“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” –1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Becky Danielson co-founder of 1 Corinthians 13 Parenting helps us through the principles of raising kids with supernatural love by explaining the importance of modeling patience.
Patience is a foundational characteristic in modeling the 1 Corinthians 13 parenting style.
“I think parents of small children say a lot of quick arrow prayers to God. Parents of teenagers and young adults; we spend a lot of time on our knees praying for our children. But that patience piece is pivotal and it’s to the point that we need to be patient throughout all of our children’s upbringing. We also need to be patient with ourselves.
“With patience I think it’s so important for us to model that patient behavior to our kids.”
What does it look like to model patience? Becky shares a few examples:
• Being able to wait.
• Being able to say, ‘Not yet.’
• Demonstrating patience by waiting for God to move in our lives.
• The patience for a child to learn something and not jump in and fix things for our kids, toddlers or teenagers.
“If a child is struggling in tying his or her shoes…taking the time to be patient and show them over and over and over again, ‘This is how it’s done.’
“When taking a teenager out and working on the driving skills, being patient and not taking over and allowing them to fail.”
We learn that a part of the battle parents face is allowing their children to fail, but Becky explains that children learn so much more from their failures than they do by their successes.
Do we need to adjust our parenting styles?
Becky says yes! At any age in a child’s life there’s generally a different role parents will play, depending on their child’s personality:
“There’s generally one place that we tend to land most frequently; ‘The Controller, The Consultant, The Coach,’ and ‘The Chum’ are the places we want to be because they are as God parents us. ‘The Clueless,’ and ‘The Checked-Out’ parent are places you don’t want to end up because they are there places that children are not going to get what they need.
“To back off and do more of the coaching and more of the consulting and be more of ‘The Chum’ and just have fun with my kids.”
