How Family Counseling Services Can Help You and Your Loved Ones

Today’s world is fast-paced, and we’re all affected by it. Information overload has become a normal part of our daily lives, as we’re inundated with parenting tips, productivity hacks, marriage advice, and guidance about our faith. This stream of information can be helpful, but it can also be overpowering.

One of the main areas of our lives where we’re constantly being told what to do is in parenting. This can lead us to perfectionism and the burden of having to produce perfect children. Logically, we may know that neither we nor our kids will ever be perfect, but subconsciously we may still be drawn to the pretty picture of optimal parenting.

Balancing Family Roles, Demands, and Contentment

Since there are valuable messages to be found, and also messages that not only won’t help us, but can even hurt us, how do we tell the difference? How do we balance our roles, take care of our responsibilities, and feel secure in the life choices we’ve made?

It’s critical that we place our relationship with God above everything else. We need to come into His presence on a regular basis, allowing His Word to speak to our hearts every day. Our children should see us prioritizing our time with God. We can weave conversation about what He’s doing in our lives into everyday moments with our kids.

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. – Deuteronomy 28:18-21

The Priority of Marriage

Our marriage is the second most important relationship in our lives, our influence on future generations will be felt largely through it. A strong and stable relationship provides a secure, nurturing environment for our kids. When children are raised by stable, married parents, they are more likely to be emotionally and financially secure. Our marriage is the primary model for our children’s relationships, and if they grow up to have strong marriages themselves, they will provide a healthy foundation for their own children. So focusing on cultivating a strong, happy marriage will benefit generations to come.

It’s never too late to work on your marriage, but the earlier you start, the better.

• Have a short daily check-in with your spouse. Teach the children that they should not interrupt these moments.
• Plan regular date nights where you can reconnect apart from your other roles and responsibilities.
• Take weekends away so you can recharge together. If you don’t have family available for child care, offer to exchange weekends away with another couple.

Setting Boundaries

Boundaries are meant to protect what’s most important, and allow you to fully experience the current moment. Technology is a tool to help with productivity and organization, but use it sparingly and set screen-free times at home to enable you to focus on your spouse and kids. Some families use a basket where all devices are placed during dinner or before bed. This way family connections and a quality night’s sleep are prioritized over electronics.

Together with your spouse, decide how to limit your kids’ activities. Perhaps each child can be restricted to one sport and one creative activity at a time, but they have the option of choosing the specific activities they’ll enjoy, whether that be ballet, soccer, swimming, baseball and softball, biking, tennis, guitar, piano, flute or voice lessons, martial arts, or an array of church or volunteer activities. These boundaries allow for freedom within specific guidelines.

Tufts University psychologist and author of The Hurried Child notes, “Kids who have been trained to be tennis stars, skating stars, or pianists, and who haven’t been allowed to express other parts of themselves, may feel empty in adolescence – just as a businessman who succeeds in the outside world, to the neglect of his inside world, starts to feel empty.” Elkind reminds parents that children need time to be unscheduled and even bored. He warns parents against overscheduling.

Boundaries are very beneficial for kids; the limits provide them with a sense of safety and a structure in which to relax. This helps reduce any anxiety they may have.

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. – Proverbs 1:8-9

Social media is an area that is filled with temptation in many ways. While it’s fun, it’s also addictive and can negatively affect mental health because of our propensity to compare our lives to other people’s success stories. We may find ourselves struggling with discontentment, feeling dissatisfied with our own lives and identities. Set limits and guard yourself against being drawn into the vortex of comparison.

Kids also need definitive boundaries with social media. They need to know what it’s good for, and how to identify its dangers. Share passwords with your spouse and let transparency be the rule in your home. This will make your marriage stronger and help you trust each other.

Another area in which to set boundaries is in caring for yourself. Taking care of one’s self can become low on the priority list for parents and especially for moms, but it’s important to prioritize so that you can take better care of others. Our kids need to see us making this a priority.

Consider the following ideas:

• Exercise
• Eat healthy foods
• Spend time alone
• Nurture our relationship with God
• Spend time having fun with friends
• Spend time with our spouse

When children are very young, this may be more difficult, but try to find moments to incorporate these activities.

