July Newsletter

Families are in need of more calm and less stress! The breathless pace we're living in is tearing families apart. Still, there is something that can be done about the stress you and your family experiences. A lot of stress can be removed if you make the tough choices necessary to gain control over your schedule.

Here are 5 choices you can make to help eliminate the stress in your life:

1. Create a Calm Environment at Home. Make your home a safe, calm haven from the madness going on in the outside world. Try not to overreact to circumstances of home life. Sure, many issues need to be addressed, but when you get angry or frustrated, overreactions are common and family stress levels rise. Look to cool down before you respond to such situations.

2. Refresh Your Spirit. Make time for God everyday. Reading a daily devotional each day is a great way to refresh your spirit in the presence of God. Encourage your family to do the same. Consider a regular family devotional time.

3. Renew Your Body. To eliminate stress, we need to be people who reflect balance in our physical lives. Everyone in your family needs plenty of rest, exercise, and a healthy diet.

4. Strengthen Family Relationships. Our families provide us with relational connections that will sustain us through both good times and bad. Strained or broken family relationships are naturally accompanied by stress. To eliminate stress, take the lead with your family to make sure your relationships become and stay healthy.

5. Roll with the Punches. No family is exempt from difficulties in life. Some are brief "moments" while others are "seasons." How we respond to the hard times is a determining factor of whether or not stress will wreak havoc with our family. Stay flexible when the tough times happen and your family will still be standing when those times have passed.

In the end, your family's stress levels have a lot to do with your own choices. You can choose to let busyness, over-commitment, and hard times take their toll on your family, or you can proactively make choices to lower the stress your family experiences. Begin today by making choices to ruthlessly eliminate stress in your home!

As teenagers go about the adolescent task of developing her identity, they are going to struggle with a poor or improper self-image from time to time. Teens play the comparison game whereby they are aware of peers who are smarter, prettier, more coordinated, and so on. Whenever teens play the comparison game they lose, and their self-image takes a hit. Parents can use their influence to build up a teen whose self-image is suffering.

What parents can do to help teens build a positive self-image:

• Believe in your teenager. Teenagers need adults in their lives who believe in them even when they don’t believe in themselves. The difference between a teen who moves on to healthy adulthood and another teen who does not is often one caring adult who believes in her or him. Be that person!

• Shower your teenager with praise. Praise and affirmation are positive, motivating factors that help to build your teen’s self-image. On the other side of the coin, constant negativism, nagging, and put-downs discourage, deflate, and damage self-esteem. So, choose praise over put-downs every time. Praise your teen, but don’t lie or exaggerate. Teens know the difference between legitimate and false praise. Try not to praise only for performance-based issues. Sure, it’s great if your daughter hits a grand slam in her softball game, but what if she strikes out every time at-bat? Do you only praise her when she succeeds? If so, she’ll get the message that she’s only valuable and lovable when she performs at high levels. It’s much better to praise her for good efforts regardless of outcomes, for her admirable behaviors, and most importantly, for her positive character and personality traits.

• Don’t overvalue your teen. Sure your teen is special, and a unique gift from God, but overvaluing your teen won’t help build a positive self-image in him. In fact, it can actually cause long-term damage to him by fostering narcissism, when parents unintentionally plant the seed in his mind that the world revolves around him.

• Encourage your teen and be a cheerleader. Urge your teen to develop her gifts, skills, and strengths. Help her to recognize and minimize her weaknesses. But remember that not every kid will become an academic genius or a professional athlete. Provide her with lots of emotional support and help her grow into the person that God has uniquely created.

Getting your teenagers talking can be quite a challenge. You've probably had a conversation that went like this:

Parent: Did you have a good day?
Teen: Yeah.
Parent: What did you do?
Teen: Nothing.
Parent: Did anything exciting happen?
Teen: No.
Parent: Any plans for the weekend?
Teen: Not really.

Some of the challenge in parent-teen conversation is due to the type of questions parents ask. When parents ask questions that can be answered with one or two words, they usually don't lead to great conversations.

To get your family talking, try using open-ended questions that create the possibility for more engagement in conversation. These won't guarantee long answers from your teen, but the more thought you put into the questions you ask, the better the chances are that your kids will engage with you.

Here are some suggestions for open-ended questions which may help you get thinking about creating your own:

- What was your understanding of what happened when _____________?

- What would you like to see happen when you ____________?

- What do you think caused them to ____________?

- What were the two best things that happened to you today?

- What was the most surprising thing about your day?

- What do you hope your life will look like 10 years from now?

- How has your opinion of our family changed over the years?

- If you could change something about our family, what would it be?

- If you had to choose, what would you say is the best decision you've ever made?

- What sorts of things are most important to you in life right now?