Loving Our Kids on Purpose

If anyone is interested, a lot of our thoughts on parenting have come from this book: Loving Our Kids on Purpose by Danny Silk. His main ministry is family life and relationships and he is big on creating environments of love and honor instead of control, fear, and anxiety. In the book, he focuses on the parent-child connection as the most important foundation of parenting, which helps us teach our kids how to manage their freedom. He says that because God is more concerned with teaching us to live free lives in a world of unlimited options rather than trying to keep us from sin, we should teach our kids the same thing.

It's a pretty untraditional approach to parenting, but a refreshing new paradigm that we like for a lot of reasons, mainly the fact that it emphasizes our relationship with Mr. Mister and helps us prepare him for a world filled with choices, which is reality.

We are FAR from having it all down and don't do everything exactly as he says in the book. But we're learning as we go.

Here's a funny clip of Danny Silk demonstrating how to teach a 2 year old to manage himself. It's a little hard to hear at first, but the premise is that he's acting out a mom giving a 2 year old the choice between being fun or staying in his room until he can be fun.

Here are a few more clips if you're interested:
Loving Our Kids on Purpose - a short background
Red Truck, Yellow Truck Relationship - it's not about control
The Priority of Connection