Last night was Staff Meeting and dinner at our home, falling after a full day of meetings, two crisies with our children and no food at all in my nauseas stomach. To be honest I had not even reread the chapter by the time I got to the meeting!! Yet it was amazing to see God at work opening hearts, mouths and minds to discuss some of the ideas in the book.

Now in chapter four of Raising Resiliant Children, we discussed “Changing the Words of Parenting” all about our tendency to repeat the same negative “scripts” of parenting talk over and over despite their lack of effectiveness. Drawing on the concept of drama with ourselves as actors and our words as the script, we role played some of our normal scripts as staff with students then looked at what we had said. After our initial role play, identifying common responses to students who are disruptive at preps, all staff identified the script as “positive.” (I would say it is ANYTHING BUT but my opinion is not nearly as important as theirs!) From here we had the opportunity to look at what “positive” means and the difference between speaking truth and having truth “heard” by our students. We went back over the lessons from last week about active and passive listening and talked about what in our scripts is “working,” – what results and change are we seeing? What an amazing transformation to see staff really thinking and pondering and beginning to change their minds about this initial look at our “scripts” as staff. We ended the discussion with talk about heart change versus behavioral change and the need for both in a christian school environment. Even the concept of the difference between the two drew questions and comments. Though we have not committed to any major changes, I feel tremendously blessed by the positive and active response from the entire staff. We have certainly sat through meetings with NO response from staff, so the active participation, dramas, disagreements and questions are truly gifts from God.

Check out Raising Reliant Children. It’s a secular book but the concepts are biblically based and the core of it is rock-solid. There are very few parenting books I find helpful but this one I loved.