The Art of Parenting

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. The Bridge that Love Built Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: Relationships (Day 1 of 3)  Bob: All of us, as parents, want our children to be able to form healthy relationships as they grow up. Dennis Rainey says, for that to happen, moms and dads need to know how to skillfully pursue a strong relationship with each of their children. Dennis: First Corinthians 13 says, if you’ve missed love, you’ve missed life; so these little children that you’re raising, who will become big people, have to be trained in the basics of love. That begins with us as parents. You and I, as parents, are God’s physical arms of love to these little people to tutor them in what love truly means. Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, December 5th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Don’t assume that your children are going to be naturally good at forming strong, healthy relationships; that’s a bad assumption. They need your help to know how to develop those kinds of skills.  1:00 We’ll talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. You know, when I think back on all of the things that Mary Ann and I thought about—in terms of “These are things we need to make sure we teach our children,”—I don’t know that it ever dawned on us that one of the things we needed to teach our children was how to be good at relationships. I don’t know that that was ever a conscious thought—that teaching them how to be good at relationships was something we would need to do. I guess we just thought: “Well, that just happens,”—right?—“You grow up, and you’re good at relationships.” Dennis: Right. And you’re supposed to know how to do it naturally; right? I want to ask my bride, Barbara—we just celebrated our 46 years of marriage,— 2:00 Bob: Congratulations, by the way. Barbara: Thank you, sir. Dennis: —and we had six kids that are all married now: “Go back to the beginning. Did you and I ever have a conscious—we probably had some, when we were unconscious, raising kids—[Laughter]—Did we ever have a conscious thought about training our kids to love others?” Barbara: Not early on, but I remember having conscious thoughts about it when sibling rivalry was at its peak; because then I’m thinking, “Oh my; I have to teach these kids how to relate to each other.” Bob: —“how not to kill each other.” Barbara: Yes; so it was defensive. Bob: I do remember that—that you have to teach them how to get along with one another and, maybe, how to get along with kids on the playground. But again, the whole idea that relationship training is a part of a parent’s responsibility—I think that’s one of the big ideas I think you guys have captured in your book, The Art of Parenting. It’s what we’re going to spend time talking about on today’s program. Dennis: You know, you never know, Bob, who’s listening to the broadcast. I had a young lady come up to me in Boulder, Colorado, this past summer— 3:00 she said: “I grew up in Southern California. In the backseat of our car, as my mom would be driving me to school, I’d be listening to FamilyLife Today.” [Laughter] She said, “I listened to it for years—all the way through elementary school, junior high, high school. Then I kind of left the faith.” She said: “I went to Stanford, and I kind of lost my way; but graduated—came out the other side—and was listening to FamilyLife Today again when it got my attention. It was like, ‘I need to come back to what I had heard.’” She said: “I’m not married. I have a couple of kids. All that training—all that training I heard—as a little girl, growing up—is now paying off for me, as a mom. I just want to say, ‘Thank you to FamilyLife Today for doing what you do.’” Bob: Well, you know who we need to say, “Thank you,” to— Dennis: I do! Bob: —the people, who have made this program possible over the years. Dennis: That’s what I want to say to our listeners right now: “Would you make this broadcast possible to another little girl like that?”—  4:00 —“maybe to their mom and dad,—maybe to a couple, who are engaged, who need to go to a Weekend to Remember®,” You’ve heard about it here, so you know how to get them there; but to do that, we need folks, like you, standing with us, financially, with generous gifts, here at yearend. Over 40 percent of our donations come in in the next 30 days, and those 30 days make the other 11 months possible.  Bob: Yes; that’s right. Dennis: Would you stand with us? I’m serious. I’ve been doing this now for 27 years, and none of your money is sticking to my fingers—trust me. It’s all going in to provide help and hope—biblical help and hope—for marriages and families, all across the country, and around the world. Bob: Well, and here’s why right now is a really good time for you to make a yearend donation. We have some friends of the ministry, who have come along, and offered to match every donation that we receive, as a ministry, between now and the end of the year, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $2.5 million. You make a $50 donation; we get $50 from the matching fund.  5:00 You make a $100 donation; we get $100. We’re hoping to take full advantage of this matching-gift opportunity. That’s why we’re asking you, as a listener, to be as generous as you can possibly be, here at yearend, and help us head into 2019 fully ready to take on the challenges that are in front of us, as a ministry. If you can help with a donation right now, we’d like to say, “Thank you,” by sending you a gift. Several months ago, FamilyLife® had our first feature film—a movie called Like Arrows in movie theaters. That movie is not yet available for purchase on DVD, but we have a limited supply of the DVDs that we’re making available to those of you who make a yearend donation. Again, it’s our thank-you gift when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com and make an online donation or when you call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. Again, we appreciate your support of this ministry and your partnership with us, here, on FamilyLife Today. 6:00 Now, we’re talking about big ideas in parenting. This idea of helping your child know how to do relationships—this is key for parents to get their heads around. Dennis: It’s one of four big ideas that we want to challenge parents with. What I compare these four with is reading, writing, and arithmetic to education. Those are the basics; those are the fundamentals. If you know how to do reading, writing, arithmetic, you can be fairly well-educated. Well, in raising kids, there are four biblical issues/big biblical issues. What I want to encourage—what Barbara and I want to challenge parents to do is establish the target. Know what you’re aiming for; you might just hit it. So the reading, writing, and arithmetic of parenting are these four.  Where we’re going to start today—relationships—Bob has already talked about that.  7:00 Second one—character—this is helping your kid be wise and not a fool: choosing right and not wrong, not destroying his or her life.  Third area is identity—spiritual identity: we’re made in God’s image; sexual identity: “Male and female created He them.” You’re helping your kids determine: “What does it mean to be a boy?” “What does it mean to be a girl?” and “What are the distinctives there?” Number four—mission—teach your child he was made for a mission. Psalm 127, verses 3 through 5, says children are a blessing—they’re a reward; they’re a heritage—but they are also “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior…” You, as a parent—and we’ll talk more about this when we talk about mission later—you, as a parent, are compared to a warrior.  8:00 And if you’ve never felt that in this culture, you’ve had your head in the sand; because you are battling for the next generation. Your children/your arrows are in your hand. How are you going to help them head to the right goal in the midst of so many confusing targets that are being thrown at them? Bob: I preached a sermon at our church recently. I said, “We tend to think of the big story of the Bible around the four themes of creation, and fall, and redemption, and then consummation.” People have heard those categories before; but I said: “What’s common in all four of those periods—creation, fall, redemption, and consummation—what’s common is the big idea of relationship.  “In creation, we were related in perfect harmony with God and with each other. In the fall, our relationship with God was broken; and our relationship with each other was messed up. In redemption, what was broken is put back together and repaired; and so we begin to re-cultivate a relationship with God and with one another.  9:00 “And in consummation, it’s a perfectly-restored relationship that lasts for eternity.” The idea of healthy, relational functioning—the idea of the fact that we have good relationships is central to God’s design for humanity.  Barbara: Yes. Dennis: I want to talk about relationships, and I want to use an illustration to do it. A Christian leader, that will remain unnamed, had just completed a 14-city book tour. He was on his way back home when he found a note that he was to have lunch with a person, who had won the bidding contest for having lunch with him after the tour was over. But he wasn’t surprised at all that somebody had spend $500 in the bidding contest for lunch with him.  10:00 What surprised him most was that the person, who won the bidding, was his daughter. She wanted to have lunch with Daddy—she wanted a relationship with him. I think we forget our children were made for relationship. As Bob said earlier, they were made to be trained how to do this right.  If you think about the great commandment—when Jesus was asked, “What’s the greatest of all the commandments?” what did He say? “Love God; love others,”—it’s all about love. You go over to the Book of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13 and what did Paul say?—he said: “If I speak with the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith so as to remove mountains but have not love”—listen to these words/three words—“I am nothing.” 