Getting to the Heart of Parenting

This past weekend Aaron and I attended a parenting conference at a local church. The speaker was Paul Tripp and he was really good. He is married and lives in Philadelphia and has four grown children.

I'll try to sum up the conference with a few main points. One of the main points was basically the title of the conference. Getting to the heart of your child rather than just being a law-giver or judge over them. However, he's not saying that we don't have authority over our children but that the authority is given from God. We are tools in God's plan to train up Godly children.  One thing he mentioned was that the job of parenting is bigger than getting your child to do what you want.

What set of values sets the schedule for your family? One thing that really struck me that he said was that we are more like our children than we think we are. We want our way just as much as our children want their way. However, we look at it as being more unacceptable for our child to be selfish, and impatient when we don't think our selfishness and impatience is as serious.

He talked about every behavior problem of a child is a heart problem. Its the sin in our hearts. He said that as parents we settle for quick situational solutions that do not get to the heart of the matter. When fights or situations arise between siblings or their friends he gave us 5 heart oriented questions to ask them.

1.) What was going on?
2.) What were you thinking and feeling as this was happening?
3.) What did you do in response?
4.) Why did you do it or what were you seeking to accomplish?
5.) What was the result?

He said instead of saying who had it first or counting to 10 try asking them these questions. It gets them to think about their behavior and expose their heart. Then through God's grace He can change their hearts.

There were many many more very good points to this conference but I won't put them all on here as that would take a while.

I'm thankful we went to this conference. We bought the cds of the conference so I'm sure we will pull those out as a resource many times.

Paul is the author of many books and one we bought at the conference is called Shelter in the Time of Storm. I haven't started reading it quite yet but it contains 52 devotionals on Psalm 27. I'll post more on the book as I read through it.