In this second part of the series, you will get lots of practical ideas and projects based on different age levels. Human beings thrive when they get to see the fruit of their contributions to a cause bigger than themselves. That’s no different for your kids and there’s so much you can do to instill teamwork from a young age.

Main Points In This Episode:

• Review of the costs of not leading a culture of family teamwork
• How family teamwork gives hope for the future to your kids
• What to do with your littles
• What to do with your middles
• What to do with your teenagers
• Final parenting tips

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Check out Angie’s Postpartum Course!

Proverbs 29:18 – “Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.”

Galatians 5:13-6:3 – “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another…”

Titus 2:1-8 – “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.”

Full Transcript:

Welcome to Courageous Parenting Podcast, a weekly show with parents with biblical truth on raising confident Christian kids in an uncertain world.

Hi, I’m Angie from Courageous Mom, and I’m Isaac from Resolute Man.

We’ve been married for 21 years and have seen the fruit from raising our eight kids biblically. Based on the raw truth found in the Bible

We can no longer let the culture win the hearts of children. Too many children from Christian families are walking away from their faith by age 18. And it doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. Join us as we start an important conversation about effective parenting in a fallen world. Welcome back, everybody, to the podcast. Hey, guys, so glad you’re here. If your first time listener, we so thank you for being part of the movement. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably listened to a lot of the episodes. I know. And the Facebook group for the Parent Mentor Program, new program just launched. And we asked, hey, how many episodes of you listen to? And it was all across the board, some of them from the beginning. I think we have one hundred and twenty two now. There’s a lot of stuff.

So it’s you know what, we actually haven’t even taken a break. We’ve just gone straight since starting. Yeah, well,

I mean, our goal is to never miss a week. It’s kind of like that thing that you can count on. I think that that’s important consistency you can count on on Tuesdays and comes out and hopefully it nourishes your week a bit with biblical truth and practical advice that’s relevant to today’s issues in parenting and actually marriage. It’s amazing. It is a parenting thing, but so much of it has to do with marriage.

Well, yeah. And as far as parenting goes, are one of our foundational beliefs. Is that your parenting as a team. So obviously that’s going to require communication and teamwork in marriage.

Now, hats off to all those single moms out there, because I know there’s a good single dad, handful of guys that listen and even in our parenting program and love it. So we really respect and appreciate you. You’re kind of holding two hats and you are the team. And I know that can be hard. OK, so, Angie, before we get in, this is part two to pursue projects that require family teamwork. There’s a recent revelation in our family about what is super quick, because that’s on the podcast.

I’m actually sitting here right now at the baby kicking like crazy. But yes, I as you guys might recall, we thought our due date was in the middle of June, June 19th. And that was obviously based upon fertility signs. And you guys, if you’ve been following any amount of time, you know that I experienced pregnancy loss. We lost Mercy in February of twenty twenty. And without getting into too many details, my cycle was irregular. And so it was very difficult. Like there’s just a there’s a postpartum period, just like after you have a baby. A lot of people don’t even realize this when you have a miscarriage, where it’s it’s just irregular. And so we got pregnant and we thought it was September but it was actually august.

So we were so we were off. But just speed up to the

And so we had an ultrasound this last week based upon just some symptoms that I had been feeling. I felt like I was experiencing things that I normally experience later on in pregnancy than I was. So we had an ultrasound and sure enough, so my due dates actually May twenty first, not June 19th. Yeah.

So we’re talking about team work here. It takes teamwork to prepare and have a baby and all these things, of course. And she’s doing, you know, most of the work but you know, having the baby.

But we had a lot of projects around the house that we’ve been doing, which is interesting because that is our topic is doing family projects together. And so we’ve been reevaluating, adjusting some things recently as far as like our trip and the

Rv trip went from three weeks down to eleven days. And some people are like, you’re still going because, what, five weeks away from your due date? Yeah, we’re going to head twelve hours. I’m not going to tell you which direction yet, but while we’re on our RV trip, you will we’ll probably do a podcast episode.

Yes. You guys are going to see me very much with child. But you know what? If you have more interest in that, I have shared more on my Instagram page. Just go to a courageous.mom I have I did a Instagram live that’s in my feed where I’m sharing more about the details of how the life, you know, in the ultrasound tech world got to this healthy baby.

Over five pounds already has hair, definitely, you know, getting closer and a lot of very telltale signs. You know, it’s good news, actually. You’ve already done a month more of labor than you realize. It’s embarrassing pregnancy, I guess you call it, and it’s a blessing. Also, baby’s healthy. Technically, you can have the baby any time and, you know, good survive and do well. Yeah. So that’s that’s good.

Lord willing, we’re making it, you know, at least to the do date which is my trend.

But let’s stick to the topic. Right, because you’re like, OK, enough of that. Some of you, some of your like please more please more. All right. By the way, another praise report. We just shared this in church and I thought it was super relevant. Share with you is that we stopped. You probably know that’s when when the Trump lost the presidency and really didn’t have to do with Trump, actually had to do with a lack of will. The censorship is happening by social media and so forth. We. Canceled all of her ads with Facebook and Instagram that have been running for over a year. We had an ad campaign. It was only part of why people join the parenting program, but it is part of why the founder of a podcast apparently meant a program to bring new people in. It worked. It was very effective. And we just stopped it without a plan. And and the only plan since has been trust in God and building something with all of you. And we’re so thankful now. We are so thankful because each parenting program, we have a certain number of people we allow in. We’re thinking about upping that a notch as the Lord provides. But you guys filled our recent class by sharing. I just want to thank all of you because that literally is the main way we provide for our family and are able to continue doing this. If money didn’t come in, the products weren’t sold, donations didn’t come in, we wouldn’t be doing this, not because we didn’t don’t want to. It’s because we have our ninth baby coming and

You wouldn’t expect to find other work to do. We wouldn’t have time to be getting into this as much as we do.

So we’re just so thankful. And that’s the Lord’s doing through you. And every time you share the podcast, give a review. Every time you share the parent mentor program, if you’ve been through it and you share it with friends and churches and so forth. We had another couple of church groups join us in this last program and that’s going really well to some individuals groups can sign up for. And there’s a discount. You can see all that, plus all the free resources, at CourageousParenting.com.

