Learn To Sacrifice Preferences

Learn to sometimes sacrifice your own preferences for your children or your spouse. It might feel like you do that already all the time, but sometimes there are still things we need to lay down and pick up again when our children are a bit older. It feels difficult to do that now but it will be worth it in the end.

Megan would love to work more with the poor in Durban, but she’s a full time educator, mother and Sunday school teacher. She can’t do everything. So she’s made a choice to postpone her passion to work more with the poor until the children are older.

Continually Review Your Priorities

What actually is most important in life? Are there things that are in your life that don’t actually need to be there? Things that take up important time you could spend with your family? We need to be the ones making the priorities happen in our life. We can’t just react to life, we need to be leading in it.

At the beginning of each month, Megan and I have a ‘diary’ night. We sit down and diarize our priorities. Then everything else must fit around those things. Some of our priorities include: A date night every Monday, church on Sundays, church small group meetings on Wednesday night, and a family night at least once a month. We also try to focus on doing something fun specifically with the children on our day off. And as the father, I make sure I’m there every time.

What are the most important things in your family life? Plan those first, then fit everything else around them.

Guard Your Time With Your Family

See time with your family as a priority. We have to be intentional about this. If you don’t have to work late at the office, then don’t. Your children need you during this time. There are many pressures on us at this stage of life, but don’t let the pressures control you. And refuse to let them rob you of time with your children.

Put Your Family Above Your Work And Yourself

We're back after a short break. Hope you had a wonderful parenting experience over the holidays. Now that school has started back, life just got busy again. We hope that these parenting suggestions will help you to keep focus of the importance and joy of raising your children well.

When we get to the end of our lives we’re probably not going to say that we wish we would have spent longer hours at work, had more money to buy more things or wish we could’ve been busier people. We’ll most likely say that we wish we had had more time with the people we loved. Not to say that our jobs and careers are not important, they are, but we have to be sure we're putting first things first. This time in our lives when we are raising our children can often feel busy and overwhelming, and we can be in danger of wishing it away. But we must remember we only have a small window of opportunity to impact the lives of our children. It is a precious time that we don’t want to miss. And when that opportunity is gone we’ll probably wish it were back.