One Sunday our family attended a rare, two hour long church meeting. My children are very used to sitting quietly through one hour church meetings, but sometimes they struggle a little bit on a two hour meeting.

About three quarters through the meeting this past Sunday my eight year old son asked if he could go to the bathroom. I told him he could, but to hurry back. About twenty minutes later my husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Where is Porter?”

“I don’t know.” I said. “I thought he would be back by now. He went to the bathroom. We’ll need to go looking for him.” My husband sat back in his seat content that I was going to go look. “You will need to go look for him.” I smiled. “I can’t go into the boys bathroom.”

“Oh yeah. Oops. Sorry Bunny.” he whispered with a smile as he stood up and walked toward the door.

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Interview with a parenting expert part 3

This is part three of the three-part series on Teaching Children Self-Government I did with Family Therapist, BJ Stober, host of Family Voice Talk Radio.

In this segment we talk about helping teens figure out ways to decrease computer time.  A question was asked presented stating that children are often forced to have lots of computer time by school etc.  So, they wanted to know how to find a balance.

For the remainder of the call we talked about making a family government structure in the home to back parents up.  If a family has a secure structure then the parents and children all fee more secure.  There is not as much parenting guess-work, and the children learn cause and effect, which lead them toward self-government. Continue reading →