Now, I just want to share, like briefly how big of a testimony this is, because we had just been so preoccupied with trying to get rid of Hornets so that we could be in the studio, for example, remodeling certain things so that we could actually be able to do this easier and get our bedroom ready for having another baby. Yeah, and we had a deadline, which obviously now that deadline has inched up. And I’m super, super thankful that you and the team, the family team, was able to do as much work as you were because, man, if we were still working on this whole, that would be a bit stressful. But that being said, a lot of energy was going towards getting this ready so that we could have a place to do ministry. Right. And so honestly. And so you could I like that. Yeah. And I but I wasn’t sharing as much on social media. You are able to be doing the posts that we normally are doing to so that people can hear about the parenting mentor program. So about three days before we launched the new program, there were only 12 people signed up and we usually limit it to 40. And so within three days we talk to our kids about it. And they were praying. And it was so awesome to see God answer our kids prayers and our prayers. And it was you guys that did that. And so I just wanted you to see that part of it, that you’re also building our kids faith, because when they see God answer prayers like that, it is milestones for them in their faith, like how can someone grow up and later in life deny a God when they’ve seen such massive answers, prayer. And there are many that our kids have experienced in their life. And that’s just one.

So twenty eight sign ups in the last three days. Yeah, no advertising, just people sharing. I do want to say perhaps dancing had something to do with the too. There was some kind of reel we’re learning about Resl’s. We did our first reel and Instagram if you saw it, and talk about teamwork. This has to do with this episode. That was one hundred percent. Megan Tolpin. One hundred percent she’s thought thought of it, picked out the song, and what to do.

I love you.

I don’t know how much of a miracle it is. I wasn’t very good at it. So you were awesome. Yeah. Anyways you can see our reel about that.

I’ve had friends literally message me and go. I think I watched it maybe nine times because I had go back and go, wait, what Isaac

Are you sick. I haven’t really been looking at numbers. I think over forty thousand people watched the real

Because it’s on three different platforms. Yeah.

You know, that was kind of embarrassing unless I knew who I was in Christ.

Yeah, you’re very gifted at teaching. Somebody said I’m glad I’m teaching parenting and not dancing.

And it would be, oh, OK. OK, so the cost of no family teamwork. Let’s get into it. Thanks for letting us do a little bit of an intro. The cost of no family teamwork. And then we’re going to go into talking about the middle, the teenage years and a little bit more about the Youngs. And and then we’re going to have some final tips for you as well, OK, regarding teamwork and how to cultivate that. So it’s super important. We’ll break it down by age groups.

And before we jump in, if you didn’t listen to last week’s podcast in your ear hearing. They say that we’re going to be, you know, finishing up the Littles, going into medals and teenagers, we did in the first podcast, we went over into detail of examples of how you can get your kids that are under five involved. So what I

Always say, you can do them out of order. If you’re already listening, just continue and then go back to the other one. I always make sure that I work out of order to do so. All right. So the cost of no family team work? Well, first of all, there can be division in your family. You may not see it four years into the future, but if you don’t cultivate a sense of teamwork proactively, which takes patience and long suffering and not getting as much done in the training periods of time, but if you don’t do it, then you’re going to see division in your family later. Why? Because everybody’s going to go in other directions and really desire to be going in other directions versus being a team. And it’s OK as they get older that they have the directions or kids certainly do. But they also love doing things as a family, too, and being part of the team. Yeah, and I think that’s really, really important, especially today, so that your influence in their siblings influence matters. It’s not just your influence, it’s their siblings influence that matters to you. Don’t want that division to cultivate another cost of not proactively cultivating teamwork. Is it, frankly, just a limit on what you can get done as a family?

That’s true. I mean, honestly, if you were let’s just use the remodel of the studio, for example. Imagine if you did it by yourself without Drew and Megan and Luke and Bruce I would still be working.

Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t be done. We won’t be going on an RV trip if it was a matter of getting this done before the baby.

the House wouldn’t be done because we were doing that afterwards.

Everything that we’ve done, we’ve done as a team. Yeah. Different teams sometimes because some kids have to pull back to do more school and other kids are learning a new skill because they’re interested. But yeah,

Yeah, it’s super important. You see on my Instagram I have a highlight of the studio so all you can see, all the teamwork happening there. And then a highlight of the house remodel, which I’ve lost because I don’t know, I was just more into sharing about it on the studio for some reason. Right. OK, so limited. What gets done or how about this limit on family size? Why would that be?

Well, honestly, like, if you’re not teaching your kids to contribute, then you’re doing all the work and you might feel exhausted with just having a few kids because you’re doing everything for everybody.

Right? I don’t know if we can handle more honey

Now because I’m already maxed out. But the reality is, is when you have a team, a cultivated team atmosphere or attitude within your family and you’re raising your oldest kids to be contributing and to be living on purpose and and living a disciplined life. Right. Like I’m teaching the younger boys to put their laundry away. They’re five and two. And still, because it’s something that you keep teaching them for a long time, you start when they’re able to get stuff out, they can put stuff away, but it’s years of teaching them. But when you do, then you have. Kids like our I just think about our older boys room, they hardly ever have clothes on the floor and so very rarely and it’s usually when they’re doing laundry that I see it. So there’s a purpose for it. But the point is, is if imagine if I was doing everybody’s laundry. There are 10 of us, almost 11 of us. If I was doing everybody’s laundry, all I’d be doing is laundry. I’d have no time to homeschool. I’d have no time to do this podcast. I’d have no time to cook if I was doing all the cooking by myself. It’s the same exact thing, all the prep work and cooking for 10 people three times a day. That’s a big deal.

Now, in the early days when all the kids were little, you were doing all of that, but you were

Getting the kids help. And it was part of their education because they were so young and it was fun. Like that’s how Kelsey learned how to bake. And now she loves baking and that’s how she blesses our family. Right. And I think about like the kids doing laundry and how much fun it was for them. We talked about that in the previous podcast, how they learned their colors by sorting laundry colors. But all the boys do their own clothes like that. To me, it’s not a matter of like these are female things that only women learn and these are male things. The only Men learn, that’s not how we’ve ever raised our family especially. And I think part of that is the insight of how sick I get when I’m pregnant and how there were things that you were unprepared and as far as like doing laundry and cooking and it became difficult. And so I remember like looking at this and going, I had to make sure that my sons are raised in at least knowing how to do these things so that they can take care of their wives. If something like what’s happening to me happens to their wives, I just think it’s a matter of being prepared as much as is possible and being responsible. And who’s to know if your kids are going to get married, you know, for until they’re like 30 or even 40. Right. Like it’s all about God’s path for them. So you want them to be good stewards of their things.

