I read this post over at Molly’s blog “Adventures in Mercy,” and thanks to her review, I now definitely want to read the Christian parenting book Loving Our Kids on Purpose by Danny Silk from which these quotations were taken:

The false belief that you not only can, but are responsible to, control your children contributes to elevating the inferior priority of obedience and compliance in the home. The danger is that it not only leads to disrespectful interactions, but it also blinds you to what is really going on inside your child, especially if your child is compliant. It’s easy to mistake obedience for a good relationship. As long as the child is doing what you say, your relationship is fine. The moment obedience is threatened, the relationship is threatened. Therefore, in order for your children to be around you, they must become you.”

“In summary, limiting the freedom of our children in order to teach them external controls, smallness, constraints, and fear of punishment is not a strategy that works in the long run. Instead, we must teach our kids what freedom looks like, feels like, and how to prosper in it. This is the model of Heaven. This is what our Father in Heaven is doing.

The best way to prepare our children to handle the multitiude of options they will have as children of the King of Kings is to invest in developing a heart-to-heart connection. This connection replaces the disrespect factory and introduces the honor factory. The practice of honor will revolutionize the family system, because honor brings power to relationships and the individuals in those relationships. Honor is the antidote…

One of the primary ways we show honor to one another is by sharing power and control in our relationships. When we help our children practice power from the time they are little, they become powerful people who are not afraid of the forces outside of them. They learn to think and solve problems. They learn to draw on the power within them, the power of the Holy Spirit, to direct their lives toward their goals in life. They become skilled at wielding decisions…

…Therefore we introduce freedom to our small children, and we allow them to practice messing it up while they have a safety net in our home. We create a safe place for them to fail and learn about life…”

Doesn’t that sound interesting???

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Another book that has intrigued me is A Sane Woman’s Guide to Raising a Large Family by Mary Ostyn, who blogs at Owlhaven.  This review by Carrien at She Laughs at the Days made me think that this book might be interesting, even though my family would not qualify as “large.”

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Finally, I recently got linked to here in regards to my “Why I am Not a Proverbs 31 Woman” post.  It’s flattering to be thought of well by people I’ve never even met.