Hello again. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Charissa and I am married to David and together we have 4 beautiful children ranging in age from 5 up to 10 years old. As promised last time, I thought I would share with you some of the amazing wisdom Anne Marie Ezzo shared with us while we were with them in South Carolina recently.

Our family had the privilege of spending 5 weeks this summer with the Ezzos in their home in Mount Pleasant. Now, I say ‘summer’ but as we come from Australia, it was actually our winter! The fact that we got to miss the coldest, wettest part of our winter was blessing enough but having the privilege of Anne Marie’s wisdom ‘on tap’ for 5 weeks was an even bigger blessing!

So, on the morning before we left, Anne Marie & I were having our morning swim and I ‘took the plunge’ and asked her one of the scariest questions I could think of! :eek: I asked her ‘Now that you have spent 5 weeks with our family, living in the same house!, what advice can you give me re: parenting each of our children?’ I guess the question really was ‘How am I doing as a Mum?’ Now, for any of you who know Anne Marie, you will know that she is a lady not only full of incredible wisdom but also incredible grace.

So, how did she respond? She smiled :-D then she ever so gently went through each of our children and how we could ‘fine tune’ our parenting with each of them. She also gave us some tips for our family as a whole. I thought I’d spend the next few blogs sharing what they were. Here’s the first one – Don’t parent to your child’s emotions.

What does that mean? Well, we have several ‘melancholy’ children in our family and one in particular who manages to manipulate using his emotions. Actually, if the truth be known, he manages to manipulate me, Mum, by his emotions. What does that look like? Even at 10, when faced with a difficult or unpleasant task, he will often cry, sulk or tell me how he can never do anything right and I keep getting drawn into it! I am a Mum after all. Aren’t Mums supposed to be compassionate and loving and aren’t we the ones who are there to hug them when the rest of the world tells them to ‘get on with it’? Yes, we are but we are also not doing them, or our family, any favours if we allow them to manipulate us in this way. After all, as an adult we don’t get our own way if we sulk! Don’t we as Mums also have the responsibility of training our children for real life?

So, how have I changed since hearing this advice? I’m still compassionate and am still there to hug and care for my boy as I was before but I am also more aware of how he behaves and of how that affects our family. David and I want to prepare our children for adulthood and we can begin that now by teaching them appropriate ways of communicating and sharing how they feel so they don’t grow up ‘molly coddled’! (Is that a word other people use around the world?) It’s hard to step back and be objective as a parent but it’s a healthy thing to do from time to time so we can see the patterns that are forming and then decide if we need to make any changes.

Next time I’ll share with you what Anne Marie had to say about our eldest daughter!

Until then

Blessings, Charissa