So a lack of equipping is another cost. And we talked a lot last time about that. So and then the next one is depression, really. And we did talk about this last time. But I just want to make sure it’s drilled home. Human beings get depressed when they don’t contribute and they need to contribute outside of the areas of like education and things like that. They need to feel like I have a unique contribution to my family because I’m here. These things happen and they need me. And I just think that’s super, super important. You can love your kids up and down, but if they don’t have a responsibility that they can rise up to you. If they don’t have to break their comfort zone to learn new things and contribute something to be proud of being proud of. And they don’t feel is connected to the family in a more practical way. They might feel it in a loving way, but they need to feel that practical side of things, too. Proverbs twenty nine eighteen says Where there is no vision, the people perish. But he the keepeth the law happy is he there is that they need to have a hope and a future. The Bible says they need to see that.

And the thing that is so important about what we’re talking about with depression, there are so many different forms of depression. I just want to say we’re not getting into like all of them. Obviously, we’re just bringing up one aspect, one reason why people struggle with depression. And I think that a lot of people are really struggling with it more now than ever in the last year, kids especially, they’re doing a lot of places they have to do school on Zoome. Maybe sports are canceled. They’ve gone through seasons like that. Now they’re getting better. Some in some places are able to go back, but they still have the social distance stay six feet away. They have to wear masks. They’re isolated. There’s still this level of isolation. And so if if you are living in those circumstances and it’s impossible for you to change the circumstances for how your kids are living their daily life at the most or at the least, you have to help them to have purpose and confidence and feel like they’re contributing and have a purpose within your family and within your home. And a huge part of that is what we’re talking about. Like we’ve even noticed with our kids at first, we just thought it was like a tulpan thing, like, oh, well, maybe we’re just, like, so intense about living on purpose, like all of us. Like, it’s a thing that’s in each of the Tolpins, like even from the time that they’re little that like when they’re feel like they’re not the kind of get depressed, like they start acting kind of

We notice in our family maybe they’ve become addicted to it in a way, in a positive way. But if they’re not contributing. Yeah, if they’re not productive in a meaningful way for a week,

they start feeling sad and grumpy and, you know, around and then bad

Habits in the same way, though.

But we are both the same way like and so I’m productive. We you guys, this is one key into our parenting. Hopefully this is an exhortation for you if you aren’t this way. But I think most of us should be this way. Look at yourself and evaluate how you handle all the things we’re just talking about. How we feel when we’re not being productive and how that affects us, and then we apply it to our kids and we go, oh, they’re probably wired very similarly in that way. And then when you read verses like Proverbs 29, 18, which I just share, you go, oh, it’s all people. The people will perish. Right. And so that word vision, which is Hasan Hasan in Greek, I went through the blue letter Bible to find out what it was.

You said that so.

Well, I don’t know if I did or not. I listen to it like 10 times. But you guys, I love looking into these the terminology of them because some people might go where there is no vision and then they think of one type of vision. Right. And so I really wanted to see what the Bible was talking about in this. And so the first thing that is under the definition when you’re looking it up and blue letter Bible, it says in an ecstatic state. So I think of excitement, right. Like when you have vision, isn’t it exciting if you have goals and a vision for doing something you kind of like, you’re excited about it. Some people might be more charismatic than others, but this is about being in an excited state because you have vision. Well, are people says but that keep it the law happy. Is he there’s an element there that they go together. The second definition was having vision and night said in night in parentheses. And I just started thinking about darkness. Right night is dark and having clarity in darkness. And that’s something that we get to give to our kids. Right. Like kids don’t have necessarily have the ability to have vision or to be able to see their purpose. They need parents to lead them to bring clarity, to give them something to look forward to, to kind of not to to gently lead them in the direction and give them some vision. Right. And then let them have excitement about it. The third thing was vision. Oracle prophecy or divine communication is what it said. And then when you look at a strong concordance under that, it also was talking about a dream. Right. So having insight from a dream, an Oracle prophecy. And so reading scripture is so important. That’s why the second part of that verses. But he that keeps the law. You can’t keep up the law if you don’t know the law. Right. So you need to know the word, which is where God gives us a vision for what is going on today and how it applies to our life right now.

Yeah. So I think in the last we’re going to dive into the breaking up of age group and practical things. You guys have all kids, different ages. I know some of you are pregnant with your first or your wife is, and that’s exciting. We have people in the parenting program where they haven’t had a kid out of the womb yet, right? Yes. They’re loving it. So but, you know, let’s talk a little. Yeah, yeah, totally. Let’s talk about littles then. When we say littles, middle and teen age, you want to give some age ranges on that age?

Yeah. I mean, so obviously, you guys, if you’ve listened to us long enough, you know that we don’t like age specify certain jobs or chores because it’s actually more about a maturity. Some things are about spiritual maturity, like certain chores. What can they handle? Like babysitting, for example, would be something that I would put in the pre teen teenager category later. But obviously some teenagers don’t have the spiritual maturity or like that, even the street smarts that you would. They’re not equipped and prepared that you would trust them with that. Yeah, but other kids, it’s like they’re twelve years old and they’re like it’s intuitive to them. Right. And so as we’re giving these ages, I say that because you know your kid best and you really need to discern which, you know what of these jobs and some of these jobs that land in the middle, you might actually be able to bump up to the littles or or to the teen years, depending on how you’ve raised your kids. I really do believe it’s depending on how you raise your kids. If you’ve already been equipping them, if you’re listening to this and you’re you’ve been the mom while your kids were little, where you did all the dishes, you did all the cooking, you never let them help, obviously.

Then if you say to your twelve year old, make dinner, they’re going to be like, what are you talking about? I don’t even know how to open a can. Do you know what I mean? So obviously there’s an element of how you’ve raised them will determine what different chores are, jobs, whatever you want to call them. You can actually assign to your children’s, not just their age, but then there’s also that innate like who they are actually. Right. So there’s the nature and the nurture, actually. That’s how this plays out in this topic. So for Littles, I would say two years old to five. But but if you have, I will say that and this is not a sexist remark. If your third kid is a boy, it might be more like two to seven. Years old, if your first kid was a boy and you were teaching him a lot of things, he might be five and be more on the middle side for daughters, girls just kind of especially with, like domestic things, they kind of catch on a little and they can handle many more instructions. They can kind of remember more instructions than boys can’t just because of where the growth spurts are in boys and girls ages brain.

It’s just brain development is all it is. Right. And so and I would say on the physical side of things, there are things that you probably could ask a seven year old boy to do, but a seven year old girl might not be able to lift it. Right. So anyway, just saying that Middle’s would probably be where that little cuts off. So five to seven year old range and goes up to like, I’m going to give you a big range here, ten and a half to 12, because we’ve had some 10 year olds that could do stuff. But some of our 12 year olds. Yeah. You were just starting to do. And then teenage years, I’m going to throw the preteens, the tweens, the 12 year olds right there, too, because a lot of them are capable, but a lot of parents don’t realize that they are. So I want to challenge you to think out of the box with that age category. That is really a hard, hard age 11 to 13. A lot of those kids feel like they don’t have purpose. They can kind of verbalize that like they’re bored.

