No Ordinary Days

This is part two of a series of episodes on preparing to parent during one of the most formative periods in your child's life - their teen years. Whether you have children distant from, nearing, or in the middle of their teens, these episodes are for you.

What's the best way to talk to your teenager? Talk to them for the 12 years they're not a teenager. In part one of this series, we'll focus on the groundwork that needs to be laid so that when your child arrives at the pivotal teen years, they won't just listen to you, they'll actively seek your counsel. It all starts by building trust and communicating a genuine message of love all throughout the...

Parents are fond of using force. Whether it's yelling or threatening or whatever it might be, we're often convinced that the only way to curb misbehavior is to intimidate or frighten our child into compliance. And while some sort of force may initially be necessary at times to get our point across, it's never capable of truly reforming our children's behavior. Why? Because it's...

Raising children can be frustrating - terribly frustrating. Often we feel the need to unburden our frustrations on others. "Can you believe they said that?!" or, " Who do they think they are?" or, "You wouldn't believe what I'm going through," and on and on. But we rarely stop to think about the degree to which our actions are responsible for their actions. We...

I'm not sure that you would characterize this generation as aimless. It's just that so many of our aims are wrong. Mainly, the one that directs us to serve ourselves exclusively. That's not why we're here. Nor is it why your family is here, together, at this particular time. You and your family have a mission - you just might not know it yet. But that mission needs to be discovered and it needs to...

This episode is dedicated to mothers and the inestimably valuable sacrifices they make on behalf of their families. We cannot thank you enough for all that you do.

Isn't it strange how things of little to no importance have a way of crowding out the truly important? Take for instance the inordinate amount of time we spend bickering with other people or fretting about the future or worse - engaging in both of these activities on social media. All the while life - beautiful, real, soul reviving life - is going on around us. But what if we don't have ey...

Over the course of our parenting journey it is certain that we will make mistakes along the way. Regret is waiting to greet us as we make our way to the finish line and he's there to collect a debt. Our job to make sure that we owe him as little as possible. How do we do this? By learning from our mistakes and perceiving the true value of our short time with our children. In this way, though o...

Yelling is a quick fix with a short shelf-life. What’s worse, it rarely reaches the heart of our children for good. In this episode we'll look at the signs that might indicate you yell too much as well as the reasons why parents feel compelled to yell. We'll also discuss some of the damaging effects it can have on our relationship with our children.

Christian parents are quite familiar with Ephesians 6:1 - 2, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honor thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise;" We may have trotted this verse out in moments of disobedience or when we felt our children were being disrespectful. Of course, as it applies to our children the second verse is true, no matter...

We live in a day where our children, and everything they represent, is under constant threat. The time is long past for us as parents to become clear eyed with respect to these threats and to fight, every single day, on our children's behalf. It's a fight that requires sacrifice, perhaps for some even the ultimate sacrifice, but how could we give our children anything less?

Our children are on a journey back to the one who created them (as are we). Our job is to help them along their way but we are also more than capable of hindering them. We can do this in many ways, but in this episode we're going to focus on our being either too harsh or too lenient. Exclusively focusing on our child's faults to the near exclusion of their strengths, or vice versa, is at its heart...

When it comes to your identity as a parent, what's the message you're trying to send to your child? That you know what's best? Conveying that message is understandable but it has a fatal flaw - you don't always know what's best and you of all people should know that you aren't perfect. With that in mind there is a better and more effective message to send to your children -...

We as parents would love it if all we had to do was to tell our children what to do and they just did it. Of course it almost never works like that. Not only are nearly all of the tasks we give them difficult for them to carry out (due to their lack of experience) they rarely see the value of the tasks seeing as how they're, well, children. In this episode we discuss how we need to approach the is...

Do you know what you should reasonably be able to expect from your 3 year old or 10 year old? How about your 1 month old? The truth is it is all too easy for our expectations to be unequal to our children's age, whether they are too high or too low. Unmet expectations can be a source of great frustration, and frustration almost always serves to weaken our relationship with our children. Knowing th...

Obedience is like the holy grail of parenting. Not only does it make our lives as parents a whole lot easier, we believe raising obedient children forms a part of our duty. The truth is, there really is only one reason why your children should obey you - because God told them to. Sadly, we often abuse our authority to coerce our children into obedience, thus making it more difficult for them to re...

(This is the second part of a two part series). To parent well you need principles. But principles can only take you so far if you don't know who you're applying them to. Do you know your child? Do you know their likes and dislikes? Do you understand why they do the things they do - why they respond the way they do to you? Regardless of whether you do (or think you do) every parent can ben...

To parent well you need principles. But principles can only take you so far if you don't know who you're applying them to. Do you know your child? Do you know their likes and dislikes? Do you understand why they do the things they do - why they respond the way they do to you? Regardless of whether you do (or think you do) every parent can benefit from becoming a student of their children....

There's no denying that the journey of parenting is arduous, the question is, how far will we go? All along the way there will be naysayers, doubters, scoffers. "Why are you doing this?" they'll ask (it's a question you'll pose to yourself on occasion as well). This question is a "checkpoint" of sorts, a mini-test. To pass you have to provide a reasonable answer...

There are many, many different kinds of parents out there, but among parents who are conscientious about how their children turn out, there are 3 predominant groups - Right Side, Left Side, and Center of the Road parents. What are the characteristics that define each of these groups and how can you ensure you're in the right one? That's the topic of today's episode. Mentioned In This P...

If you want to steer a ship, you need control of the rudder. If you want to steer your child, you need control of the heart. But how do you gain this control and how much control are we talking about exactly? This isn't as easily answered as you might think. Many parents believe the way to the heart is through the will, and so they set out to "break" or "conquer" their child's will as if it were s...

Here are some things we know - for most of (in some cases, all of) our children's time under our roof we are bigger, stronger, smarter, richer, and more experienced than they are. These are all traits or characteristics upon which authority may be established, but terrible conditions from which it should be maintained. Furthermore, relationships founded exclusively on authority are often cold,...

I think many parents (understandably) would very much like it if each one of their children came with their own instruction manual - like the ones you might find in the glove box of your car or that come included with IKEA furniture. Fortunately, they don't, because if they did we would miss out on one of the most profound experiences of being a parent - the experience of seeing the world thro...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the No Ordinary Days podcast! This episode is all about laying the groundwork for all that's to come. Why are we doing this? Why the name? Why now? The short version is, we feel passionate about parenting, about children, about family. I've been talking about these things for years at live events, but it's time (past time) to speak to a broader audie...