Category: Friendship

Top Tips for Teaching Your Kids About Friendship

Top Tips for Teaching Your Kids About Friendship - Parenting Like HannahThe end of the school year can be tough. Friends who have seen each other almost every day for months may find themselves separated for the summer. Or they may find themselves in places where they make temporary summer friends. Kids seem to change a lot over those summer months.

Sometimes best friends will see each other again at school in the fall and realize they no longer have things in common. Add competition, hormones, peer pressure and all of the other wonderful parts of growing up and it’s no wonder friendship and popularity are important topics to young people.

As a parent, you can probably do a lot to help your child’s popularity – but should you? How much should you become involved in helping your kids choose their friends? Should you just leave your kids to their own devices and hope they choose friends who will help them grow more than they put them in danger?

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5 Tips for Raising a Quiet Child

5 Tips for Raising a Quiet Child - Parenting Like Hannah“Fine” That’s often the favorite word of the quiet child. If you have a quiet child, you may feel like it takes an enormous amount of effort to get him to speak a complete sentence, much less pour his heart out to you. Quiet kids can be male or female and any age, although parents seem the most frustrated trying to communicate with quiet teen boys.

You may be tempted to give up and not try after a few hundred failed attempts at conversation. Unfortunately, parenting is much more difficult when your child doesn’t open up and talk. Christian parenting is virtually impossible because a child who doesn’t tell you what’s on her heart and mind leaves you guessing by the behaviors you see. (Which can be a very inaccurate measure of the heart.)

Your quiet child is also very likely introverted and likes to go off and be alone for hours at a time. You can’t change how God created your child’s nature, but you can soften it a bit. (The strengths God gave your kids can become detrimental when taken to the extreme. God provides parents to mold those gifts to God’s original design and plan – often softening them from the extremes to which kids will often take their gifts.)

If you have a quiet child, doing these things should help if done consistently over a period of time.

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5 Tips for Raising a Talkative Child

5 Tips for Raising a Talkative Child - Parenting Like HannahSome of you are shocked to learn talkative kids exist. You may have a houseful of children who grunt more than they talk and think saying,”Nope” is exhausting. If you are raising a talkative child though, you may have days when you wish he were just a tad less vocal.

It’s probably no surprise to you (and certainly isn’t to my family) that I am a talkative person myself. I never meet a stranger, and can usually coax conversation out of even the most reluctant teen. It’s probably why I studied education in college and love to teach!

While your talker may wear you out at times, you need to understand this is a child who is displaying her gift from God. A talker can become an amazing Bible class teacher. She can get total strangers talking about their faith without breaking a sweat. He can preach a sermon without major nerves. Talking is a gift from God, He gave your talkative child to serve Him.

Unfortunately, talking, when undeveloped and unfocused, can drive people away from God instead of to Him. Self-centered talking can cause others to keep things quiet your child needs to know to serve more effectively. Talking when developed without the spiritual, godly aspects can create an arrogant, materialistic speaker – using his or her gift, but not necessarily in godly ways.

There are 5 things you need to do if you are raising a talker.

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Fun Ways to Get Glimpses of Your Children’s Hearts

Fun Ways to Get Glimpses of Your Children's Hearts - Parenting Like HannahTo be an effective Christian parent, you really need to understand your children’s hearts. You need to know their priorities, what they love and what gets them excited about life. Those insights can help better guide you as you dedicate your kids to God. Unfortunately, no matter how well you know your kids, you can ultimately only see the parts of their hearts they allow you to see.

If your child is quiet, very private or going through a tough time, those glimpses of his or her heart can be hard to find. There are some fun things you can do though, that will give you sneak peeks into the hearts of even the quietest child. Some of these you may already be doing with your kids, but didn’t realize the important information the results of those activities was giving you about their hearts.

Here are a few of my favorites and how to start interpreting them.

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9 Top Tips for Teaching Kids About Friendship

9 Top Tips for Teaching Kids About Friendship - Parenting Like HannahAre your children popular? Unpopular? How many friends do they have? Are their friends encouraging them to do things they shouldn’t? Friendship issues often start in the preschool years and continue until long after your kids have grown up and left home. Your children’s friends (or lack thereof) and the quality of their friendships can cause a lot of drama and stress for your entire family.

Often at least some of the drama could be avoided if we had actively taught our kids about friendship rather than just letting them figure it out from trial and error. Knowing how to choose friends and how to treat friends will drastically reduce the amount of friendship trauma your kids endure. It can’t all be erased, because people are involved – people who are constantly changing – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You can better prepare your kids though, by teaching them how to find great friends and how to be a great friend.

So what are some key tips for teaching your kids about friendship?

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