Peaceful Parents and Tweens
What Your Marriage Relationship is Teaching Your Kids
How is your marriage? How your marriage relationship is communicates to your tween what marriage should be. What kind of message are you sending?
A marriage relationship is a work of heart. It sounds very cliche, but is very true. Once you add tweens to the mixture, your marriage takes on a whole new meaning. Tweens start to identify the way people treat other to learn how they should treat others. Parents are the number one couple that tweens secretly spy on, eavesdrops on, and ask inquisitive questions of in their pursuit of deciding how they should be treating the opposite sex. Didn't know you were under the microscope? You are!
What Peaceful Parents Teach Kids
Peaceful parenting is a concept not driven by being a perfect couple who never argue or have differences, but parents who agree to handle situations in a peaceful way. The book Seven Habits of Peaceful Parents (Dr. Joseph Cress, Dr. Elizabeth Lonning, and Burt Berlowe, Resource Publications, 2001)says this about peaceful parents, "They manage their emotions, resolve conflicts, trust their own parenting style, communicate openly, nurture their child’s self-esteem, spend quality time with their children and discipline in a consistent manner." Here is what your child learns from this type of relationship:
Hard work and endurance, as a marriage does take hard work and endurance. You cannot fall in love and marry your dream man or woman and think that it will be rosy all the time. It will never happen. You will disillusion yourself, if you think you can make this person fulfill your fantasy forever. Let your child know often that marriage takes work, and you should not throw in the towel every time misunderstandings or conflicts occur. You endure them and work through them, until a solution is met.
Respect, as more than likely, the person you married has a different personality than you and may feel differently about subjects on politics, religion, personal issues, etc. Learning to accept another person's point of view and still love them is showing a great deal of respect. Your child should hear and see that her parents can be different, and yet still love each other passionately.
Selflessness, as there are times that your spouse depends on you to run an important errand or has to back out of an engagement with you to handle a more pressing situation. Sure it may hurt at the moment, but once you move past that feeling, and realize that your sacrifice is far more worthy than your self-pity, you will be happy to have helped your spouse. This teaches your child that you want to be there for your partner. You want to be the person he or she can lean on when times are hard, even if it means giving up something of your own.
Trust is a very complex trait. It entails trusting your spouse when he or she is away from you. It involves trusting in a decision that one makes that could affect the whole family's well-being. It encompasses every other aspect that is mentioned in this article. Without trust in your marriage, you are leaving a hole that can suck away everything you have worked so hard for. Your child learns that when you dedicate your life to another individual through marriage, you have to be certain that this is the person you will stick with through thick and thin. You cannot marry someone for looks or money. You cannot marry someone for better and leave in worse. Otherwise, the person your child chooses to marry could be the wrong one. Yes, trust is the glue that binds your entire marriage, and your child must know that you love and trust your spouse beyond any doubt, and that it is the thing that makes you feel secure, makes your child feel secure, and makes the family feel secure that you are going to be together year after year, and forever.
