In Our Hands

Discipline your children while you still have the chance;
    indulging them destroys them. (The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 19, Verse 18, The Message, BibleGateway.com)

We feed them sugar in its myriad forms, buy them a dizzying array of plastic stuff, and use the TV as our baby sitter. Then we pay the dentist. But the chance is gone to form their character and their intellect.

This holiday season, let’s give them the gift of ourselves, an informed us.

So what will I do for Sophie? I’ll play Zoominoes with her tonight and do tic-tac-toe. She loves that and cheats. Not really. She just changes the rules as we go along. Maybe she is on her way to Extreme Ownership. She does lead to win. By that I mean she grabs the pen and changes my O to an X. Voilá! Victory for the five-year old.

Oh, and maybe I’ll revisit Simplicity Parenting, the best book I know on child rearing, other than maybe The Book of Proverbs, which takes us back to where this post started.