Avoid Overparenting

Overparenting has also been called helicopter parenting. Both children and parents are negatively affected by this parenting style. When we are constantly focused on our child’s well-being, it can cause them to feel anxious. Making our kids the center of our lives can lead to an imbalance in other areas, such as marriage, faith, and self-care.

It can also make our children feel responsible for our emotional well-being. We should be able to function at a healthy level even if our kids are struggling with their behavior or performance in some way. This will lead to a greater sense of security for our kids, knowing they aren’t responsible for making their parents feel a certain way.

Hal Runkel, author of the book “Scream Free Parenting,” asks parents to consider a specific situation, and ask themselves who is having a hard time: the parents, or the child who’s made a poor decision? He advises parents to allow their kids to experience the natural consequences of their own choices.

For example, if a child forgets his soccer uniform frequently, don’t fix the situation, but allow the consequences (e.g. – being required to run laps by the coach, or sitting out of a game) to make an impact. This will impact a child’s behavior more than the parent rushing in to fix everything.

Good decisions come from experience; experience comes from making bad decisions. – Anonymous

Along the same lines, parents need to allow their kids the space to do things themselves. If they haven’t obeyed an age-appropriate instruction to clean their room, don’t clean it for them.  To do so reinforces their non-compliance, making future instructions empty because you’re implicitly teaching your child that if they delay long enough, you’ll do it for them.

Often, parents are still waking up high schoolers every morning for school. Even college freshmen sometimes ask their parents to call and wake them up for class. If a high school or college student isn’t able to wake themselves up on our their own yet, this signals a serious problem with their maturity levels.

Another example is that of a mom who would keep track of her college-aged child’s assignments, test schedules, and deadlines online. She would then create a study schedule so her child could meet all of their deadlines. This is overparenting that prevents a young person from reaching his or her full potential. Without meaning to, the parent is communicating that the child is unable to handle college-level work without parental supervision.

If these scenarios sound familiar to you, consider taking a step back, deliberately choosing not to be anxious, and allowing your child to take risks for him or herself. This is one way of respecting your child’s abilities and will enhance his or her growth into a fully-functioning adult.

Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it. – Proverbs 22:6

Author Meg Meeker, M.D. has identified five symptoms that point to overparenting:

• Every time your child encounters a problem, she calls you to ask how to handle it.
• Your child is unable to handle disappointment on his own.
• Your child avoids doing hard work, instead opting to take any available shortcut.
• You do your child’s homework, call his teacher for him, and regularly act as his advocate.
• Each week you do hours of Internet research, searching for answers for your child’s stage of life, whether that be the perfect preschool, the most quality vitamins, or organic meal plans.

Parents, focus on the big things. The rest will fall into place. – Meg Meeker

Overparenting is often caused by comparison. Don’t compare your child to others. Don’t compare your parenting to other people’s parenting. Comparison is directly correlated with discontentment and anxiety.

You may need to take some time away from social media, which as we’ve discussed above is often the cause of comparison. Often, parents who compare themselves to others suffer from guilt related to all the ways they think they’re falling short.

Christy Wright, the host of the Business Boutique podcast, addresses four ways to overcome guilt related to parenting:

• Don’t make yourself into a martyr. Don’t take responsibility for things you’re not responsible for.
• Affirm to yourself that what you’re doing matters. Your work matters, your family time matters, and your time with God matters above everything else.
• Give yourself grace. It’s impossible to be a perfect parent. What your kids need is for you to be emotionally and physically present. They also need you to be holistically healthy, which you means you take time for yourself and to cultivate your marriage.
• Take care of yourself, and enjoy your life so your kids can see your contentment and joy. Scripture reminds us: “Children are a blessing from the Lord and the fruit of the womb is His reward.” Let’s live as parents in a way that reflects this truth.

How Family Counseling Services Can Help

If you’re finding life balance difficult to achieve, maybe you are overparenting and lacking time for self-care, your relationship with the Lord, and your marriage. Professional Christian family counseling services can help you find a healthy balance.

Family counseling services have helped many clients get to a place of health and balance in their marriages and parenting. If you need some practical help in this area, we would love to have the opportunity to work with you. Asking for help is a sign of strength, so don’t be afraid to reach out today.