11:00 First Corinthians 13 says, if you’ve missed love, you’ve missed life; so these little children that you’re raising, who will become big people, have to be trained in the basics of love. That begins with us, as parents. You and I, as parents, are God’s physical arms of love to these little people to tutor them in what love truly means. Bob: And Barbara, our kids are not naturally good at relationships any more than we are naturally good at relationships; because when we rebel against God—when we reject Him and say, “I’ll be my own authority,”—that puts all of our relationships out of whack. Ultimately, for us to have healthy relationships, we have to have our relationship with God realigned. But as we raise the next generation, we just need to recognize our kids are not going to naturally and instinctively be good at loving one another; right? 12:00 Barbara: Yes; and I think that’s one of the things that was so hard for me, as a mom, is that I expected more of my children than they were capable of giving. I think that’s true, universally, because it would be so much easier for me, as a mom, if they would get it sooner and become mature quicker. But children are children, and it takes time for them to learn these lessons over and over again; because they’re born selfish, just like we are. That training and teaching them: how to have a good relationship, how to ask for forgiveness, how to apologize when they’ve made mistakes, how to restore the relationship—that is the kind of teaching that has to be repeated over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.  It wears us out, as parents; but it is the goal—is teaching them how to have good relationships and realizing that it takes the entire 18 years that they’re in your home for them to develop the kind of competence in relationships that will serve them well as they become adults. 13:00 Bob: The starting place for all of this with your kids—and this is one of the things you say in the book I think is so helpful—our kids need a healthy, loving, strong, connected relationship with us. Dennis: Yes; yes. Barbara: Right. Bob: That creates in them an awareness of what strong relationships are all about—a thirst for those kinds of relationships to be a part of their life. This is where, in the early years, moms and dads need to be focusing on building the kind of relationship with their kids that their kids—well, they want to spend $500 to have lunch with Daddy; because they crave that relationship. Dennis: And in the book, we compare loving your child to building a bridge. Now, think about a bridge for a moment. A bridge is something that is built across obstacles—it may be a river, it may be a canyon, could be a forest— 14:00 —but a bridge connects two different sections of land to each other so that traffic can go back and forth. With parents, you are given the assignment by God to, first of all, build the lanes across the bridge to your child’s heart; okay? The way you do that—we have three ways/three lanes that you build. Number one: You love your child unconditionally. Number two: You pursue your child. Number three: You make forgiveness a part of your family’s DNA. Let me tell you something—if this bridge goes up, and it doesn’t have the third lane, the first and second are going to be crossed out by people disappointing each other. What you’re doing, as a parent, is—you’re training your kids to know how to love an imperfect person. Bob: And these three lanes—unconditional love, pursuit, and then forgiveness—these are lanes that you may establish early, but there are roadblocks that go up all during adolescence/pre-adolescence.  15:00 We have to keep those lanes clear, because they can get clogged over time; can’t they? Barbara: Yes. And this is where parents have to be parents—they have to be mature; they have to be the wiser one and not drop down to your child’s level. Really, what we’re doing, as moms and dads, is—we’re modeling God’s love. We’re showing our kids what God’s love looks like. Dennis: And I’ll tell you—here’s the surprise in all of this. This is very simple. I thought, at the beginning, God gave us six kids to raise them. He, in essence, gave us six kids to help us grow up and learn how to love truly—a truly Agape love that loves another person, despite their attitude/their behavior. I want to tell you—when they were teenagers, they would mud-wrestle. They’d try to get you in the mud-hole with them and mud-wrestle with emotions. What you have to do is love them enough not to get in the mud-hole. 16:00 Bob: Yes; and here’s the key takeaway, I think, here in the area of unconditional love: When your children experience consequences/when they experience discipline for bad decisions—and they’re going to; they’re going to have to be disciplined; they’re going to have to get some time-outs or some privileges taken away—but what they should never experience in that is any sense that their relationship with you— Dennis: Yes; the bridge can’t go down. Bob: —has been threatened at all. Barbara: Yes; yes. Bob: They have to be able to go to bed at night, going, “Okay; I got what I deserved, but Mom and Dad still love me.” Barbara: Yes; that’s exactly right. Bob: Yes. Dennis: And that’s where the pursuit of the child comes in. Pursuing them when they want to talk is not always going to be convenient, but you go to their room. If you have one of those moments, you pursue them and you just build that bridge. You just pursue them and let them know—and then you praise them, believe in them, especially if they’re filled with self-doubt. 17:00 And by the way, most teenage boys and girls are filled with all kinds of self-doubt. They need Mom and Dad to fiercely, fiercely believe in them— Barbara: Agreed. Dennis: —and to keep expressing those words. Bob: You guys were hugely busy with what was going on in the ministry as you were raising your kids. You had six kids. I’m thinking: “One-on-one interaction with each of the six kids”—you know—“did that happen like once a quarter?” [Laughter] Dennis: How do you spell “Loser”? I felt like a loser most of the time as we were raising our kids. Bob: But you tried to be purposeful there, to say: “Okay; I need time—I haven’t had time with this child for awhile. I have to get some time away,”—whether it’s go to the hardware store together, or we go out for ice cream together, or we—you just tried to make sure that you were getting some one-on-one time with each of your kids all the way through the process; right? Barbara: Well, and sometimes it’s just going into their room at night and getting next to that child’s bed and talking to that child.  18:00 I think another thing that’s really important, too, in pursuing is praying specifically for that child, by name, with him or her; because there’s something about being prayed for that makes you feel loved and cared for. All the way through their years, we would go into their rooms at night—and all of them always shared a room, so they weren’t really ever alone in their room when we did this—but we go to their bed and we would talk to that one child, eye to eye; and we would pray for that one child, eye to eye. We didn’t do it every single night, but we did it a lot. Even those two or three minutes of one-on-one time at night in their bedroom before they turned off their light I think is also an investment that’s important. Dennis: We have to get to the third lane. Bob: Forgiveness? Dennis: Forgiveness. We have to get there, because it’s the core of how God relates to us: “…forgiving one another just as God in Christ forgave you.” Listen to me, parents—  19:00 —your assignment is to communicate the forgiveness of God, practically, in all the different ways they disappoint you. In the many foul-ups and the many failures, you are modeling something that is supernatural.  I have to share this quote by an unlikely source: Anne Lamont. Listen to this statement she makes about forgiveness: “Earth is forgiveness school. You might as well start at the dinner table; that way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.” [Laughter] Isn’t that a great quote?! Bob: It is. Dennis: Start at the dinner table; because you can do the work of forgiveness and feel comfortable, in a family, doing it. Bob: And as you said, over and over again, part of the whole forgiveness equation is modeling for our children what it looks like to seek forgiveness when we’ve done wrong so that they can then know how to seek forgiveness when they’ve done wrong.  20:00 This whole idea of, not just granting forgiveness to our kids when they’ve disobeyed, but showing them, when we mess up, we need forgiveness as well—and I know that’s a part of the dynamic.  I’m thinking about what you shared in the Art of Parenting™ video series, where one Thanksgiving you sat down with your kids and you had to ask for their forgiveness for how you had been harsh and critical with them. Barbara: Yes, yes; that was a real milestone, I think, in our family. Dennis and I made it a practice, all the years we were raising our kids, to apologize when we made mistakes. I apologized every day, multiple times, for all kinds of things, to our kids.  But I went through a season of really understanding—God was working in my life, and I was really coming to an understanding that I was really broken and wicked at the core. I wanted my children to understand that it was more than just I made occasional mistakes, here and there; but I wanted them to know that I was a sinner and that I was not— 21:00 —I was not infallible. I wanted them to hear me say: “I am really sorry that you have had to experience my sin nature/my old sin nature. I wish that I could have bottled it up, and hidden it more or protected you from it more, but there it is.” I just wanted them to know that I recognized that I was a sinful person, and that living with sinful people is harmful, and I wished I could have done it differently. Dennis: And at that point, you wept. Barbara: Oh, yes; yes, I was heartbroken; because I didn’t want to do that to my kids. I didn’t want to harm my children.  Dennis: I don’t think the kids had ever seen you weep. Barbara: Well, not like that; no—no. Dennis: But she had a godly sorrow about her sin; and then she asked them, “Will you forgive me?”