They have desire to do way more than their parents see them doing, and they have a desire to do more than they’re actually capable sometimes too. Right.

But at the same time, that’s like on the bigger jobs, right? Like we’ve been doing remodeling in our 12 year old son is like making essential oil shells. I mean, he’s like using a chop saw using a drill nail gun, and he’s building it in these 100 percent by himself. But he didn’t start out that way. He had dad right beside him teaching him safety rules, all the precautions and those kinds of things. Right. And just knowing that kid, we might not have done that with one of our others.

Absolutely. I want to take a moment and give you something for free if you haven’t got it already is the date night one. It is a beautiful document you can download that will has some key questions on it for your date night. Just get in alignment about what’s most important for your family. No matter what time of year, it’s always important to recalibrate. You can get that by going to CourageousParenting.com and subscribing to our mailing list. Also, you can get all of our show notes and everything, a CourageousParenting.com. And I also just want to share real quick about the Parenting Mentor program. So many families are being transformed by going through this. It’s the six week self-paced program with live engagement for us and even direct interaction. So if you want to join us, here’s a little bit more about it and you can find out more at CourageousParenting.com.

And I realized that we were getting too comfortable with the world’s vision of how to raise our children. What Angie and Isaac have done and creating this is literally phenomenal.

This program provided awesome scripture based teachings and just a really great practical applications.

This class has just really rocked my world. It has given me a vision for not just the different things that we might focus on as parents who are trying to raise our kids biblically, like how our kids are behaving or what we’re doing with discipline, but also the things, the heart.

We now have a game plan to how we want to raise our children. We have so many answers to the questions that have been in our mind. It’s not just these hypothetical situations or it’s not just this. Here’s what I think you should do. It’s let me show you where in scripture this is. Do your legacy a favor and yourself a favor and just do it. One of the best things that we’ve done this year, one of the best investments we’ve made this year, and I could not recommend it more. We’re no longer fearing

Dark days ahead, but we’re so excited to raise the lights to be leaders

For the next generation. So let’s dive into we talked a little bit about the littles, but not much, I think. Let’s go into the Littles. I think where we left off as you were talking about cooking. Oh, let’s move on from cooking to some other things. What are other things Littles could participate in that where they’ll feel a contribution to a family and actually be helpful.

Right. Well, one of the one of the best things aside from cooking, you’re right. I didn’t really talk a lot about that. I do talk more about that in the mom Bible study that we have. And and we do talk about this actually more in depth in parenting mentor program. Yeah. With a lot of examples on that. But gardening, I would say gardening would be the second biggest thing that for me, I mean, I did have a break when we lived in central Oregon where I wasn’t doing as much because we were renting. So how do you you start with doing starts. This can be part of an apology, actually has a botany curriculum that you can use with younger kids. There are other companies that make growing plant type curriculums. I would say, regardless of if you homeschool or not, it would be a fun thing to do during. The summer months at spring and summer, if you’re going to start with starts with seeds and teach your kids about how seeds grow, it can be both helpful to have them helping you plant seeds, weeding, getting the soil ready to plant the seeds.

But you can also have like a whole educational system centered around this first. And you can start that in like February and March, where you’re planting some things in the house and you’re watching them grow. They’re watching the seeds germinate or the avocado plant. You talked about how you had an avocado plant in the last one and how you love that because it was something you did when you were a kid. And I, I remember when we had our greenhouse in Damascus how Drew, he’s now almost 15, but he was like four years old. And every morning for a long time, he would wake me up with his little pot of peas. He was going snap peas. And every day like it grew again, Mom. So I’d wake up to this little boy holding his pot for like weeks on end. And he just he was always the one that wanted help with the mister and watering. And he was so gentle with them, which was good training for when we were having another baby.

So gardening and what are some other things. So we’ve cooking. Gardening.

Well, and with the gardening, I would say weeding is huge because I have to share this. I’ve written a lot on on Courageous Mom. There’s like three or four blog posts that talk about teaching your kids about sin while you’re weeding. And so not only is it an opportunity to teach them diligence and work ethic and get the job done, but you can actually have some really deep spiritual conversations where you’re teaching your kids about how sin works and you go, hey, we got to go. We got to weed while the weeds are small or they’re going to get bigger and they’re going to be harder to pull out. And if they become thistles, then they cut our hands and they make us bleed. And it’s just like sin. Sin is harder to get out of our life the longer we let it be in our life.

There’s a reason the Bible talks about weeds, right? Another thing is financial. You know, we don’t believe in giving our kids allowance. That’s another podcast. I think we probably did. Yeah, we did. But we do believe in commission jobs. And so we is a perfect first commission job. We’re early on where they get a certain amount per week. I think we’ve done a penny a week. So what are they also doing now? They’re motivated to count how many weeds they got and tell you so you can

Count them up and then they go in the burn pile. And it’s there’s so many aspects to this that we could go into regarding gardening and ways that you can make it more than just this drudgery chore of being on the ground and pulling weeds. It actually can be a really fun thing. We used to sing worship songs while we were doing out or we would just talk when we were in the vineyard and we’re pulling weeds or even in your flowerbeds around the house. Right. So there’s a huge opportunity is the point, to have lifelong lessons taught, sowing and reaping as a parable in the Bible. That is a good one to even teach on and then go and do with your kids and then they get to experience the fruit when you’ve planted vegetables or fruit and they had to work for it. The kids really, they love it. They’re like my rhubarb plant. Look at my strawberries, daddy, do it. One of my

And another thing is jurisdiction’s teach that word jurisdiction. Look up that word again yourself. It is what God has given you. So what jurisdiction’s has God given a little guy or a little girl. Well, they’ve given him a room often to share, hopefully to share. We think sharing a room is the best, no matter how many rooms you have announced. But but that’s their jurisdiction. And teach them good God is right now is giving you this jurisdiction. And God asked us to take care of the things in our jurisdiction. So how are you doing with that and how do you want to be doing? Well, here’s what we should be doing and and teaching them about that and that. So it’s not just a conversation about all your room’s messy. Go clean it. There’s a bigger purpose here.

