“Resilience is the capacity to retain core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changing circumstances.”— Todd Bolsinger

When the heat gets turned up, change is happening and challenges are being faced, we can stay calm (acknowledge but not give in to our emotions), stay connected (don’t  isolate ourselves—don’t take our ball and go home) and stay the course (there is still a game to be played; there is still a life to be lived.)

In this episode of the Parenting Podcast, we’re talking about how to build resilient, strong kids. To get there, we must learn to build resilience in ourselves so our children will see what it looks like to be resilient.

Kids today are no longer sad, they’re depressed. They’re no longer worried, they are anxious. They are no longer “going through a hard time,” they are “experiencing acute trauma and PTSD.”

Our kids today have received more mental health intervention in the form of therapy of some form and yet by every measure, this generation’s mental health is getting worse. Why is that the case?

In this episode of the Parenting podcast, we’re diving into a conversation around a new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier

At the beginning of this episode, Scott referred to the Irreversible Damage episode of Locker Room: Season 8, episode 5.

If you were to walk up to the average person you know and say, “how are you?” The number one response will probably be, “busy.”

We can be busy for a season, but we all need to have some margin in our lives. That margin is there for things like rest, other people, emergencies, and spontaneity. If we fill our schedule to the degree that if something else were to try to squeeze its way in, the whole thing would come crashing down, that’s an indication that we might be too busy.

In this episode we sit down to discuss what we can do to guard the most important things during the busy seasons, and how we can establish healthy rhythms of activity and rest in our families.

Our kids are paying attention to the risks we’re willing to take. Being actively involved in the church is going to provide us with plenty of opportunities to do things that are head-scratchers to the world, but because of Jesus they make perfect sense.

So if our kids see us partnering with Jesus, in community and serving together on mission with other believers, the likelihood that they will participate and step out in faith themselves is a lot higher.

We’re back with season 2 of the Parenting podcast and up first this week is the topic of the role of the church in the lives of our kids and our families.

“It is only rest in God’s presence and grace that will make you a joyful and patient parent. If you’re struggling to be patient, finding it hard to be joyful and sometimes dreading the next day of parenting, could it be that your struggle to be tender and loving to your children is rooted in the reality that you are overburdened and overwhelmed…perhaps in all your work to be used by God, to produce children who know what it means to rest in His wisdom and grace, you have forgotten how to rest yourself.”

- Parenting, Paul David Tripp

In this episode we circle back to the book we unpacked earlier this season, and discuss how rest is a key part of being a healthy parent.

This is our last episode for this season of Southland’s Parenting Podcast but we are already recording fresh content and will be back soon for season two. Thanks for joining in!

Through the course of our life, God uses different things, circumstances and people to make us more like his son, Jesus. Our children are excellent instruments in the hand of God to both reveal how much we are still not like Jesus and also to help transform us more into the image of Christ.

Galatians 5:22 talks about the fruit of the Spirit that should be present in our lives as believers. In this episode we’ll have a discussion celebrating how our kids have been key elements in the hands of the Holy Spirit to develop that good fruit in our lives.

What we pray for our kids tends to reveal what is important to us. As a parent it’s easy to get caught up in praying for specific things for our kids as they come up: prayers for safety, favor in school or a sporting event, or prayer for wisdom in a certain situation. And it’s good to pray for these things!

But sometimes we fail to push beneath the surface into a deeper conversation with God about the direction of the lives of our children and their future with him.

Join us for this episode of the Parenting podcast as we dig into how to pray for our kids.

Ephesians 6:4(NLT) Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.

Whether it be public, private or homeschool, there are more options for school choice than ever in most places today. And while there are times when we have to insulate our kids, we cannot isolate them. We live in the world, and we have to love people. Not all the people that we hang out with are going to know and love Jesus, because that’s what he calls us to do—to be in the world but not of it.

Join us on this episode of the parenting podcast as we have a conversation about how to approach one of the most important roles we have as parents—overseeing the education of our children.

Psalm 127:3 (NIV) Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them…

“Good parents don’t always produce good kids. Parents should constantly be asking themselves where they get a set of values that tell them whether they have “good” kids or not. I’m afraid that many good parents live with long-term feelings of failure because their children have not turned out the way they hoped.” - Parenting by Paul David Tripp

In this episode of the Parenting podcast, we discuss how our primary responsibility as parents is to aim our children in the direction of Jesus. We'll also take a look at our identity as parents and some traps we can fall into when we try to get our identity from our kids.

The book referenced in this episode: Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family by Paul David Tripp

The most influential thing on the hearts of our children—for good or for bad—is the state of our own hearts and what comes out of us.

We have all been influenced by our own individual experiences growing up. Some of us only had one parent around. Some of us didn’t have a strong faith component in our lives growing up—no map to guide us on what to do. Some of us may have grown up in a family where faith was a key part of daily life, but maybe we never had that personal relationship with the Father.

Our hosts for this podcast have been in each of those places, and we’ll discuss how getting our own hearts right with God is the first and most important step we can take as parents.