Cultivating a Relationship with Your Child


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Cultivating a Relationship with Your Child Wendy Skenderi, LPC, RPT, BCPCC As we enter spring we experience life emerging. The trees begin to bud, the grass turns a luscious shade of green, and flowers burst open to offer explosions of color. Our Maker is at work in His creation, cultivating nature, resulting in indescribable beauty. To cultivate means ‘to promote or improve growth by giving your labor and attention.’

Relationship

As we reflect on how God attends to nature, we have a visual example of purposeful labor that makes living things grow, flourish and produce. God does this for us in our relationship with Him. He is the Master Gardener of our souls: fertilizing, pruning, giving living water, and abiding with us. He provides unconditional love and a fulfilling sense of worth and purpose.

Relationship with God

The work of parenting is the same. How can we give intentional labor and attention to our children to help them grow to be beautiful, thriving individuals, while discovering who God intends them to be? If we have a healthy root system, which is our growing relationship with the Lord, then the conditions are ripe to form strong relationships with our children. Parents can attend to the following four ‘branches’ of cultivating a relationship with their children, with each branch being equally important to the overall health and longevity of the core relationship.



Perspective. God created each child unique, but it’s easy to lose sight or miss altogether who they really are. In parenting, we have the tendency to slip into focusing on the hole, not the donut*. Regularly ask God for His perspective of your child. Take a few moments to sit quietly and ask the Lord for words to describe your child from His perspective. Seeking His perspective will often change your reactions, so you will respond rather than react to your children.



Priority. Much research has been done over the years to determine whether quality or quantity of time spent with your child is most effective. The truth is both are equally important. Make spending time with each of your children a priority and, while with them, keep your focus on entering into their world for a while.



Pruning. Correcting, training, and teaching your children in love are vital parts of parenting. Yet, it is not the sole component to affecting growth. In fact, when ‘pruning’ is attended to without incorporation of the other ‘branches,’ problems occur in behavior and attitude. Discipline your child with God’s perspective for him or her and with a healthy dose of caring.



Paying attention. Pay attention through active listening to your child. Listen with your eyes and “let your nose follow your toes,”* so your body stance will be engaged in the conversation as well. Practice restating your child’s comments to convey you heard, understood, and cared. Parenting through relationship means that your job of fixing and correcting your children will come after establishing they are heard and cared for.

Cultivating a relationship with your child is worth it. As Psalm 1:3 states, “He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither; whatever he does prospers.” *Bratton, Landreth, Kellam, Blackard: Child Parent Relationship Therapy Treatment Manual, Routledge, 2006