Lately I’ve become sentimental, thinking about our oldest starting high school next year. Only 4 years left with her in the home. Only 4 more summers all together. Only 4 more years to impart to her all the wisdom and character and life skills we have yet to make time for! We were told over and over again to “cherish the little years – for the days are long but the years are short” and now it seems SO TRUE!!
In light of the brevity of our time left with our daughter at home, the temptation could be to tighten the reigns of control to make the most of the days left of training. However, instead, it seems that the path of wisdom is to begin a gradual “hand-off” of ownership in different areas of her life.
We realized recently that the time had come for such a hand-off of ownership when we heard our daughter speaking of “your values” and “your guidelines.” We realized we needed to transition her to formulating her own values and guidelines in certain areas.
We don’t want our children to leave our home simply having followed our guidelines based on our values. We want to impart to them the wisdom to formulate their own values, and principles of action consistent with those values.
The example at hand for us was modesty. Our daughter respectfully agreed with our values on modesty, saw the biblical basis for those values, and submitted to the family guidelines. However, they were very much “our values.” That needed to change! “Our values” won’t be as effective to her in college or as a young adult when she is no longer in our home. We want her to have “her values” established. Now seems like the time for this transition to begin. And with ownership comes both privilege and responsibility.
She was tasked with the job of coming up with her personal values on modesty. I had her spend some time looking up bible verses and reading some examples of modesty guidelines. She wrote out her own thoughts on the subject – first her values, and then her guidelines based on those values. This order is significant – first values, then guidelines!
Then we then did a really brave thing… we told her that we would allow her to make some of her clothing decisions based on her value statement, even if they were a little different than ours. There would be some clear “no’s” but she would have more freedom in the grey areas as long as she was being consistent with her values. It feels more important to teach her to develop and live according to her own biblically-based values and principles than to have her adhere to our specific set of rules.
This could easily apply in the area of technology as well. As parents, we are rightly trying to impart “our values” and “our guidelines” to our children about technology usage. For little ones, that is called good parenting! For teens, it may be time to begin the hand-off. Perhaps you could ask your pre-teen or teen to spend some time formulating his or her own value-based guideline for technology usage. And then let him or her try to live it out. Allow for successes and failures. These are life lessons that are better learned in the safety of home.
Similarly, there could be a hand-off of ownership in making decisions about music, movies & TV. Currently, when a song, book, app or movie comes up that I am not familiar with, I research it on a parent preview website. (My favorite is Common Sense media.) However, perhaps it is time to start transitioning our children into going through this process themselves, in order to learn how to make wise choices about what music to download or movies to watch.
It seems that all of parenting involves transitions and hand-offs. It takes wisdom from our Heavenly Father to know when and how to implement these important transitions. Every child will be different, even within the same family! However, ultimately, our goal is not to raise children who respect our values and obey our rules only while living in our home, but adults who live according to their own biblically-based values and principles.