1. Try to improve your own mental health. In dealing with your children, you teach more by what you are than by what you say. Ask yourself such questions: Since God accepts me, why can't I accept myself? Who am I to question God? Since I forgive others, why can't I forgive myself? Am I easy to be around? Perhaps there is something in me that is worthwhile.
2. If you are married, establish a healthy marriage. Unhealthy marriages develop unhealthy patterns of interaction in your home which affect your children. If your family 'health' us not the very best, get some help in making it so. It isn't a sign of weakness to see your own faults and to try to overcome them...rather, it's a sign of maturity and strength! Weak people try to avoid such reality.
3. Provide for your family's needs: physical, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual.
4. Spend much time with your family. You as a parent are often not only busy but tired and need rest yourself. Your children must be a priority, especially while they are young. Eat as many meals as possible (that means sitting down together at one place and talking, sharing, caring). No distractions should normally be allowed.
5. Teach them proper values. Children will pick up your values; if they see your emphasis for money and prestige, they will value those things, too. If they see you laying up treasures in heaven, they will usually value heaven (Matt. 6:19-21). God, Jesus Christ, church, family, responsibility, and Christian character: what could possibly rate above those things?!
6. Let your children be children.
7. Focus upon strengths rather than weaknesses. Be realistic, but recognize strengths. Morris Rosenberg in Society and the Adolescent Self-Image found that high self-esteem children tend to have mothers who are satisfied with average or below average performance. This may appear to go against the grain, but pushing our children to hard is more harmful. The key: don't create unrealistic expectations for them. We should help them overcome setbacks and compete in honest ways. We should provide encouragement and support in all efforts they choose...but keep God, Jesus, and the church first in all things!
8. Discipline your children with love. Set certain limits and enforce them but don't over-do it. Be HIGH in love and standards (the model used toward us by God).
9. Encourage achievement in school: motivate, help, maximize his/her potential, yet accept them for that they are and not for what you wish them to be.
10. Try to avoid over-protection and dependence.
11. Explain changes that will occur at puberty.
12. Forgive them.
13. Don't be partial to one child over another. Realize they are different!
14. Learn to show affection.
15. Help them to belong.
16. Help them to develop a strong faith in God, the source of our true value.
17. Adolescents need attention and they will find a way to get it. It IS easier to get negative attention than positive attention: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Teens often ask "why not" to get you as a parent to change your mind. They really are not wanting to know. They are just wanting you to acquience. You as a parent have a right to say "no" because you are "uncomfortable saying yes."
