Parenting Chapters 10 and 11

Parenting with Love, Limits, and Lattitude

Chapter 10 of Successful Marriages and Families

Parenting in the Gospel Context: Practices do Make a Difference

Chapter 11 of Successful Marriages and Families

I was very touched by chapter 10 of Successful Marriages and Families. I learned that from a spiritual perspective children respond to their earthly environment has a lot to do with their spiritual identity and the spiritual gifts that they have been given from our Heavenly Father. 

I think it is so important to realize that each child that we will have will have different personalities, interests, gifts, talents, and more! 

As a parent, I hope to discover these gifts in my children and help them to develop them and discover more. I also hope to teach my children that they are sons/daughters of God. I hope to help them develop a testimony of these things. 

I am grateful for my parents for raising me to believe in myself and to know who I am and what I stand for. I hope to do the same for my children. 

I also enjoyed reading chapter 11 of Successful Marriages and Families. 

In this chapter, I learned that Heavenly Father expects us to do our part in our parenting roles. This includes nurturing as a mother, providing and protecting as a father, and doing all that we can to raise our children in Christ. 

Elder Robert D. Hales taught, "The key to strengthening our families is having the spirit of the Lord come into our homes." I believe that doing the things that invite the spirit into our homes will have a great impact on our children. For example, having a family devotional each morning which includes singing a hymn, reading from the scriptures and saying a prayer, blessed my life while I was in High School. I found myself singing the hymn that we had sang as a family earlier that day which caused me to make better choices. 

I learned to remember that we were each raised by the best parents you could imagine--a Heavenly Father and Mother. I want to apply this knowledge to my life by relying on my spiritual instincts a little more when it comes to parenting. I have been receiving so many different opinions and advice on how to parent with our baby on the way that I have begun to realize that the most important thing to do is to rely on God and your spouse to make decisions.