— Barbara: Yes. Dennis: —and went around, person by person. Barbara: And the great thing about kids is that they are always eager to forgive; because they love Mommy and Daddy, and they want a relationship. Bob: Yes.  22:00 The significance of these three lanes on this bridge can’t be overestimated.  Barbara: Yes; yes.  Bob: While you’re building them, it doesn’t feel as significant; but when the tension comes up/when there’s conflict later on, having these lanes working—unconditional love, and pursuit, and forgiveness—keeps the relationship alive and thriving. I would hope our listeners would get a copy of your book, The Art of Parenting. It is now available, and you can go online to order at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. This is a great book for moms and dads to read together. Again, the title is The Art of Parenting. There’s a DVD series that goes with it that you can use with a small group. The information about the DVD series and the book are available, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com. You can order from us, online; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order: 1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” 23:00 Now, speaking of The Art of Parenting—this year, we produced a feature film that was a part of the Art of Parenting project. In fact, many of you saw it in theaters, back in May. It’s a movie called Like Arrows. That movie is not yet available for purchase on DVD; it will be available in early spring of 2019.  We do have a limited number of DVDs we’re making available this month to those of you who can help with a yearend donation to support the ministry of FamilyLife Today. As you heard Dennis mention earlier, the need is significant; but so is the opportunity. We have a matching-gift fund of $2.5 million that we’re trying to take full advantage of. Every donation you make, here at yearend, is going to be matched, dollar for dollar, up to that two-and-a-half million dollar total.  If you’re able, go online and donate at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate.  24:00 Again, we’ll say, “Thank you,” by sending you a special pre-release DVD of FamilyLife’s movie, Like Arrows. It’s our way of saying, “Thank you for your partnership with us in this ministry.” And we hope you can be back with us, again, tomorrow when we’re going to talk about one of the very important skills our kids need to learn as they form healthy relationships—and that’s how to seek forgiveness, how to grant forgiveness, how to resolve conflict effectively. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. I hope you can be with us. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. The Family as a Training Center Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: Relationships (Day 2 of 3)   Bob: Is it okay for moms and dads to fight in front of the kids? Barbara Rainey says, sometimes, it is. Barbara: We decided that we wanted our kids to see us having some disagreements—not big conflict—but if we were disagreeing about something that was not a huge thing, but we really both had a strong opinion on it, we decided that we would go again and occasionally express our disagreement in front of our kids and let them watch us work it out. We just disagree, and parents disagree. It’s okay for parents to disagree. Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, December 6th. Our host is Dennis Rainey; I'm Bob Lepine. Your kids are going to have to know how to resolve conflict, because conflict is a part of life. They need your coaching, and they need to see how you do it. We’re going to talk more about that today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Thursday edition. We’re going to talk today about what moms and dads can do to help their children develop some relational intelligence—to help them know how to do relationships right. Dennis: —how to love imperfect people. It’s that kind of programming that we try to provide, here, at FamilyLife Today that keeps listeners coming back for more. You ought to hear one of my favorite stories—my all-time stories—in 27 years of broadcasting. It was a letter from a woman, who lived in Alaska. Where she lived, she couldn’t get a radio signal; so she, every day—it was like at 10 o’clock/10:30—she would get on her snowmobile and drive out to a ridge [Laughter] so she could listen to FamilyLife Today. A woman—a wife/a mother—who needed practical biblical help and hope for her home. When you give to FamilyLife Today, you’re making this broadcast possible— 2:00 —not merely to folks who live on the outskirts of humanity in Alaska—but you’re making it possible, all across our country. If you believe in what we’re doing, here, on FamilyLife Today, I need you to pick up the phone, or go online, or take out a check and say: “Guys, keep going! Twenty-seven years has been great, but we need this broadcast to stand strong now. Here’s my investment in godly homes and legacies for generations to come.” Bob: During the Christmas season, and as we approach the end of the year, this is a particularly critical time to hear from listeners; isn’t it? Dennis: It is; over 40 percent of our donations come in this month. As I said on a recent broadcast, these 30 days determine how FamilyLife® is going to continue broadcasting over the next 11 months.  Bob: Yes. Dennis: Please, stand with us. We need your help now.  Bob: Here’s good news: right now, if you help with a donation, your donation is going to be doubled—it’s going to be matched, dollar for dollar.  3:00 We’ve got some friends of the ministry who have offered to match every donation we receive, during the month of December, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $2.5 million. That’s a huge opportunity for us; and we’re hoping FamilyLife Today listeners will respond and make an online donation, or call to donate.  When you do, we’d like to say, “Thank you,” this year by sending you a DVD copy of the movie that FamilyLife produced this year that was in theaters a few months ago. It’s a movie called Like Arrows. It’s going to be available for purchase in early 2019; but right now, we have a limited supply available if you can help with a yearend donation. Donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. Just ask for the DVD, Like Arrows, and we’ll send that out to you, along with our thanks for your support of the ministry. Now, I want to tell you guys about my next-door neighbor when I was growing up. His name was Dee; he was a year younger than me. We grew up across the driveway from one another—we had a shared driveway. 4:00  Dennis: You’re not talking about recently; you’re talking about when you were a kid. Bob: This was when I was a kid; yes. This was back in Glendale, Missouri. Dennis: Back before the earth’s crust had hardened. [Laughter] Bob: We shared a driveway that “Y”-d off. As you came up the driveway, the right side went to their house; the left side went to our house. We moved in when I was two; Dee was one. We went all the way through high school together. He was the best man in my wedding. Barbara: Really? Bob: Yes; so we had a great relationship. In fact, Dee just came and spent a weekend at our house a couple of months ago. We had a great time getting caught up on everything. Barbara: Wow! Bob: So Dee and I played together a lot as we were growing up. One time—my mom loved telling this story—one time, she was watching us out the back door. Dee was like a year-and-a-half, and I was two-and-a-half years old. I pushed him down—I pushed him onto the ground, and he fell down. He was crying; and she came out and she said, “Bobby, why did you push him?” I said: “I shot him. He’s dead, and he won’t fall down! [Laughter] So I pushed him to the ground!” 5:00 I remember Dee’s dad—Dee’s dad would always—when he would step into the room, where we were playing, or where his sister and my sister were, and we were all together and there was squabbling or something—Dee’s dad would come in, and he would just laugh. He’d say: “Little children! Love one another.” [Laughter] He would repeat that over and over again. I didn’t realize he was quoting Scripture when he was saying that. He was just stepping in to what is, often, the case with kids; that is, that kids often don’t do a great job of loving one another. He was giving us a little coaching on what really matters. Barbara: That’s cute! Bob: It’s one of the themes that you address. And, by the way, Barbara, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.  Barbara: Thank you, Bob. Bob: It’s nice to have you here again with us today as we’re talking about parenting. We’re talking about the new book you’ve written called The Art of Parenting. One of the core themes in this book is that we’ve got to help our kids be good at relationships, because they’re not naturally good at relationships— 6:00  —we learn that pretty soon. As soon as you have more than one in a family, conflict comes in pretty quickly; doesn’t it? Dennis: And if you don’t teach the resolution of conflict—if you don’t teach your children how to love another imperfect person—you’re not doing a good job preparing them for the rest of their life; because they’re going to spend the rest of their lives relating to selfish, sinful, broken people, many of whom think and believe differently than they do. They have to know how to do this!  