Like this is your spouse to

How you take care of the jurisdiction’s God gives you. Will determine if you can trust you with more. Yeah, right. And you can use that verse

And then you can even I mean, we’ve talked about how important it is to understand that the family is the image bearer of the body of Christ and be an active part of that. That was in our previous podcast, right where we went through Corinthians and we went through spiritual gifts and a little part of it where it’s like, OK, guys. So listen, this is actually training ground for your kids to learn what it means to be a part of a team so that when they’re older, they’re part of they’re not just spectators and in a church, they’re actually a part of the body of Christ. It’s actively moving. But that’s why it’s important to understand jurisdiction’s, which is what you’re talking about, because they’re going to be many times where even when jobs are given certain jurisdictions and they need to understand that that’s their God given responsibility with. In that job, right, and they have a master and employee that’s over them, the Bible is just so relevant to them.

Don’t let up on that one. This church jurisdiction’s thing, because they will move up and whatever job they get so fast, because it’s so hard to find anybody that completely, proactively takes care of the jurisdictions. So when they get a job and they’re like, OK, here’s all that. This is my jurisdiction and I have been trained to give my absolute best. Doesn’t matter how I feel about my boss, doesn’t matter how I feel, what other people are doing, my standard is take care of it. You can have every other employee in that position not fully taking care of other jurisdictions. And your kid is. And then what happens to them? They move up, they become leaders. They create change

Versus I mean, we’ve been employers many times to where it’s like you can tell the difference among people that take ownership over their jurisdiction. And if they don’t get done, they just own it. They’re like, yeah, I’m going to get to that or I’m really sorry I was doing this and this and I will do that or I didn’t. I dropped the ball. They take ownership over it. There are those kinds of people. And then there’s the kind of people that blame shift or try to push their jurisdiction on other people, which our kids have experienced that while they’ve had jobs before.

So that has to do with teamwork because a lot of times of sharing a room. So they’re having to learn how to do it together, to communicate to each other when one isn’t doing as well at it. We always like them communicating with each other before they come to us. So if they haven’t done that, we send them back to communicating with the other kid.

That’s definitely something that’s more like the middles age for sure, because you still need to supervise in the Littles conversations, obviously, because they sometimes don’t communicate in a way that can be heard by the other person. And so as they get older, you want them to start becoming more independent and doing the Matthew 18 approach so that in learning the understanding that any other way is actually gossip. But if the other person is not receiving it, then mom and dad need to mediate.

Absolutely. What other things? Family teamwork. Can the young ones help with it?

Well, I think that there this is really important to hear our younger kids in our family, because they have older siblings generally want to, like, be big. Have you experienced that before where they just want to be big, like the bigger siblings, even if they can’t do the things? And it’s something that I saw even with Solomon. So Solomon is five and a half. They were redoing the studio, obviously Solomon and can’t do the chops, he can’t do the table saw and he wanted to be a part of what Dad, and Drew and Austin and Bruce, you know, different what they were doing because he wanted to be big, he wanted to help. And so Dad found ways to help him help that we’re going to be safe. And so even though it might have taken longer for dad, he allowed a little that was you know, Eli was, two, and he wasn’t as interested in it. But you could really see Solomon wanted to help. And so you let him come. And then we gave him credit where credit was due and you were like, mom. Solomon helped put this wall a sheet rock up, you know, and. Oh, yeah. And he was like, I drew this because Megan was drawing Bible verses on the wall. And so he thought he was drawing Bible verse.

You help me draw some lines and there are some sheetrock. He after I cut it, he hit it to break it.

Oh, yeah, that’s right. And so there you know, obviously the details are going to be a little bit different for you regarding what you’re having your kids do. But my point is, is the littles don’t need to stay one hundred percent in the Littles category. You need to allow them to come over to the middles category and even the teens category being supervised. Mind you sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. So we try and involve them in a safe way as much as we can in as many things as we can, because it is fruitful for them, but it’s fruitful for us too. It’s a wonderful thing to have helpers.

And I think that there’s, there’s an element of I’ve seen you do this with the little guys, like when Austin was three he had a little suit and he used to go to work with Dad to help Dad. And like if you had a conference he would greet people and that was how he would help.

More like five, six. Yeah, I know that one.

Yeah, but he but yeah. So there are things that like Littles can do if you will, that it’s just for a short period of time. And then I come and I pick him up and

Come home and really what he was he was greeting people. Yeah. But what he was in my mind, what he was actually learning is how to socialize with older people. He knows how to shake a hand firmly. Look people in the eyes, how to, you know, learning about what dad does and the dynamics of that being around for social situations. It was great, you know, and he was helpful. He would carry things for me. He would you know, you would do things. Yeah.

And so. I just bring that up because you don’t have to have a farm, you don’t have to have big you know, most people are like, well, I don’t have a renovation project going on. And those are a lot of the examples that we’ve been talking about, just because that’s what we’re doing in our life right now. So I look back on, you know, the older kids who are now 18 and 20 and the things that they were doing when they were five and when they were six. And I just wanted to just challenge you to think like, what can I have my little guy do? I even think of when we had the publishing digital publishing company and how our whole family would go and clean the office every now and again. And so even the littles would go and collect the trash can bags from all the little trash cans, or they’d walk around the dumpster or one would have a vacuum. And so there are just different things that you can do depending on what your jurisdictions are. Just think, what are your jurisdictions within what God has you doing in your life and how can your kids even do something small to help? Because it actually is a big thing for them.

That’s huge. Well, let’s go into obviously we didn’t see all the examples in your examples to be different. I think you get the point, though, is that be patient, take longer to train them on something and you watch them blossom and get excited about that, OK? And that’s creating a vision for their life. Middles!

So like, you know, depending on the age of your kid, I would say this is like seven years old, maybe a little bit younger, maybe a little older, depending on if it’s your first born and you’re able to have undivided attention to really train them on things. But for being a mom at home, maybe you want to go over like the dad things that you’ve done with the kids. And I’ll go over some of the things that I did. I mean, obviously, I was able to trust them more with the gardening. I mean, we had a small hobby farm, so chickens, we had 12 to twenty one chickens for about a decade. We have chickens again now, but we had Kelsey completely in charge of that. She had help the first year when she was five six, but by the time she was seven, she was completely in charge of that. Every once while there would be like, Oh Mom, there’s something wrong with this chicken and I’d step in. But generally speaking, she would lead the crew on cleaning the coop and her brothers and sisters sister would help her, even though they were very tiny. And I would help obviously, too. But she was feeding them, watering them, giving them, you know, mealworm and corn and taking care of them. And they obeyed her. She would call them and they would come back in after free ranging. Right. There were other aspects of gardening where I just knew I could trust her right.

