The Best Parenting Advice I Ever Received

Last updated on: March 6, 2019 at 6:41 am by Shaunti Feldhahn

The Best Parenting Advice I Ever Received 2019-03-06T06:41:50-04:00 Shaunti Feldhahn

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A number of years later after talking to this mom of teenagers, my ten-year-old daughter and I were driving in our minivan when she gave me her first serious, no-holds-barred, legit, pre-teen eye roll in response to something I said.

Now, normally, my head explodes at signs of disrespect—and so does my voice! But suddenly, it was as if God flashed my mind back to my conversation with that mom. I had to make a decision about how I was going to view and communicate in this new season of parenting before me.

I took a moment to be calm, and said to my daughter, “Honey, let’s have a conversation about this. You may not realize it, but you were really disrespectful right there, and that’s not okay. I know you think dad and I just have random rules, and we don’t understand you. You think that we don’t know what we’re talking about. And you might have those feelings again. So here’s my request: Can you have grace with us for, oh, about the next ten years?”

My daughter laughed, but then stopped as she realized I meant it. “I’m serious, honey. Can we agree that until you go off to college, whenever you think we don’t know what we’re talking about, that you’ll have grace with us? Because otherwise, these next ten years might be unpleasant for all of us.”

She looked at me for a minute. I could tell she was suddenly taking my request seriously. “Okay,” she said. No eye roll in sight.

The next time another eye roll made an appearance, I reminded her, “Remember our agreement? That isn’t okay. And this is one of those times when you can show grace.” And you know what? It worked.

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