Two New Posts from Orange Parents Focus on the Need For a Plan

Mark, Lisa and Ron are working together to develop a birth to 18 plan that will help us best partner with parents as they raise children that know, love and serve the Lord. Here are a couple of blog posts from www.orangeparents.org that stress the importance of the plan.

Posted by Carey Nieuwhof on May 17th, 2010

What’s Your Rhythm?

You’ve already seen on the blog that we believe parents are highly influential. In fact, while the average church leader gets about 40 hours a year with your son or daughter, a full time working parent who gets eight hours of sleep each night and doesn’t homeschool has 3000 hours of influence with a child over a year. Seriously.

What do you do with all that influence?

We want to encourage you to create a rhythm at home that makes conversation about God normal.

Here’s the thinking: Every family already has a rhythm. Yours does. Mine does. And what happens in that rhythm becomes ‘normal’ for the kids. If you grew up in a musician’s home, it might be normal to have artists around playing music. For others, it’s just normal to see mom and dad out on long runs or it’s normal to never miss a football game. In other families, it might be normal to build furniture or make custom jewelry. Whatever shows up in the rhythm of every day life in our homes is perceived both to be ‘normal’ and to have value.

The question is: how does God get worked into the rhythm? See, sometimes God is someone who shows up on Sunday, but is absent the rest of the week. Not because he’s not important, but because he doesn’t have a role in our daily rhythm. For others, God shows up in our life over the week, but he’s kind of awkward. You know the ‘okay-now-that-dinner’s-done-let’s-read-the-bible-any-questions-can-we-be-excused’ drill? God’s there, but the dialogue’s just not normal…not yet.

Here’s what’s true: the younger your kids are, the easier it is to create a rhythm. There’s craft time, play time, nap time, meal time…you get the picture. Life is so structured, so it’s easier to regularly incorporate faith into the rhythm of life. But the older they get, the more creative and purposed you have to be about creating a rhythm.

When our kids were younger, we prayed with the nightly and read the bible regularly together. We used the take-home resoucres from church to amplify at home what was happening at church. But beyond that, my wife Toni and I tried to weave conversation about our faith into spontaneous moments too – in the same way you might talk about a great movie, a friend or sports.

As our kids entered their teen years, that spontaneous conversation has become so important. We sometimes read the Bible as a family, but we’ve largely moved toward personal devotions for all of us (after all, faith ultimately has to become personal for everyone). I often find long car rides to be great times to dig into faith and life issues. It doesn’t happen every day, but what I’m so grateful for is that it still feels ‘normal’.

How about you? What age are your kids and what has become a best practice in your family for focusing your priorities on what matters most?

What’s working for you? What have you tried that isn’t working so well?

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Posted by Carey Nieuwhof on May 14th, 2010

Get a Plan

This week on the blog we’ve talked about being imperfect parents and how even imperfect parents need to focus their priorities on what matters most.

Two statistics help put this all in perspective.

The first reality is that parents continue to be the most influential voices in the life of their children right through the teen years. You might think that friends landed at the top, or media, or school environment, or socioeconomic status… but you would be wrong. As much as we think we have no influence, we have influence. According to Chap Clark’s research, here are the influencer’s in a teen’s life (and yes, they are in order):

1. Parents
2. Non-parental committed adults
3. Non-parental non-committed adults AND peers
4. Media, Ecology

So clearly, despite every indication from your child to the contrary, you still have influence. Primary influence. So do other adult voices. Unbelievable? Believe it!

But the big question is – how do you leverage that influence.

In a study commissioned by Orange, The Barna Group discovered that only 49% of parents say they actually have a plan or goal for what their child will become as a person. The other half say they simply do their best based on immediate needs. (Source: State of the Church and Family 2010 Annual Report).

But it makes you wonder, even among parents who say they have a plan, how well thought through is it? If someone was to ask them four or five questions about their plan, would it hold water?

That’s kind of why Reggie and I wrote Parenting Beyond Your Capacity and started this blog. We wanted to help families develop a plan around leverage their influence and creating a plan for their chidren’s moral and spiritual formation. You might come up with a better plan or a different plan. That’s great! (Seriously). It’s just that we believe having a plan is better than not having one. And having one that leads somewhere is even better.

So let’s cap off the week with three little questions:

1. Do you have a plan?
2. If so, why did you develop it and how did you know you needed one?
3. If not, why don’t you have one? What keeps you from starting one?

Like I said last post, eighteen years ago when my wife Toni and I started this parenting journey, our plan was simple: we wanted to prioritize our child’s relationship with Christ above everything else. That’s all we had, but I’m grateful we had it. Since then, we’ve refined it a lot and learned tons even as Reggie and I wrote the book. But I’m thankful we started with something, as simple as it was.

How about you?