To to move the little starter plants that we had taken six weeks to grow. That made it a little more fragile. But we needed a transplant that she got to do the more fragile part of the transplanting, whereas the younger kids would just watered them. Right. Cooking was a huge thing. She has always been in the kitchen with me. Most of the kids are know they’re like five. Most of the kids have all been in the kitchen with me a lot. Whether they’re in an infant carrier or on a Bumbo or in a highchair, they start out really young. Mom, the kitchen, because I’m in the kitchen a lot and giving her response to the kids move from cutting olives with a plastic, non serrated knife that save to then cutting oranges with a serrated knife. They are peeling carrots, they’re peeling potatoes. They’re all of those are some time consuming things, especially if you’re cooking like mashed potatoes. Right. You have to do a whole bag of recipes. Like I remember her sitting there for 40 minutes and thinking that’s like it would take me twenty minutes, but if I start her early enough, that’s twenty minutes I’ve saved, actually. And so when you change your thinking to Yeah. OK, it is going to take them longer. But if I start them sooner than it’s time I’m not doing it. Yeah. It is actually very helpful.

They also get on dish crew. So we have crews doing dishes now. We have two people from morning to for lunch, two for dinner, different teams and

They rotate,

We rotate it and then put people with different people. And it changes every month, I believe. Right.

Well, sometimes we’ve been on every two to three

Months, OK, so and we change it up and it doesn’t mean we don’t help sometimes, but mostly I would say ninety five percent. They do all the dishes.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I, I definitely step in on a daily basis but but yeah it’s been good for them to head. So like the basic chores that are divided up on a regular basis are jurisdiction’s are dishes and bathrooms for cleaning. And it’s not just dishes like so dishes crew also includes like cleaning the kitchen, meaning sweeping the floor and wiping down the dining room table and the counters. So there’s a little bit more to it than just doing the dishes.

You’re probably thinking, well, that’s not very exciting. How do you get your kids? Like, have good attitudes about that and so forth. Well, I think a lot of times, just like you, you don’t know why you’re asked to do something. If you don’t know the bigger picture, if you don’t understand the vision of it, then it’s hard to do the mundane. See, vision takes us out of the dread of mundane. And so you have to do that for your kids. You have to remind them it’s like, hey, because we’re doing this, we’re going to live in a clean house. We get a you contribute.

And people over and

Over at any point can be friends over these kinds of things. But if we’re living in mass first, God doesn’t want that. It’s unsanitary. You don’t like that. And so we all just we chip in and then we always get to live in a clean, sanitary place and have people over.

Yeah. So hospitality is a huge motivator for them, but also it’s just something that God wants us to do because he wants us to be good stewards. And that’s a principle that is taught on a very simple scale with the kids when they’re little. God wants us to take care of our things. It can be that simple. And then when they’re in the middle, that’s when you start reading the parable stewardship and taking care of your things and understanding that they’re gods and honoring other people and having respect for other people, following through with your commitments, contributing to the family. All of these concepts get start getting taught in the middle age. And honestly, a lot of them are things that we teach during our family meetings when all the kids are sitting there. So like the little kids may not fully understand, the middle kids understand more, but the older kids, the teenagers are getting it.

So we’ve for the sake of time, we’re going to have to kind of rapid fire here just to keep the podcast episodes in The Realm here. But a couple of things I would do with Middle’s is lawn anything property management projects, fixing things. Austin was, you know, fixing the dishwasher, for example, learning how, watching a YouTube video,

Watching a technician came out and took it apart and together

Driving the tractor, you decide what age. But, you know, depending on the kid or the lawnmower or the weed eater or the pruning of trees and

Being the man of the house when dad’s out of town. So now it’s security. So property management. And then you take security. Security is like make sure every single door is locked, all the windows are locked at night, making sure the lights are off to conserve resources to knowing how the world works and knowing how to phone works and, you know, nine one one and these kinds of things. And just, you know, I would leave town on a business trip. I would know my eight year old son would have things dialed. I definitely didn’t believe he would like stop an intruder. That was something I didn’t put the burdens on him like that. But it did it in a way where he was like, my

Life is so fun. I had to lock the windows and lock the door, make sure the dog is going.

It’s never I have to it should be a here’s what you get to do. It’s all here. But my parents are impatient and how they present things put a little thought into how you present something to your kids and everything is in presentation. If you present something in one way, they want to do it. If you present it in another way,

They don’t want that.

So good enough to present things correctly. I’m very careful in how I present things. I think about it. I pray about things, you know. Hmm. This kid’s wired this way. What’s going to motivate them to do this? And maybe it’s my business experience coming in because I’ve managed tons of people and have tons of people, an organization, young adults, especially my past. So I really learned how to motivate people. But, you know, you can learn to you just trial and error. You should practice. Okay. There’s lots of other things. There’s animals, I think, with the littles, with animals, which we can talk about. They’re helping in the middles. They can own it. And I think that’s a really good differentiation in teenage years on. They can own these things, but don’t take over the animals. I know you don’t want to, but too many parents do. And really, you should help them own it. And if they don’t like it, you have to have heart to heart conversations about it.

That’s really good. We also have on here event prep. So that was something that fell more in my jurisdiction obviously over the years with hospitality. And so I would get out a dry erase board because our family was so big and I would put down different people’s names with jobs that were divided up based upon like their capabilities there, honestly, their age, the maturity, what I knew I had already taught them to do. So I could trust that it would get done well. Right. And then there were some things where I was like, OK, so I need these three bathrooms done before we’re hosting church. Right. Like, we would have you’d have a lot of people at church and I’d say, who have you three, which bathroom are you going to take? And they they would jump at it because it was like they knew I’m going to have to do one of these bathrooms. I might as well pick which one. And so it was there. It was helpful. And then we would write it down. I was like, OK, as soon as you’re done this. And cross it off of your list so I can know and I’ll come and

Inspect these other things, too, like I’d run business events and I started to think, OK, we’ve got a good team work going on here. Why don’t I write huge tents and run my meeting in our yard?

And so then I would to cook.

So you do the cooking and there was all this event prep that all of us could be part of. And then we got to our kids got to mingle with our managers that came over for

Dinner together, binders

It put binders together. So I’m like, now, could I have done that? You know, an assistant that could help me with that and things like that. But could I could I have done that elsewhere? Yeah, but why not include my family in that? And I think it really helped the business and helped my family.

It was really special because the kids loved it. Like Kelsey had an apron and Austin would put on his fedora. They would all they would be all dressed up and they were like maybe 12 and 10, and they would go from person to person when we had the lunch. And they’d be like, would you like a quiche with dairy or no dairy? And they’d serve people and they’d practice serving water while it was during the meeting. And they would bring out appetizers and they would deliver the food for. Yeah, and it was so much fun, like they would help make the deviled eggs or the angel eggs and they would take them out and and serve them.

