I have found it very important knowing exactly what is going on in my child’s world – as much as possible! This makes spending time together very important. For a working mother, you find out you naturally have limited time to spend with your children, particularly during the week. Depending on the flexibility of your work arrangement and traffic pattern on your route, you may find out it’s actually past bedtime before you get home sometimes, or they are probably already yawning and too tired to interact with you meaningfully, before going off to sleep. You might have missed out on something really important! Now how do we manage this? I believe with God, all things are possible. We just have to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help us.
Many a times, I have heard statements like ‘mummy, I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know when you got back yester night, I must have fallen asleep’.
This tells me we must create the time to deliberately ask direct questions, ‘how did your day go today/yesterday? What happened in school? How are your friends? What about your teacher? Any message for me from School?’ Whatever questions that naturally comes to your mind to ask – probably not too many at once though, so the child doesn’t start feeling you are carrying out an investigation!
But interestingly, I have also found out some facts may just naturally emerge at playtime, story time, meal time, and any other time without you deliberately prompting for it. This tells me all facets of interaction are important to really put you in your child’s world.
But why would you want to be in your child’s world? We need to be able to guide our children and we cannot possibly do that well enough, if we are unaware of what they are going through. It is however important to note that the big enabler here is ‘trust’; your child must be able to trust you, your child must see you as a friend, then he is able to talk to you.
Prayer point: O Lord help me first to be my child’s friend, help me to discover every detail I need to know about my child. Holy Spirit, guide my child to do the right things and comport herself/himself appropriately at all times.
‘All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children’ Isaiah 54:13
If we form the habit of being in our childrens world. Asking them questions and all like you said.. then naturally, the child will not hold things back from you. When some subjects arise that they need to talk about, you will be the first person that will come to their minds and this helps a lot.
ReplyDeleteI believe most times, parents leave it till really late before they become a part of their child's world. The child will probably be like 18 yr old plus before the parents want to know the friend or friends she is spending time with (This time maybe out of the fear of her developing intimate relationships with the opposite sex) and since the child is not used to having talks with the mum, she holds back the most important information.
I pray God teaches us and gives us the grace to be best friends to our children.
I have learnt that the earlier you start being your child's best friend, the better for both of you. This child is more likely to continue confiding in mummy, even as he/she grows up. Otherwise, it gets to a stage where the child feels 'matured', particularly when confortably in teen age, and then shuts out the parents. And I tell you, this can be dangerous! May God help us in Jesus name. Amen.
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