Ten Suggestions For The Overscheduled ChildWritten by Kimberly Chastain
Ever wonder what happened to family dinner hour? Or for that matter family dinner half hour? Monday is Soccer Practice, Tuesday is Piano lesson, Wednesday is Church Activities, Thursday is a Soccer Game, Friday a birthday party to attend. A number of events will fill up weekend. Do you feel like a professional scheduler and taxi driver? Are you finding yourself increasingly irritable as you go from one activity to next? Maybe you and your children are overscheduled.As a coach and family therapist I see more and more people wanting to find balance in their lives. In past few years I have seen a marked increase in children with anxiety and depression. Children are now saying they are ‘stressed out’. I remember one child in particular who just wanted to play a board game with his parents, only family assignment was to play board game. The family did not have ‘time’ to play game. Children no longer seem to have time to goof off and just be children - goof off time is not on schedule. As parents we need to guard our children and ourselves to protect our children’s unscheduled time to be children. Children need time to create their own games and also to learn to entertain themselves. Children often want us to entertain them or television instead of figuring out how to play by themselves. I would hazard a guess that some of your fondest memories as a child were playing out in backyard with some friends and really doing nothing in particular. Just laughing, playing, talking or ‘being’. Ten Suggestions to keep your family from being overscheduled: 1.Each child in family has one outside activity (i.e. sports, music lessons) besides church activities. (If you have a big family even this may be difficult.)
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This article is copyright and first appeared in 'Cross Times' in September 2004. Do you feel accepted? We only feel really accepted by God as we bring to him all those past hurts that have made us feel rejected and far from him. Feeling accepted is to be able to cry ‘Abba, Father” and really mean it. It is to be able to say in darkest of places “God has not forgotten me. He will not leave me, fail me or forsake me.” It is to be sure God can be trusted not to let us down and to be able to feel that we can come to Him just as we are and that He will still welcome us and treat us as His children no matter how far we have wandered from Him. It is to know that if we were to become prodigal then He would show us truth of that story and welcome us with open arms. Most of us do not feel completely secure in all ways described in first paragraph. Rejection and lack of self acceptance - all difficulties distorted relationships we encounter as children and as adults in a fallen world conspire to make us feel that we are not acceptable to God at all. We feel that He cannot possibly want ‘us,’ The trouble is we have until we are born again been adopted by wrong spiritual father. His name is Satan and he is a liar. He has done all he can to make sure we are products of as much rejection and fractured relationship as he can organise. He has made sure events worked to show us that we cannot possibly be children of living God - not really - we are too bad! We may intellectually have thought ourselves part of God’s family but I wonder how many of us deep down have wondered if perhaps God did not make a mistake? Satan has loved to play on that. He is master of false belief. He will use every word and action we encounter to convince us we are unacceptable. he started when we were very young. In fact from moment he knew we would be born devil has been on an out and out campaign to ensure that one thing we do not get to know is very depth of heart of a loving Father God.
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