So how about like RV trips? You might be thinking camping trips, whatever it is

They can they

Can all help with Parap and these different things. And you go, well, they don’t know how to prepare. Well, for one of our last RV trips, I got a Rubbermaid tub for everybody that could put below and they were limited to what they could put in the cabin. And so I said, you got to bring and then you’re going to get approval from us. So there’s ways you can have safeguards. Right. And then someone to bring them to us.

We don’t have to pack everybody. So it’s interesting because we yeah, we are still doing this RV trip and we’ve had quite a few people go, whoa, are you going to be doing too much like, you know? And I’m I’m like, I’m actually excited because it’s going to be a break for mom. Yeah. In a lot of ways. Right. Because everybody we’ve kind of got our rhythm down. We’ve been doing this for so long that, yeah, I can just put down like a list again on a dry erase board of all the main things they need. They need their swimsuits, they need underwear, they need pajamas, blah, blah, blah. But then they get to choose what else goes in there. And then with the younger’s, I just look through it to make sure, oh, and they go, hold on, you missed your goggles or whatever it is, it’s not that hard. And they feel so proud and they’re excited to go put it in the RV.

I think sometimes we can be too much of perfectionist. I’m the expert of this I know best, therefore I’m going to do it. And I know I’m being a little sassy right now, but I just want to I wanted to hear some parts because your perfectionism is ill equipping your kids if that’s the case. And so I’m going to challenge you on that. This is courageous parenting. We don’t hold anything back. Just think about that, I think, to building things together, like what could you build together? The vineyard was very much a build together purpose. I didn’t know anything about vineyards. I like wine once in a while. I wasn’t really interested in how to make wine or any, you know, any of that. I just wanted to farm. I wanted to

Do something together. Yeah. Look at years later and it would be a legacy project

Did that together and the goal of it worked out, which is it was some money and it was a lot of time and effort, but it transformed the culture of our family and forever transformed who our kids are. Because, you know, at that time we were doing very well financially and there had been I could have made it to where there’s no reason for them to do anything extra, but

Instead been very spoiled

And stood in the opposite direction. And they had a harder work than most of their friends. And I think that has really, really paid off so well, whether we had a lot or had nothing or in between. We’ve experienced all of it. Our kids have always been the same because we’ve always parented the same of making sure they work hard and work ethic and build things together and so forth. So what could you build together? Sometimes it’s a model, a little model building with your your boy, or it could be creating, you know, curtains for your house or what could you create together.

And you can even think out of the box, like maybe because of everything that we’ve walked through in this last year with churches shutting down. Maybe you’ve listened to some of our podcasts and you’ve contemplated planting a house church. That’s something that you when you do that, you’re doing it with your kids because they have to help with hospitality. You have to give them vision for what that is actually building. It’s building a local body for Christ. That’s huge. And it advances the kingdom and it’s an eternal work. Right. And so another aspect, you know, you talked about work. I brought the kids in. To so many aspects of launching, Redeeming Childbirth and the postpartum course where I went to conferences, they helped me to sell books, they checked people out, they decorated they created little baggies for when I go to conferences that had like a little bracelet that had a Bible verse on it and said redeeming childbirth on one side. And, you know, whatever you’re working on, maybe you are in you’re running the children’s ministry at your church or something. And you have to come up with VBS and you have all these projects you have to do and you’re thinking, I’m going to get all the leaders together and we’re going to do this. Well, maybe you do, but maybe you save one part of that and you get all your kids together and they help put it together for the kids for this that VBS in the summer.

You never know what your gifts are. I remember I grew up being very introverted, very shy and never speaking in front of people like public speaking, never wanting to do that, getting out of reading in front of class, all of those things. I was very much a kid, and I think it has something to do with my upbringing. But when I was in my later college years, I ran a business in the summer that had to do with lots of people. I had about one hundred and forty people on my team. I had an office space during the summer and I remember giving speeches in front of my group and I never knew I had the gift of speaking until I was twenty one. And I think that could have been would have come out earlier and transformed how I grew up if I would have discovered that gift. And I think that part of why you’re getting your kids involved in things. Yeah, it’s helpful. But more importantly, it’s equipping them and it’s helping them discover things. They’re good at things they’re passionate about, things they’re interested in, like in ruling out things they don’t like, so that earlier on they have a better idea of directions to go in their life and where they invest their time, energy and resources even to know if college is good or bad for them. And because I think it’s bad for a lot of people and good for some. And so I think that’s really important to think about. Let’s go into the teenage years and a lot of it, by the way, we’re in a rapid fire through some teenage things. But really what you did in the Littles in the middle determines how the teenage workout.

That’s right. Because if you haven’t been doing a lot of training, you may find yourself having to really teach teen. I mean, I had to teach you how to use the washing machine when you were an adult man. And that’s a perfect example of that. Right. And so if you haven’t taught your medals how to do laundry, you’re going to have to teach your teenagers.

Now, for the record, I did my own laundry. I was in college and stuff. I just didn’t do it with our the right way. And, you

Know, it was a matter of having front loaders and not knowing how the technology worked. Right. And so there was and there’s an aspect of like going, OK, so what if I taught my kids in evaluating honestly and going, OK, so with that kid, I’m going to teach them this a little sooner.

But but this is where their work ethic shines in the teenage years or you realize you made a mistake. It’s never too late, by the way. Yeah. You can still invest it, but you need to sit down with your kids and apologize to your kids,

And then you need to have extra patience with them because you will have to be more clear. A perfect example. This is Cookie, actually. So if you haven’t taught your kids how to cook, like for me, I can talk to my older kids and say, hey, can you make dinner? And they don’t actually want any advice on what to make for dinner because they’ve done it so many times. They’re like, yeah, great. And then they’ll ask if they can get a couple of things at the grocery store. And that’s the teenage years. That’s the beauty of the teenage years. The metals, they’re like some of them are. They’re just different. Right. Like if I was to ask even our fourteen year old, can you make lunch, he would go, what would you like me to make if I ask our twelve year old to make lunch, he’ll go awesome and he’ll jump in and he’ll make routine no pasta or he’ll do something because it’s just his he has a gift. Yeah. And he really enjoys that. Whereas our fourteen year old has gifts and other things and he’s remodeling and doing other things and so understanding the differences because you can see them by the time they’re teens, tweens and teens, you should be able to know your kid enough after having studied them and been really walking in life with them, you should be able to determine what things they just are naturally really good at and what things they need. A little bit more direction. It is totally different.

