's been a journey of figuring out since we got married as at first we were just loving each other in our own love language, not the other's, and both felt pretty unloved).

We tend to find when we are spending a lot of time with her and seeing serving her as a way to love her we make a lot of peace around our house. So many parents say they didn't realize when they "signed up" for this job that parenting will be a constant act of sacrificial love: sacrificing time and energy that would have previously been spent on other things to help our child's needs be met. It is so worth it though! And some days, it really doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all. Other days though, we get exhausted. Things don't go the way we expect. We run into tantrums or power struggles or strong preferences in our child that we weren't expecting.

I think it's those days that finding peace and making peace matters the most. What does that look like for you? For me, the biggest key is not getting into power struggles with my daughter. As I shared yesterday, I have a lot of "umph" and am very passionate about the ways I like things done. I have to watch that in myself because it could quickly turn me into a control freak that tries to force her to follow all my preferences, instead of letting her develop independence and healthy decisionmaking and learn her own preferences. The best tools I've found to help us both get what we need/want without a power struggle are activeparenting.com and consciousdiscipline.com. I've taken both classes and when I put their practical tools into practice, we have peaceful, joyful, empowering days at our house. And we don't just keep peace by avoiding power struggles, we make peace by deciding to work together, and engage in collaborative problem solving. Jesus stood for peace, did not engage in power struggles, and did not overcome by force...but rather by servant leadership, teaching, and leading by example. I'm choosing today to do that at my house and focusing on peace.




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