I just know that, the older I’ve gotten, the more resolute I am that the family is an incubator—it’s a training vehicle—for young pioneers, who are going to spend the rest of their lives on their journey—the first time they’ve ever been there—but they’ve got to know how to relate to people. Bob: Barbara, we’ve talked already about how important it is for parents to doggedly pursue their children— 7:00 —to pursue a relationship with them; to build a strong, healthy, unconditional love; a forgiveness and grace-based relationship with our kids. Even when we do that, our children are not going to naturally embrace that same kind of a relationship with their siblings. I’m thinking of how I’ve watched my grandkids, now, who are one- and two-years old. They’re not thinking about these things, consciously; but there’s an innate sense of: “I want what I want. I want to be the center of attention. If you’re interfering with what I want, I’m going to make life hard for you.” Barbara: Yes. Bob: This is that fundamental self-oriented nature that’s in each one of us, and that’s what keeps us from having healthy relationships; isn’t it? Barbara: Exactly, and that’s what makes mom and dad’s job hard—is that our kids are born sinful, and we know that; but they’re so sweet and they’re so loveable—and we just think they’re the greatest. We forget, sometimes, that they’re little sinners, at the core. 8:00 But Dennis and I worked at it. Even though we felt like failures, we didn’t quit teaching; and we didn’t quit training in getting along. Primarily, what we taught and trained, over and over again, was the whole concept of recognizing what you did wrong, naming what you did wrong, and then saying: “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?”—you know, teaching that whole dialogue of forgiveness, and restitution, and reconciliation. Dennis: One of the things we tried to do with our children was to help them to realize that they are relating to what C.S. Lewis called “not mere mortals, but eternal beings.” They need to recognize that every person was made in the image of God. Genesis 1:26-28 talks about how God created them male and female, but He made them in His image. As image-bearers, they have value— Bob: Yes. Dennis: —they have worth. Our children need to recognize that. 9:00 Bob: I think, oftentimes, it’s our own insecurity—or our kids’ own insecurity about what they’re good at—that causes them to look at others and find fault. Dennis: Yes; I think you’re right. Barbara: Yes; yes. Bob: We’re masking our own insecurities by trying to make ourselves feel better or look better than other kids.  This goes to the core. I remember reading something by an author—a guy named Bill Gilliam—that always stuck with me. I’ve used this line over and over again. He said, “When a child is born, he draws a circle around his life and declares himself “the lord of the ring.” [Laughter] I think we have to acknowledge that that’s true. Barbara: Yes. Bob: I saw something called “The Toddler’s Creed” years ago. Do you remember? Barbara: Oh, yes. Bob: “If I want it, it’s mine; if I had it five minutes ago, it’s mine; if you have it and I want it, it’s mine.” This is how kids think. We have to train our kids, not to be self-centered, but to be others-centered, which goes against their nature and goes against what the culture is telling them. 10:00 Barbara: Well, it works in families too—it’s not just kids competing and comparing themselves in school. Our kids in our family are doing that. So, even if you just have two children, they’re sizing one another up. They’re thinking through: “Who’s the favorite?” “Where is my place?” “What is my role?” “How do I fit in this group called ‘the family’?” The more kids you have, the more of that that’s going to take place. You’re going to have more conflict—more sizing up / more trying to figure out of the pecking order, so to speak. It’s just endemic in who we are, and it happens in every family. Dennis: There’s another way we tried to teach our kids how to love one another, and that came through the issue of resolving conflict. I actually have a documentation here of some of the conflict that occurred between family members. [Laughter] Bob: Police reports you’ve brought in here? Dennis: It really—has fingerprints on it—eyewitnesses. [Laughter] Bob: Mug shots! Dennis: Photos; that’s right. DNA! 11:00 Bob: A.K.A. Dennis: And here’s what it’s about—and parents breathe a sigh of relief when they hear my list—this is about sibling rivalry. Now, we’ve already talked about this a little bit; but I just want to give you some evidence, from our family, of what our kids fought about as they grew up.  One of the number one reasons they fought was—who sits in the front seat with Mom or Dad on the way to school. [Laughter] Barbara: Yes. Bob: And how did you solve that? Dennis: We assigned a day. Bob: Okay. Dennis: Now, that’s good as long as you’ve got less than five kids. Bob: Yes. Barbara: Five or less; yes. [Laughter] Dennis: We had six!—so there was a dilemma there—but they fought over the seats in the car. They fought over the amount of ice cream they got; the number of cookies; how you broke the Hershey’s with Almonds, because it’s not in little squares. Bob: Did you do the thing where one breaks and the other picks? Dennis: Oh, yes! Barbara: Yes; we did that. Dennis: And we told them “fair” is what comes around to town once a year. [Laughter] Bob: That’s a good one. Dennis: That’s okay? 12:00 The third thing they fought about was who had worked the hardest; who had done the most;— Bob: Yes. Dennis: —who got to play the most; who last spent the night at a friend’s house, and whose turn it was now; who made the mess; who did it last; who did it first; who had it first? The older ones argued that we were just spoiling— Bob: —the younger ones. Barbara: —the younger ones. Dennis: The Art of Parenting™ has got some great evidence on this, because you asked our kids— Bob: The video series; yes. We interviewed your children and asked them to talk about: “Was one of them the favorite?”  Barbara: You asked, “Who is the favorite?” Bob: And the favorite knew she was the favorite; didn’t she? [Laughter] Dennis: Yes; the kids named her, and she named herself! [Laughter] But here’s the point—as a parent, do you know the very basic fundamentals of how two broken people resolve a conflict? Listen carefully, because this comes from the Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway. If you haven’t been, this is a good reason to go— 13:00 —to just become equipped in these basics of “What are the components of forgiveness?” The first thing is—it demands communication and an admission: “I was wrong when I…” Then it is, number two, “Will you forgive me for doing ‘X’?”—and you name the offense. Then, the one who has been offended has the opportunity, at that point, to say, “Yes; I decide to forgive you.”  And this is key, because your children need to know what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. Forgiveness means you give up the right to punish another person. Sometimes, our kids would not forgive one another; so we would give them chores. I’ll never forget the boys—we tied two of their legs together and made them sweep the garage—[Laughter]—because they wouldn’t forgive each other. Of course, the older one drug the younger one around the garage; and that created more conflict. That wasn’t such a good idea over the long haul.  14:00 But the key thing is—you make them look each other in the eye and say, “Will you forgive me when I did         ?” And then we say: “Okay; what’s your response? It means you give up the right to punish your sister,” / “…to punish your brother.” And then we talked about reconciliation and rebuilding trust. All of those points are the basics of how you help two people know how to love another person, who will disappoint them at times. Bob: And these basics of conflict resolution are fundamental building blocks that will serve kids throughout their lives in every relationship. If they don’t know how to seek and grant forgiveness, life is not going to go well for them.  Of course, I remember, with our kids, it was, “Tell your sister you’re sorry.” Barbara: Yes. Bob: And you know what they would say; right? [Speaking with no emotion] “Sorry.” Dennis: [Not meaning it] “I’m sorry.”  Barbara: Yes; yes. Bob: And then, “Say it like you mean it,”—you know, they’d get silly. You really have to teach them how to do this. It feels rote for a while. Barbara: And it is rote for a while,— Bob: That’s okay! Barbara: —but that’s okay. Bob: Get it to be habitual in them. Barbara: Yes. 15:00 Dennis: —over, and over, and over, and over again. Bob: That’s right. Dennis: I’ll tell you—there is a method of teaching in the Bible called the Rabbinical Method of Teaching. Do you know what it is?—repetition. Bob: Yes. Dennis: Do you know what sibling rivalry is?—an opportunity to teach over, and over, and over again how you resolve conflict. Let me tell you another way that parents dare not miss as they train their kids to love other people, especially around resolving conflict—resolve it between you and your spouse. Your kids are like little radar units. I know, when Barbara and I would have an argument in the kitchen, sometimes, I would feel like there was this herd—or covey of little quail—just circling us; locked on; watching us go back and forth, sometimes, at each other—not healthy; okay!? Bob: Right. Dennis: Sometimes I would say: “Time out, Sweetheart.” “Kids, your mom and dad love each other. We’re in a covenant-keeping marriage; we’re going to go the distance—we’re not in trouble. We just have a disagreement; okay?” 16:00 There’s an African proverb that says, “When the elephants bite, it’s the grass that suffers.” It suffers in more ways than one; because if they don’t see you resolving conflict in your marriage, how are they going to know how to do it when they get married? Bob: So I’m going to ask you about that; because some parents, you know, will say: “We’re not going to do conflict in front of our kids. Barbara: Yes. Bob: “If we’ve got a disagreement, we’ll postpone it. We’ll do it back in the bedroom; we don’t want our kids to see us. We don’t want them to feel insecure, thinking that mom and dad aren’t getting along.” Do you think it’s good for mom and dad to have a little conflict in front of the kids? Barbara: I think that’s a great question, because we talked about that. My parents never had conflict in front of us. I grew up thinking they never had conflict, because I never saw it. And I don’t know that you—did you see your parents? Dennis: Once. Barbara: One time your parents had conflict? Dennis: My parents had one very— Barbara: —heated argument? Dennis: —heated argument. I was five years old, and I was afraid they would divorce.  