Raising kids is not an easy task especially when you realize that none of your kids are created like you and none of your kids are similar.
Yep! My husband and I have three kids and three of them are completely different creatures. I usually say, it was easy to raise my two boys and guess what? My husband says, it was easy to raise my girl. Well, I guess that is a common thing.
You see, early on in my parenting journey, I thought it would be easy for me to raise a girl because, I thought, she would think exactly like me. So, I kept on telling my daughter how to run her “small world” in the way I was running mine. Well, God has a sense of humor, doesn’t He?
God has blessed me with a my daughter who actually came from a different planet. I am serious!
Lydia, my only beautiful daughter, who is now a 21-year old young lady, relates more to her dad than to me. So, I tried everything so she would be the exact copy of me. I’ve failed terribly!
I am blessed by a wise man. So, my husband used to say, “Baby, remember, this little girl is not like you.” Do you think I understood what my husband was telling me? Nope! I tried to explain to him how he and I could work together so we could change her so she would be exactly like me. I mean, it would have been an okay thing to do only if I was “a perfect model” to copy. But I was not and I will never be.
Anyways, as you can imagine, Lydia and I had a rocky start at the beginning but little by little, I learned in a hard way. One day, I think Lydia was 5 or 6 years old, I asked her, “Lydia, why do you think God gave me you?”
She put her chin up and proudly said, as if she was preparing herself to answer that question, “He gave you me to teach you about patience!”
I am serious! I thought the Holy Spirit was speaking to me because that was exactly what was lacking in my life and God surely taught me how to be patient through raising my beautiful daughter. (Well, I still lack patience though. I need prayer in that.)
Now looking back to all those 21 years, I thank God for helping me to be able to build a healthy and respectful relationship with my daughter. Now I dare to call her my best friend because she is! If we sit to talk, time just flies and we don’t realize it! Praise God!
So, I want to share few things with you, young mothers, which may help you build a healthy relationship with your daughter(s).
- Teach your daughter how fear God
Fearing God can be expressed by you seeking God and His ways all the time. For me, this was (still is) number one thing in my I focused on because something became clear to me that it is God who created me and my daughter and He is the only One who can guide me to build a fulfilling and lasting relationship with my daughter. So, I get up early in the morning and go to God, to seek His face. So, as a little girl, Lydia learned that early in the morning, her mama would be on her knees praying or sitting on the table studying the word of God. I didn’t need to teach her to pray. She was copying what she was watching me do.
I mean what more do mothers want if their children learn to fear God and seek His ways!
The word of God says,
“Fear of the Lord is a life-giving fountain;
it offers escape from the snares of death.” Proverbs 14:27 NLT
2. Tell your daughter how beautiful she is!
Don’t wait until your daughter puts her cute skirt for you to say, “You’re beautiful!” Tell her that even when she is in her pjs. Show her what the Bible says about her:
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.” Psalm 14:27NIV
We girls won’t get tired of hearing “You’re beautiful,” and how beautiful it is for a girl to hear this from her own mother! And, today most young girls struggle with their looks. They compare themselves with the airbrushed movie actors they see on social media and they tend to believe the lie that says to them, “You are not as beautiful as that girl!”
Unfortunately most of us mothers find it easier to criticize our daughters’ outfit and hairstyles than admiring their unique natures, gifts, talents, choices, looks and preferences. I know, we do that because we fear that our daughters would turn out to be drug addicts or high school dropouts.
Well, if that is the case, we need to first know how to deal with our own ungrounded fears before we stress our daughters out with our lectures and criticisms. Otherwise our daughters early on start to avoid every chance that they would be alone with us. That is not good! You see, we need to strive to build close relationships with them because we have valuable message to pass to them and that message needs a carrier and a healthy relationship is the only safe and secure carrier to take the message directly into their souls.
And that message is: There is a Creator of this universe and He revealed Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ, who is the only hope of us and this world. The Bible is the Book to read and study to know more about Him.
3. Don’t be quick to judge or correct Your daughter
Listen to your daughter instead of to quickly judge or correct her! Always remember this: Your daughter is different from you. You may find few similarities here and there but know that God has no Xerox machine. That means your daughter is unique and different. When you listen to her, you learn a lot about her. She teaches you how things can be seen in more than one way which is your way. And as you listen to her, you find lots of ways you can relate to her.
(I will come back to this topic some other time. For now, I guess this is enough.) ///