From One Mom To AnotherMarch 2015
Everywhere I go, I hear of moms who have broken relationships with their daughters. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception. It seems that even good relationships seem to go south when our little girls hit the teenage years. For those of you who still have those precious moldable little girls, do all that you can to develop respect towards you and your husband. (Be sure to enlist him in this developing of respect towards yourself as well. Dad’s words carry much weight with their little girls.)
Also, I urge you to develop the ability to communicate between your daughter and yourself. Remember that one important part of this is to have enough respect for yourself that you don’t allow back-talk and you require polite words like please and thank you. It’s sometimes a hard thing for a mom to require those words. For some reason, we feel like we are being demanding or self-centered to expect people (even our children) to use those polite words. But, when we don’t expect that attitude of respect from our children, we are choosing not to train them in proper attitudes and behaviors towards authorities, and we are also training them not to respect us. What a disservice we do to ourselves and to our children. But, it is never too late to try to rectify a situation.
There is always hope in God that we can change our mistakes and rebuild a relationship. I’ve had so many questions these past few weeks from broken-hearted moms concerning rebuilding relationships that I would like to focus on that again in this newsletter and on how to build a correct relationship from the beginning.
I hope you find this helpful whichever your circumstance is. Remember that your child is precious to Jesus, and you are too! God uses us to train our children for Him, and He uses our parenting challenges to make us grow in Him as well.