17:00 That was back when divorce was— Barbara: Yes; nobody got divorced. Dennis: —nobody got divorced. Barbara: Well, we talked about it—I remember. We decided that we wanted our kids to see us having some disagreements—not big conflict—but if we were disagreeing about something that was not a huge thing, but we really both had a strong opinion on it, we decided that we would go again and occasionally express our disagreement in front of our kids and let them watch us work it out.  We did do what Dennis just said—we said: “Time out.” “Okay; kids. Here are the facts: we’re not going anywhere. This is not life-altering. We just disagree, and parents disagree. It’s okay for parents to disagree.” Bob: In some homes, it’s not just disagreement; but as you know, there are moms and dads, who are saying hurtful, harmful things to one another. Barbara: Oh, yes!—in front of the kids. Dennis: That kind of stuff is not good. Barbara: No. Bob: If it does happen, though—again, get the kids together. Barbara: That’s right. 18:00 Bob: You get the kids together and you confess: “This was not right for Mom and me to be talking this way to one another. Barbara: Yes. Bob: “I’ve asked her to forgive me, and I want to ask you to forgive me. I want you to know we love one another, and we’re staying together.” Barbara: Yes. Dennis: —especially if you’ve used the “D” word. If you have thrown the “divorce” word around in an argument in front of your kids—that they’ve heard, either in person or through the walls—you need to get down on your knees in front of your kids— Barbara: Absolutely! Dennis: —and say: “We repent. We will never, ever do that again.” Why?—because they’re going to school with kids from broken homes. Sixty percent of all kids will spend part of their first eighteen years of life with one parent. It’s in their vocabulary; it’s in their experience—you’ve got to build security.  I’ve got one more very important way we train our kids to love others, and that’s training your children to respect the boundaries and purity of the opposite sex. Train your kids to respect the boundaries and purity of the opposite sex.  19:00 That means teaching your boys to protect the sexual purity of girls—to own it! Not just protect them physically, but protect their sexual purity.  I had the privilege of speaking to a football team a couple of months ago. Bob: This was a high school team; right? Dennis: A high school football team. They were all shirt-less—they were getting ready to have practice. It was hot in the summer. I wanted to make the point to those guys: “Be men. Step up! Become men who protect your school and protect the young ladies.”  It was right as the #MeToo was really in the news with a lot of people. I just said: “Listen, guys. You can either protect a woman’s dignity, and her purity, and who she is sexually or you can be a barbarian and you can take advantage of her.  20:00 “I want to challenge you, as a team, to set a new standard in this high school. Instead of being rude to girls—instead, hold the door open for them. You guys need to start a rash of common courtesies—pulling the chair out for the ladies / for your teacher! Just, as a team, represent how real young men treat the opposite sex.” Of course, if you’re talking to a young lady, I would talk to your daughters about protecting the young men by being—and dressing—modestly. I remember one of our daughters, who will remain unnamed, had this dress that she had on—as she was trying it on for prom. Bob, you know what I’m talking about. [Laughter] Barbara was there—she loved that dress!—Barbara wanted to buy the dress. Right, Sweetheart? Barbara: Yes. Dennis: Yes; but I said, “No; you can’t buy that, Sweetie.” Help your daughters protect young men. 21:00 These are all ways where you’re thinking of others before you think of yourself.  Bob: Yes; these are fundamental skills that we need to, as parents, be teaching our children before they know Christ; so that, when they do come to know Christ—when they surrender to Him and then they read Philippians 2: “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility, regard others as more important than yourselves. Don’t look out merely for your own interest, but also for the interest of others,”—now, all of a sudden, they see this in the context of the gospel. They’re doing this to honor Christ, not just to have happier and healthier relationships. I mean, it’s good to have happy, healthy relationships; but at the end of the day, what we care most about is that God is honored in how we relate to one another. This is why this is one of the essential skills you guys talk about in the book, The Art of Parenting. It’s a book I hope every mom and dad will read together. In fact, there’s a companion DVD series that small groups can go through together.  22:00 We’re hoping that this can be the beginning, in a lot of churches and a lot of homes, of a parenting revolution—a new commitment to being the most purposeful, intentional, well-equipped parents you can possibly be as you raise the next generation. We’ve got copies of Dennis and Barbara’s book, The Art of Parenting, in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center. You can order the book from us, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order. The DVD series is also available. Information is available, online; or you can order at FamilyLifeToday.com. You can also order, again, by calling 1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” You know, I’m remembering a scene in the movie, Like Arrows—the movie that we produced that was in theaters a few months ago. There’s a scene where there’s some sibling rivalry.  23:00 A brother and a sister are fighting over Legos®, and they say ugly things to one another. They have to learn how to make peace with one another. One of the things we wanted to do, when we made that movie, was find a creative way to engage moms and dads with the key issues that we all face as we raise the next generation. I know many of our listeners saw the film when it was in theaters. It’s going to be available for purchase in early 2019. We have a limited number of DVDs of Like Arrows that we’re making available this month to those of you who are able to help support the ministry with a yearend contribution. FamilyLife Today, as you mentioned earlier, Dennis, is dependent on these donations. Right now, if you’re able to help with a donation, your donation is going to be matched, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $2.5 million. You make a $25 donation; it becomes a $50 donation to FamilyLife. If you make a $100 donation; it’s $200.  24:00 Whatever you’re able to do, help us take advantage of this matching-gift opportunity; and we’ll say, “Thank you,” by sending you a DVD of Like Arrows. You can donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call to donate: 1-800-FL-TODAY. We appreciate your partnership with us in this ministry.  And we hope you can join us back tomorrow when we’re going to talk about the most important relationship we can help our children with—that’s their relationship with Jesus. We’ll explore that tomorrow. I hope you can be with us.  I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Teaching Kids to Love God Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                                                           From the series:       The Art of Parenting: Relationships (Day 3 of 3)  Bob: As parents, we want our children to be skillful in relationships; but there’s one relationship that matters more than any other—that is our children’s relationship with Jesus. Barbara Rainey says that’s something that, as parents, we can’t engineer. Barbara: It’s not our responsibility. I think that’s where parents get confused—I know I felt it. I felt like it was my responsibility to teach my kids and to make sure they had a relationship with Christ, but that’s not it. My responsibility was to present the truth to them and to model a relationship; it’s God’s responsibility to call their hearts. I think that’s where we get mixed up, as moms and dads—we own what is not ours. Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, December 7th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. As parents, how can we prepare our child’s heart so that, when the seeds of the gospel are planted, they can take root?  1:00 We’re going to talk more today about our responsibility, as parents, to introduce our children to Jesus. Stay with us. And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I had kind of an “Aha” moment—this was a number of years ago—but I remember reading in Romans, Chapter 1, where it says that, since the beginning of time, it’s been obvious to everybody that there’s a God. That’s not new news for anybody. Anybody who can look around and see the world/anybody who’s aware of their own existence— Dennis: This is the Lepine paraphrase of Romans 1. Bob: Yes! This is what Romans 1 says: “If you’re alive and you can take a breath, you know, deep inside, you’re here because there is a God.”  2:00 The “Aha” moment for me was—as I raise my kids, my kids know there’s a God. The issue is—I don’t have to convince my kids that there’s a God who exists—I just have to introduce them to the God they already know exists. Or my assignment is to explain who this God, that they know already, is; so they can have a relationship with him. We’ve been talking this week about relationships and how that fits into parenting and the priority for us, as parents, to help our kids know how to do relationships—to build strong relationships with our children to help them know how to relate to one another. At the core of all of this—they need to understand the God who created them and what it means to have a relationship with Him. Dennis: A listener recently wrote us, Bob, and said something very similar to that. She said: “Your broadcasts, in general, are so helpful; but a blessing to my life. First, as a follower of Jesus Christ.  