CHOOSING YOUR CHILD’S TRIBE AND TRAINING THEIR TONGUE
CHOOSING THEIR TRIBE
Choose their tribe… What do I mean by that? Am I going to choose all of my children’s friends? No, but I’m going to usher our friendships that are not healthy. As a parent, that’s my right and that’s my responsibility. Even as a young child, as a four year old kid going to preschool, you can still choose some of the kids that they’re hanging around with. You can talk to them about things that if those kids are doing things that they shouldn’t be, then you can tell them what you feel about that.
In the preschool that Samantha went to, they would watch Rugrats. Now, I’m not here to boycott Rugrats at all. And I’m not saying that you were a bad parent, if you let your kid watch Rugrats, what I am saying is that when I watched one episode of it, I thought that the sarcasm coming from those little kid characters, were talking poorly about their parents. I didn’t think that was a good model for Samantha. So they always had like this Rugrat time that they got to watch in the afternoon and I just asked the teacher, “Hey, could you let my kiddo color something?” Just tell her, “Hey, I’ve got some new coloring stuff would you like to?” Pretty soon there were several other kids that wanted to join her over to the side. You get to choose what they’re around in their environment. The things that they are subject to sometimes when you’re not even there, you have a right and a responsibility.
Our pastor John Lindell used to say, “If you can’t control them when they are 3, what makes you think that you’re going to be able to control them when they’re 13?” Fast forward 10 years, and what you start allowing when they’re 3 is going to be really hard when they’re 13. My husband has always said, “It’s easier to let out the reign than it is to try to pull it back in.” He’s always said, “I don’t have to be their best friend.” He didn’t say that in an ugly way, he was a great father. What he meant was, they’re not always going to agree with what I say. And I’m going to have to be okay with that. I’m not always going to be the popular one. And that was really hard for me, because the environment that I grew up in, was very codependent. If my dad got really mad, which was a lot, then my mom tried to help by giving us special things. She would let us get away with things that we probably shouldn’t have been able to get away with, because she felt so bad about what we were experiencing with my dad. So I kind of had a love computer chip in the back of my brain. I’m thinking, well, if daddy gets mad, I’m going to give them something special. I’m going to tell them “Daddy loves you, and that it was going to be okay.” But he had to train me how not to create a codependent in our own children. It really is a delicate balance. But we get to train our children and train their tongues. Be very careful in what we allow in their environments.
TRAINING THEIR TONGUE
They’re gonna say what you say. Bottom line. I remember, one of our kiddos was doing this a lot. “UGH!” And I thought that’s awful… When you hear it coming from your kid, that’s awful. “Where did you learn that?” “I don’t know.” And I had heard myself say it several times in one day, I got frustrated with something and I said, “UGH!” Well, that’s what our kid was learning was what I was modeling in front of them. What do I mean by train their tongue? Just like that, if you want them to say certain things, and you model that in front of them.
Something that I came up with a lot, I came up with a lot of songs and sayings because when I put on my teacher voice, then they listened really well. Their eyes got big and they thought the things that I was saying was so important. So I had to make them that important. When you’re standing in line with your kid for the movies or grocery store line, instead of being frustrated, I got to say, “Remember what patience means?” And they would repeat, “Patient means wait with a smile.” We would say all the time, “You’re such a good friend, you’re such a good helper,” that we would teach them to say that to their friends, “You’re such a good friend. You’re a good helper.” So we were teaching them to take what we said to them and offer that to the world. And I’m not really smart, but I watched this modeled in front of me, with several people in our church. You see this and you you think, “Man, I wish our kids are like that.” They can be! It’s what you teach them. You train their tongue, it’s what they see you model. So our kids would open doors for strangers, I’d say, “Oh, here’s your opportunity, open the door.” Or if somebody was in a wheelchair, or motorized wheelchair at Walmart, and they had to get up to go get the cereal box, I’d say, “Go see if you can get that cereal box.” Little things like that taught them how to serve others, and they are servants in and out of the House of God today.
Because our oldest child has Down Syndrome and our youngest child does not, there’s a difference in the mentality in the way they think through things and their mental growth rate was different. So my husband and I felt like we needed to get a mentor, somebody that Samantha could look up to. Someone who could take her to a coffee shop, things like that when she hit about middle school age. And so we did we recruited this beautiful young lady, her name is Shelby Miller. And we asked her, “Can you do this?” We said that we wanted her to pour into Samantha, to hear Samantha’s moments of frustration, things that she maybe wouldn’t share with us. Let her tell Shelby. This was in a really strategic time in Samantha’s life. And we thank God for Shelby and her YES to our request. We thought that really we were lone ranger’s in that because we thought we were in a in a situation where we had to pull in a mentor. But we just recently learned about some pastors on staff at our church, the Hackworth’s, they’re actually directors of the college, James River College. (Samantha went through that college). And she said, “You know that Hackworth’s did that to mom. They chose mentors for each one of their children.” They chose mentors that would agree with them, when there was a discipline, and the child would be angry or frustrated or didn’t understand. If they happen to say that to the mentor, then they knew that that mentor was going to have their back. So there’s nothing wrong with that, when you choose your child’s tribe, and you train their tongue, it is putting in golden stuff into their computer chip in their mind and in their heart, because they’re gonna absorb what their environment is like.
So you’re in charge of that, it’s a blessing, it’s a great thing to do. In the end, it’s the people that we are doing life with, as we’re young, that become our tribe when we’re older. But if it’s not a good tribe, it becomes people who are destructive, and they lead you farther and farther and farther away from safety, and certainly away from God.
FINDING THE FAMILY
When people first come into the ministry as participants, they don’t have their children. Usually, they don’t have them because the children have been taken by the state or because we request that the children stay with somebody else for a few months so that we can deal with what’s going on in their heart. And so when the children do come, then they don’t know whether to trust their mom and dad or not. They don’t know if it’s going to be the same as it was. We literally heard of one of the children, they told her foster mom and dad, they were scared to come live with their parent again because they didn’t know if it was going to be the same as it was before they got put in foster care. When that is a fear in their little hearts, then when they come into the ministry, that’s a great responsibility that we hold is that we teach our families how to minister to their own children.
So it becomes something that is a reality when they see it blossoming. It’s a natural thing that happens when the parents devote their lives to God. It’s a natural thing that happens that they become more positive. They don’t fight as much, they praise as a family, they sing songs with one another, they’re in church when the doors are open. And that slowly, creeps in and creates a trust in the children’s lives in their hearts, in their minds. And that is exactly why we do what we do. Because these parents have come to a breaking point when they see what their actions and their addictions have done to their children. And that is why they want to get help for that reset button when they come to the end of themselves and when they see what it’s done to their kids. We help them set the reset button, and overcome the addiction by allowing God to restore them and their children, their family. They can’t do enough right things, but if their hearts are devoted to God, then they’re learning how to do practical things, and there’s a natural spiritual blossoming that happens.