This is a guest post from Jaicey Bledsoe. Jaicey is a film student (and my daughter!), with a passion to share stories through writing, acting, and film production. Jaicey will be going on
her first missions trip next month and to say I’m proud of her is the understatement of the year! Check out
Jaicey’s blog where you can catch up on her latest film and missions projects.
How much influence do you think you really have on your kids?
Have you ever wondered what long-term impact your parenting is having?
Ever been worried about the kinds of choices your kids will make when they are on their own?
I recently made the decision to turn off all the notifications on my cell phone. I just reached the point where I was overwhelmed. No matter what time of day, no matter what I was doing, and no matter where I was I just kept getting interrupted.
Notifications distracted me from everything—from work, from my family, and even from myself. I learned that removing them is a great way to bless your wife and kids.
Finding quality family time is a challenge for most families. You have work, your kids’ school, your social life, and extracurricular activities for your kids that all compete. It can be hit-and-miss for many families.
Being a parent is one of the most important jobs in the world. I think we can all agree on that. One thing that may differ, is what is the most important aspect of our parental “job description.” If I polled you right now, I’d probably get a different answer from almost everybody. So how can we be effective and successful as parents if we don’t know our most important role?
We’ve been homeschooling one or all of our kids for over eight years. Our boys first and only school experience was via homeschooling. That is until last Fall when we made a big shift and sent our boys to “regular” school.
It was at one of their school’s periodic Saturday School Seminars that an educator shared with us the right, or best, way to parent our boys, and what we were doing was not it.
“Daddy, who are we praying for today? And can we start praying together at the table again?” Those are the words our 7-year-old said the other day. We were five or six days into 21 Days of Prayer with our church, and we’d missed a couple days because our 11-year-old had surgery.
What he said was just a small window into the truth my pastor spoke to me the first time we went through 21 Days of Prayer with our kids. He said, “Your kids will never recover from this.” I’ve witnessed this firsthand. Prayer has changed our family and prayer with our kids has wrecked their lives…for good.
I have been reading some of the books from the Dave Ramsey team lately. In Dave Ramsey’s book, “EntreLeadership,” and Jon Acuff’s book, “Quitter,” the topic of employee stealing is discussed. As I read it and realized I have been one of those thieving employees, it was a nice gut punch. But even worse, an effective gut punch combo, was the realization I’ve been stealing from my wife and kids just as much, if not more.
New technology has created a new norm for today’s modern family. We have things at our fingertips that we’ve never had before. But we also have challenges that we’ve never had before. Is technology beneficial in bringing your family together? Or is it actually pushing your family apart?
Merry Christmas from our family to yours!
My daughter turns 17 today! Wow, it seems like yesterday I was carrying her in my arms.
The relationship between a dad and his daughter is truly a special one. Here are some of my favorite daddy-daughter posts… (more…)