3:00 But secondly, now that I’m 36 years old, I don’t have the wisdom and the training to disciple my kids and to know how to pass this truth on to my family. You guys are equipping me with those biblical principles and spiritual growth so that our kids don’t wither when they go out into the world, but they know how to thrive.” Bob: Well, we ought to say, “Thank you,” right here, at the beginning, to those who, not only listen to FamilyLife Today, but to those that make it possible for listeners like this to get the help and hope they need for their marriage and their family. Dennis: And as we’re here at yearend, I just need to turn to you, as a listener, and invite you—and may I also say, “challenge you”—to join with us, financially, in this broadcast. Help make it possible so that others—not only you and your family—but that others can benefit from this broadcast as well. We need you right now to pull out a checkbook or a credit card— 4:00 —go online or get an envelope and put that check in the mail to FamilyLife Today—so that we can be on air with stories of redemption and hope that do give wisdom to those who are in the trenches. Bob, I think that’s what marriages and families need today—is that practical biblical help and hope that FamilyLife Today can be counted on to provide. Bob: Well, as I’ve said, this is a particularly good time of year for you to make a donation; because we’ve had some friends of the ministry who have come along and offered to double every donation we receive. They’re going to match it, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $2.5 million. For us to take full advantage of that matching gift, we need every listener, who has benefited from this program over the course of the year, to be as generous as you can be so that we can end the year in a strong position.  You can donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. When you do, we’re going to say, “Thank you,” by sending you a copy of the movie, Like Arrows, on DVD.  5:00 This is the movie we produced this year that was in theaters a few months ago. It’s not available for purchase yet, but we have a limited supply we’re making available to those of you who can help support the ministry this month. Again, you can donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. Thanks, in advance, for supporting the work of FamilyLife Today; and thanks for listening to FamilyLife Today.  In fact, we want to focus today on what moms and dads can do to help raise the next generation. Dennis: That’s exactly right. Earlier, we talked about how this big idea of training your kids in relationships begins with you. As parents, you’re a mirror of how your kid is to love another person—you train them; you teach them; you instruct them; you coach them; you correct them.  We brought the number-one coach in the country in to this broadcast, Bob, to help us know how to best train our kids to love God.  6:00 Barbara Rainey joins us, again, on FamilyLife Today. [Laughter] Bob: Congratulations!—number one in the country. I didn’t know that! Dennis: Coach of the year!—coach of the decade! Barbara: [Not sounding convinced] Yes. [Laughter] That doesn’t feel quite right, since I know my failures so well. Dennis: We just finished a book called The Art of Parenting. In that book, we’ve got four big ideas: relationships, character, identity, and mission. We’re wrapping up the relationship side—just reminding listeners that we, as human beings, are made to relate to God, as Bob has just said; and we are to relate to one another. Jesus pointed this out in Matthew 22—He said, when asked, “What’s the greatest commandment?”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” And He summarizes: “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 7:00 In case you didn’t get it, loving God and loving others is where parents ought to start as they train their kids; and it’s not natural for them to know how to love God. Here’s why—because it was God who built the bridge to your kid. First John, Chapter 4—if you haven’t read this, read it to your kids: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” He goes on to say we didn’t love God first; He loved us first and, as He loves us, we learn how to love Him in return. Bob: Barbara, I would think that, for every mom and dad who knows Christ, the desire to introduce their kids to Christ—to see their kids come to faith—that would be central for all of them.  8:00 One of the things I read in your book is—you’ve seen statistics that said this is not a priority for a lot of believing parents. Barbara: Yes; we ran across this statistic and put it in our book. It’s a George Barna stat; and he said, “Seven out of ten Christian parents today don’t think salvation is an important outcome for their children.” Bob: Now that’s astounding to me. Barbara: Oh, it was astounding to me when I read it, too; because that was my number one goal for my kids, because I want to be in heaven with my children someday. Bob: Right. Barbara: I want them to know Christ; because I know that, without Christ/without a relationship with Him, their life isn’t going to work. Their relationships aren’t going to work; their marriage’s/their job won’t work. None of it’s going to work, because He is the One who holds everything together. So, if they want a marriage that’s going to go the distance, they need Jesus, who holds everything together. If they want kids, who will grow up and be mature responsible adults, those children need Jesus, who holds all things together.  9:00 So I was shocked by that—I know Dennis was, too—but what we’re saying in our book is what I just said. It is the most important thing that you can teach your children, because you can’t teach them how to love without them knowing Christ. Bob: The problem is—we can teach them how to have a relationship with God, but this is not something we can make them do. This is on them to make that decision. This has got to come from inside of them; right? Dennis: A good friend of ours is Robert Lewis. I’ll never forget—we were going through a dark set of days in our parenting journey; and he said: “Look, you can teach your kids to do what’s right. You can teach them to love God; but it takes God to, ultimately, put it in their heart and then them to respond to Him and to love Him in return.”  Here’s what I want parents to hear—  10:00 —your assignment is to teach, and demonstrate, and instruct—and teach, and teach, and teach how your child is to respond to the love of God. Your lifetime assignment is to teach them how they should love God in return. Barbara: And I totally agree with that, but it’s more than just teaching. I think that’s where—I think that’s where a lot of parents make the mistake—they are heavy on the teaching and the instruction: “Here’s how you invite Jesus into your heart…”; but they forget that they’re modeling what that relationship looks like.  So, if you want your children to want to know God and you want your children to love God, then you have to show them a relationship with God that’s attractive. I’ve heard people say, who grew up in Christian homes: “I never considered not wanting to become a Christian, because I watched my parents. Their relationship with God was so attractive, and convincing, and real that I wanted it for myself.”  11:00 The burden of proof, so to speak, is on mom and dad to demonstrate a relationship with Christ that is infectious, and contagious, and attractive so that your kids will want one too. Bob: Well, and the other side of that is—a lot of parents could harden the hearts of their children— Barbara: Yes; that’s right. Bob: —by professing one thing—  Barbara: —but living another. Bob: And kids grow up with that kind of hypocrisy and that turns them away from wanting to have anything to do with Jesus. You know, a lot of adults today, who would say: “Here was my experience when I was a child. I prayed a prayer—I invited Jesus into my heart.” Dennis: “I walked the aisle.” Bob: Right; and then they say, “But when I became a teenager, I kind of fell away; and I ultimately had to find my way back.” Kids will often demonstrate some kind of spiritual interest when they’re children. Barbara: Yes. Bob: I think, in part, because they know: “It would please Mom and Dad if I act this way,” or “…believe this way,” / “I want to be like Mom and Dad, so I want this to be true of me.”  12:00 How did you guys or how would you coach parents to help their kids along this journey, so that it’s not just imitative behavior; but it’s really something that God’s doing in their heart? Barbara: Well, I think it’s really important for parents not to be shocked. We talk about this in our book—don’t be shocked when your kids question their faith, because all of us question our faith. If we don’t, then maybe it’s not genuine. We have to evaluate what we believe and decide if it’s true or not. All kids are going to do that. I went through times of doubt; doubt is normal.  I think, when parents react when they see their kids doubting, that freaks out the kids; and it creates a dissonance in the relationship. I think the main thing to do is to allow your children to process—engage with them; talk with them; answer their questions. Give them positive feedback when they’re asking questions, so that they don’t feel like the fact that they’re doubting is really wrong.  13:00 There’s nothing wrong with doubting. Dennis: Barbara and I had a great vacation last summer. Sometime, during the vacation, we started noodling on this. We started talking and discussing what had become crystal clear to us; and that is, we wanted our children to see us experiencing God, not just on Sunday between the hours of 10:30 and noon; but we wanted our children to see us experiencing God seven days a week—and bringing Him into our discussion with them so they caught a picture: “This is exciting. This is not some hum drum everyday journey that’s boring; but we’re serving the God of the universe—experiencing Him. He’s intersecting our lives.”  Certain things, Bob, become clear as you get older. I am seeing certain things more clearly than I have ever seen.  14:00 And that is this—as parents, you need to share your experience with God and His Word and what He’s doing in your life—how He’s convicting you of sin; how He’s encouraged you to reach out to somebody you don’t like; how He helped you defeat bitterness and forgive. Kids need to see their parents exemplifying the Christ-like life of Jesus living in and through us.  