Kindercare and now this is a place where they can project management, they can lead other kids and other people and they can do things like Drew right now is completely project managing, making all decisions and running a bias of the chicken coop. And it’s looking amazing. But now what we’re noticing is because Drew is taking all the ownership over that there’s a I’m seeing this lack of desire to help in the future with. The chickens from other kids, and so that’s a cue to me to step in and go, hey, why are we doing chickens in front of a whole group? Why is this important? How is this going to help us? And and if I don’t do that now, then when we ask for their help later to go feed the chickens, it’s going to be horrible. So, you see, I’m already thinking about that. I’m already seeing what’s happening. And I don’t want it all to go on to Drew’s shoulders. But project management, project ownership, discovering their paths in life, leadership, teamwork instilled. And if it’s not instilled in the teenage years you made mistakes, should apologize and work forward and say here’s how it’s going to be from now on and here’s what I’m going to do better. And here’s how you can do better. And let’s just do this together, because this is important for your future. At the teenage years. You’ve got to the Y has got to be beyond your family. It’s got to be way into the future of how this can help them, how it’s important.

I would also say that, you know, we’re talking about doing work and doing projects together. And this kind of goes into a really a much bigger topic that we’re not going to dive into here. We’ve already discussed this, which is social media. So a lot of teenagers are on social media. We have certain boundaries based upon each kid because each kid can handle different things. We also have given kids some ownership over if they want to be on. So like, for example, I actually think that our 14, almost 15 year old could handle social media just fine. He’s very responsible and he just doesn’t want to be on it. And so there’s that element of like in some cases where like, hey, this might not be good for you yet and we hold back in other cases, we give them the freedom to decide and they choose yes or no. Right. And then we’re involved in that. But the whole point is that there is a purpose behind why they’re on it. There is no it’s kind of like college. There’s no reason to go there unless you have a real reason to be there. And so we are very vision minded regarding social media. We’re there to be missionaries. We instill that same kind of purpose with our kids. Yes, of course, it cultivates deeper friendships. You’re able to stay in contact with family and some friends that you’ve moved away from. We do the same thing. But the reality is, is they are fully aware of their influence and they try to use it for good.

Now, in the teenage years, don’t suffocate your kids with only family projects. They should have their own jurisdictions outside of their family starting to percolate. And you should encourage that is now it’s how are they balancing family life and my things outside of the family in a responsible way that’s honoring a respectful and still gets all jurisdictions done. Now, spinning more plates while they’re in your home, you’re equipping them on how to handle it, how to do that. Here’s some final tips. Start the day together. We could do a whole podcast episode. In fact, we should but start the day together. It’s so important because when you have all kinds of things going on, you can set the tone in the Bible, sets the tone for attitude. You don’t have it all on your shoulders. It’s a spiritual problem if the attitudes are wrong and a parenting problem. OK, so the Bible’s key family identity. What is your family identity? There is a family identity. Always there is a culture. Always it’s either getting better or worse unless there’s leadership driving it forward. What are you driving forward? And if you’re not, is probably just getting worse. OK, you avoid external problem creators. These are people outside of your family that are creating a desire for them, not contributing inside your family. So the wrong relationships,

The wrong relationships that are like, man, you didn’t get paid for that. I get paid and I don’t have to do anything. OK, unity. So this is the thing depending on if they’re a little a middle or teen parenting is going to look different with those kinds of people. I don’t even allow those kinds of influences in my little life, period. There are boundaries, very protected boundaries in my little life because that could potentially impact their attitudes and become something I’m trying to correct for many years, actually. Like if you if they’re spending time with peers that don’t aren’t learning jurisdictions, aren’t learning work ethic, aren’t learning honesty of like, yes, I committed doing this and following through obedience to their parents. There’s going to be problems with the middle’s. That’s where you start actually communicating with your kids and teaching them. Well, do you think that God wants you to act this way when they notice things and. Oh, no, you don’t. How could you leave that kid? So you’re talking to your eight year old, your nine year old. How could you. And the

Reason is because you’ve already poured into your little by the time you get to middle, they can

Discern and they know something’s off and they come to you and they just are honest and they say, something happened when I was at their house or something happened today when they were at our house or, you know, and they tell you, like our kids were able to discern when they were six and seven years old and Sunday school, the kids were super disrespectful to the teacher, things like that. Right. You want your kids to Sunday school, so you well, you want to teach your kids to discern these things and to be so comfortable. Coming to you with them, first of all, and then you use that as a teaching moment, and the answer isn’t always to pull away depending on their age and their spiritual maturity. And if your kids are getting something out of it, out of it, like a Sunday school is supposed to be additive, but your kids aren’t getting anything out of it. No. Then, yeah, I would pull them out. Right. But for the teenage years, even you want to train them. It’s different. It’s where they learned how to discern they’ve had all those conversations. They’re coming to you for wisdom and advice because you’ve developed that relationship, but you’ve really trained them for how to lead other people out of their wrong thinking. Yeah. And then they make decisions because they’re like, OK, I’ve tried influencing like four or five times and it’s just like a brick wall. And they’re still like,

We don’t have to we don’t even have to. We don’t have to be very controlling. And as they get older, because they themselves only react to you around people that are edifying to their progress forward, and they want to help people, no one has to be perfect. But but they have a good discernment.

There is a discernment. And so that’s why I say it’s a little bit different as far as avoiding problem creators, as far as, you know, boundaries and different things like that. Because when you have teenage kids, too, if you have parented them well in this their whole life, they will actually set up really healthy boundaries themselves

And be careful of ageism and external influences. A lot of times create ageism if they haven’t been raised the same way. So it’s you don’t avoid that. You just you just keep a good temperature on. Are your older kids developing a feeling of only wanting to be around people their age or older, not their siblings? You catch that right away and acknowledge it and stop it. Stop them from being that way. They can still hang out with other people, even if they’re influencing that because they’re older. Anything divisive, you want to you want to stop and you want to talk about and you want to have heart-To-Heart conversations. Hey, this has been a long episode. It’s great to part series. We hope you got a lot out of it. CourageousParenting.com. You get all resources and show notes and everything about this.

See you next time. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. For more resources, go to courageous parenting and CourageousMom.com For free online workshops, blog posts and best selling courses. Also, we wanted to quickly tell you about our six week online parenting mentor program. Isaac and I created a powerful biblical curriculum. Here’s how it works. Each week we release a video with a downloadable parenting package to make it easy for you to incorporate those teachings directly into your parenting.

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