Parenting Is A Generational Contract With God!

​

Why begin with these two Scripture passages? It’s simple. We need to claim God’s promise and live like we believe it and desire it; that is to say, we must love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, not only for our own salvation but for the salvation of our children and our children’s children for a thousand generations to come. This is how I want to begin the discussion of nurturing children’s growth, development, and learning.

​

Children Are Not Born With A Manual In Hand To Tell Us How To Raise Them 

 

Keeping these two scriptures in mind, let’s begin. Perhaps you have heard it said in casual conversations, “Children are not born with a manual in hand to tell us how to raise them.” This is simply our way of talking about the frustrations and inadequacies we feel in raising our children. It is perhaps our way of saying we wish we would have had some training or a few books to read before we actually began parenting and working with children, or it may be our way of saying we wish we had some child development resources right now to refer to as we parent and relate to children.

 

Physicians study medicine and, along the way, build their personal medical libraries long before they give their first medical diagnosis. Similarly, attorneys study law and develop their personal libraries, as do many other professionals. Bringing this analogy a bit closer to home, most have shelves full of “how-to” books and reference the internet almost daily for cooking, gardening, home repairs, computers and computer apps, travel, and first aid. Yet, most of us do not have “how-to” child development books to reference on the spur of the moment or have knowledge of how to search the internet to find ways to support and nurture our children’s growth, development, and learning.

 

I would have liked to have had at least one such book when I was raising my four children. I did have plenty of cumbersome child development college textbooks, but none of these books were parent-friendly. They were simply too theoretical to be useful or even understandable. In the past, I browsed bookstore shelves and discovered numerous books that focused on a single child development topic such as how to discipline children or what to expect during a particular stage of their development.

 

I had yet to find child development resources based on the theories of the most prominent developmental researchers and authors. I researched people who studied the developmental stages of learning, self-concept, morality, socialization and play or leisure, creativity, thinking, language, and physicality, people like Piaget, Kohlberg, Vygotsky, Torrence, Parten, Bandura, Dewey, Gardner, etc., all who wrote about what they researched and learned about our human growth and development from birth to adulthood. I put what they said into a parent-teacher handbook that was written in everyday language, easy to reference, easy-to-read, and above all, easy to use.

 

Each of the books focuses on all aspects of children’s development and offers parents and teachers a comprehensive, user-friendly reference book that defines and describes the development of the “whole child” across six areas of their development called “domains.” Ninety-six developmental characteristics are presented across the six domains. The books then suggest specific activities to do, that support and nurture children in each of the 96 characteristics of their development.