In fact, Barbara and I started talking about writing, not another book—but doing a Bible study that would be like Henry Blackaby’s Bible study, Experiencing God—but put it this way: Experiencing God in Your Family. I think that’s where we were first meant to experience God. I think the reason young people today are leaving the church, when they graduate from high school or college and they’re not showing up again, is because they saw one thing on Sunday from their parents; and they didn’t see much of anything of experiencing God the other six days of the week. 15:00 Bob: One of the key elements here is that your time in God’s Word and your time together in prayer, as a family, be something that is real and regular in your home. I’m thinking of the movie, Like Arrows, that is connected to the Art of Parenting™. It’s a movie that shows a family that was kind of nominal and marginal. They were going to church, but there wasn’t really a life of faith being lived out in the home. They got confronted with that, later in life, and started to make a transition. It made a difference in the dynamic of the family.  This is something that parents need to prioritize: introducing our kids to the Bible, reading the Bible with them, praying with them—making this a part of the life and fabric of your family. I know, Barbara, a lot of moms and dads feel like failures in this area; because they’ve tried to do family devotions or whatever—it hasn’t worked well. The kids roll their eyes— 16:00 Dennis: Well, they rolled their eyes at us; okay? [Laughter] Barbara: Oh absolutely. We felt like failures, too; because we had this image of family devotions, where everybody was sitting politely around the table and paying attention. Bob: Right. Barbara: Our kids didn’t pay attention or, at least, they didn’t seem to be paying attention. But as they got older, we would catch little things that they would say, where we knew: “Oh! They really—they picked that up when we did that family devotion; so they were paying attention.” Dennis: Remember the tape we played for one of our children— Barbara: Yes; for Laura; yes. Dennis: —about modesty?—right? Barbara: He brought it home, and he played it for Laura. She rolled her eyes; and she said, “Oh gosh, do I have to listen to this?” We said, “Yes; you have to listen to this,” and so she did. We didn’t see anything for a while. After she graduated from high school, she had a job at a girls’ school. Part of her job was to check the girls before they got on the bus in the morning before they had a day of service in the community. She called me one day and she said: “Mom, you are not going to believe these girls.  17:00 “I cannot believe what they are wearing to get on the bus in the morning to go off for their day of service. I sent some of them back to change clothes.” [Laughter] I just had this sense of vindication as I heard her say this; because I thought: “She got it. She got it!” [Laughter] Dennis: Yes. Bob: I want to point our listeners—on our website, at FamilyLifeToday.com, we’ve got an excerpt from an interview that we did a while back with Don Whitney, who wrote a book on the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life. He talked about having family devotions; he said he thought his kids weren’t paying any attention. He was doing this—he felt like a failure in the whole thing—until his daughter’s graduation from high school, when she got up and, in front of the whole high school, started crying about how faithful her parents were to read the Bible every day. He said, “I thought she was hating it; and yet, this was a part of what God was stamping on her heart and her life.”  You can hear him tell the story [on our website].  18:00 It’s a powerful story and a great reminder that our faithfulness— Dennis: Right. Bob: —in just taking our kids to who God is: taking them to the Bible, spending time teaching them how to pray, praying with them, reading Bible stories, pointing them to Jesus—this is the chief assignment we have, as parents. If we fail at all kinds of other things and succeed here, that covers a multitude of sins; doesn’t it? Barbara: It’s not our responsibility. I think that’s where parents get confused—I know I felt it. I felt like it was my responsibility to teach my kids and to make sure they had a relationship with Christ, but that’s not it. My responsibility was to present the truth to them and to model a relationship; it’s God’s responsibility to call their hearts. I think that’s where we get mixed up, as moms and dads—we own what is not ours instead of trusting God to do the work in their hearts. Bob: We talked, earlier, about the bridge that parents need to build toward their children so that there are these open lanes, where we can take unconditional love and where we can take pursuit and forgiveness.  19:00 God has built that bridge toward us; hasn’t He? Dennis: He has; and because He first loved us, we love. We start building a lane back to God and a lane to others—that’s what your assignment is.  One of the things we’re talking about here—and I’m just thinking of Barbara, looking across the table at her—she has been the passionate one about this passage—is Deuteronomy 6: the command to parents to pass on their experience of God to the next generation. Barbara: Right; it talks about—uses these verbs, in Deuteronomy 6, to talk about God’s Word when you walk, and when you sit, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. It means that in every part of your day, no matter what you are doing, you’re supposed to be talking about God’s Word—living it out/practicing it—so that your kids see that you belong to Him. They see what that looks like; and they can, therefore, imitate it. 20:00  Bob: This most important thing we’ve been talking about—introducing our kids to God—this is not something we can do unless our faith is real. We can’t expect our kids to have a real active vibrant faith; and so the starting point for each of us, as parents, is to pull back and say: “What’s my own relationship with God like? How central is God to everything that I’m doing in life? Is it clear to my kids this is what matters most to me?” If a parent, listening today, is unsure about their relationship with Jesus, what do they do? Dennis: Well, I think, first of all, they need to realize that God is love. He has reached out to them in love through the person of Jesus Christ. He became flesh—it’s why we celebrate Christmas—He dwelt among us. He did what we could not do for ourselves—He lived a perfect life and, then, He sacrificed His life on a cross so that He might become the payment for our sins—  21:00 —that we might have God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ if—if we place our faith in Him.  If you’ve never done that—if you’ve never passed from death to life, if you’re not spiritually born again, if you don’t know where you’d spend eternity—why spend another day doubting or worrying about that? Why don’t you settle it with God?—and cry out in faith and say this prayer: “Lord Jesus, I need You. I need a Savior. I need You to do for me what I cannot do for myself. I need You to forgive my sins. Now, come in my life. Live Your life in and through me; and give me eternal life that I might pass it on to my spouse, my children, my nieces, my nephews, my grandchildren.”  I want to tell you something—it is the greatest adventure of a lifetime to know the God of the universe.  22:00 He is up to big things in our little lives. Why would you not want to be a part of that?  Bob: We’ve got a link, on our website at FamilyLIfeToday.com, that explains how to know God. You can go to FamilyLifeToday.com and click on that link and find out more about what it means to be a Christian/to know God personally.  Again, our website is FamilyLifeToday.com. That’s also where you’ll find information about Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s book for parents called The Art of Parenting. It’s now available, along with the DVD series that’s great for small group use. Find out more about these resources when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com—get a copy of the book; or call to order: 1-800-FL-TODAY is the number—1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” 23:00 Speaking about The Art of Parenting, we created a movie in conjunction with The Art of Parenting that was in theaters a few months ago. That movie is not yet available for purchase on DVD; but during the month of December—for those of you who can help support the ministry, as you talked about earlier, Dennis—we’re making the Like Arrows DVD available as a thank-you gift. Keep in mind your donation is going to be matched, dollar for dollar, this month up to a total of $2.5 million.  If God has used the ministry of FamilyLife® in your life this year, can we ask you to be generous and make a yearend contribution to help support the ministry? Your donation will be doubled, and we’ll send you the Like Arrows DVD. Donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate.  Let me ask you one more thing. Pray for the hundreds of couples, who are going to be joining us this weekend at the St. Louis Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway. Pray that God would meet with them this weekend and would do a work in their marriage. That’s our prayer every time when couples go to the Weekend to Remember— 24:00 —that they would leave the weekend with their marriage more strongly rooted in Christ than when they came.  We hope you have a great weekend. We hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend and then join us back on Monday when we’re going to pick up right where we left off today. We’re going to talk about how we can know if our children really know Christ. Terrance Chapman is going to be with us to talk about that. We hope you can be back with us as well. Thanks to our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. Have a great weekend. We will see you Monday for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. God’s Got Your Back Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: What Kids Need (Day 1 of 3)  Bob: When you have a newborn or there are toddlers around the house, it’s easy to get focused on the day-to-day and forget what the long game is in parenting. Here’s Dennis Rainey. Dennis: Children are God’s statement that the next generation must take our place. What we must do is impart to our children the truth about God, the experience of God, and also the gospel of God—how they can know Him—that’s our assignment. Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, September 5th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Okay; let’s pull back and look at the big picture: “What is it that we are supposed to do, as parents, as we raise the next generation? What’s the priority? What’s job one?” We’re going to talk about that today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I think I’ve heard you say—I don’t know if you’ve called it a mistake or not—but you said something about the fact that you wrote a book on parenting teenagers before you were done parenting teenagers. Dennis: One of the big mistakes— Bob: Okay; I just wanted to make sure. I didn’t want to put words in your mouth. [Laughter] Dennis: —of our—of our lives.  Barbara joins us. Would you agree, Sweetie? Barbara: Well, it was rather brash, I think, to write on parenting when we hadn’t finished. Bob: The truth is—it’s a great book. The concepts in the book are solid, and I’ve referred to it many times as we were in the process of raising our kids. Dennis: And we paid the price for many of those lessons, Bob; but we were not done raising teenagers. [Laughter] What we had to do, on numerous occasions, is go back and rip pages out or reread what we’ve written. Bob: Well, now, here we are—and you have finished the process of raising your children—  2:00 —and you decided, “Okay; now, it’s safe to write a book on parenting,”—right? Dennis: We did. This is something that I’ve wanted to do—actually, we’ve wanted to do since we were a part of starting FamilyLife®, all the way back to 1976. Barbara and I had been working with high school students nationwide, and we saw the need and really wanted to make an impact on teenagers and the next generation. The way we did that was by helping people stay married / have a good marriage; but also, ultimately, one day, I wanted to get to this topic of equipping parents to know how to do—not just marriage God’s way—but do parenting His way as well. Bob: Barbara, I’ll ask you; and then I’ll ask you as well, Dennis. If you could only speak or write about one or the other— Dennis: Oh, you’re going to do that to her? Bob: —marriage or parenting? Barbara: Oh, that’s a terrible question. [Laughter] Bob: If I said, “For the rest of your life, you have to either talk about parenting or you have to talk about marriage,” which would you pick? Dennis: I think—I know the answer. 3:00 Barbara: Well, I think I would have to say marriage, because not all couples have children; and if you don’t get your marriage right, you can’t get parenting right. So I would say marriage over parenting if I had to pick one—if you’re going to force me. Dennis: And I thought she would have said motherhood. Barbara: That wasn’t an option, though! [Laughter] Bob: Well, that’s parenting. Barbara: I’m very precise. Laughter] Bob: Being a mom and raising kids has been a passion of your life. Barbara: Well, yes; and I loved being a mom; I loved raising kids. It really was—it was stressful; it was hard, but it was rewarding. It was what I felt like I was made to do in those years that I was doing it. I was very engaged, very committed, very involved—reading things all the time—trying to improve, trying to be a great mom, trying to give my kids what they needed; so I was very invested. Bob: If you had to pick?—marriage or parenting—and that’s all you could talk about / write about. Dennis: Well, here’s the thing.  4:00 I have to answer the way Barbara did, because that’s where we have been focused over the past 41 years—we have been focusing on marriage. We have done a lot of parenting work—we’ve written a lot of books on parenting; we’ve had a conference that we created on parenting, which we mothballed until recently, Bob. You know that we’re finally getting a chance to roll this out—a parenting conference in a box, which is a small group kit to help folks know how to do the art of parenting, which is also the name of a book that Barbara and I just completed as well. We’ve been wanting to get after this and do this for some time; and I’m excited, because these are some of the best days for FamilyLife to help families that have ever existed over four decades. Bob: You have shared this story with our listeners before, but there’s a story from when you were raising your kids that kind of gets to the heart of the parenting issue; doesn’t it? Dennis: It does.  5:00 Our daughter, Deborah, came to me one time—do you remember how old, Sweetheart, she was? Barbara: No; but I would guess 13/14—early teens. Dennis: Yes—just in that age that kind of knows it all, you know. She came and she said, “Dad, I want to be able to do what I want to do, with whoever I want to do it with, whenever I want to do it, for as long as I want to do it.” I said, “Really, sweetheart?!” [Laughter] I said, “What if your parakeet came to you,”—and the parakeet’s name was— Barbara: —Sweet Pea.  Dennis: Sweet Pea—“Sweet Pea came to you and said, ‘I want to be able to do whatever I want to do, with whoever I want to do it, for as long as I can possibly do it,’ and Sweet Pea said to you, ‘I’d like to go out on the porch and play with the cat.’ What would you say?” She said: “Oh, Dad! That’s silly!” Barbara: “That’s dumb.” Dennis: “That’s dumb.” Barbara: She was disgusted with him. Dennis: She was. And I said: “Here’s the thing.  6:00 “God’s given you parents to help—not cage you up—but to create boundaries that protect you. Sweet Pea doesn’t need to play with the cat.” It was just the beginning of the teenage years for Deborah; in all fairness to her, in some form or another, all six of ours asked a question very, very similar to that. Bob: Well, every adolescent asks that question. You asked the question— Barbara: Well, even if they don’t verbalize it, they feel it; and it’s what they want. Bob: It’s this emerging independence—we want to call the shots—all of us felt it; so I’m not surprised that Deborah felt that way, but she did not respond well to the Sweet Pea analogy that you used. Dennis: No; and God, in His sense of humor—God is so mischievous, and I mean that in a holy way—not evil—just holy mischievous. [Laughter] He has a way of getting our attention.  Not long after that, we had the opportunity to travel, as a family. We needed to find someone that would take care of Sweet Pea, so we got a nearby family to take care of our favorite parakeet.  7:00 Barbara: So a family down the street that we knew well—some of our kids matched up and they played together—we called them and asked them. They said, “Sure,” they’d be delighted to. But we couldn’t make the handoff occur before we left, so we left Sweet Pea in the cage in the house. They came by later that day—after we’d left town, gotten on our plane, and flown off—to pick up Sweet Pea, and keep the bird for the week, and get the bird feed and everything. One of the younger kids in the family was tasked with the responsibility of taking care of the bird that week. He was going to earn a little money by doing this—we were going to pay him. So anyway, they came to the house, got the bird, got the parakeet cage, and the food and everything, and they were walking out to their car.  It was January, too, by the way, which is an interesting piece of the story; because, as they walked from our front door to their car, the tray on the bottom of the parakeet cage came unhooked.  8:00 It dropped open; and the bird saw his chance at freedom, and dropped through, and took off flying up into the trees. He got his freedom sooner than expected. Bob: I can only imagine those parents in your front yard, looking at the parakeet in the tree and going, “What do we do?” Barbara: I know. Yes; my friend’s name was Jessica, and she just was panicked. She went, “Oh my.” So they tried to coax it down. They put food in their hands and offered food, you know, trying to get the bird to come down; and nothing worked. They tried for nearly an hour, and the bird was in the tree and was not coming down. Dennis: So, we’re away on our trip when we get the phone call that the parakeet had flown the coop, literally; okay?  We tried to time the telling of the story to Deborah— 9:00 —when it would perhaps be a little bit of a shock absorber—but there was no good time to tell her. This completely bummed her up. Bob: Yes. Barbara: Yes. Dennis: I mean, the rest of the trip was miserable. Well, how long passed, Barbara? Barbara: Just a couple of days—say we got home on a Friday; maybe on Monday morning our neighbor, who lives up the hill—he called. Dennis had gone to work; it was about ten or eleven in the morning—the kids were off at school, and I was home alone. He called and said, “I have something really interesting I want to ask you.” He said, “Do you guys have a parakeet?” I said, “Well, we did have a parakeet.” He said, “Oh, okay.” He begins to tell me this story about how he found Sweet Pea, and I was so amazed that the bird had survived. Bob: Wow! Dennis: He found Sweet Pea where? Barbara: Well, that’s a part of the story. [Laughter] I called Dennis and I told him—I said, “Our neighbor has Sweet Pea.” He said, “You’re kidding.”  10:00 Deborah was not happy; so I wanted to go get her at school, and pull her out of class, and tell her. Dennis said, “Don’t you dare go tell her.” He said, “We need to make a big impression on her about what happened and how God spared this parakeet for her.” I said, “Okay; great”; so I didn’t go tell her. Dennis: What happened was—Bob, our neighbor, was watching TV, and he heard a thump on the window. Bob just walks out, sticks his finger up in the air, kind of horizontal to the ground, and Sweet Pea flies right down to it. Barbara: He turns around and walks in the house, carrying the bird. Dennis: Well, that was how we would get Sweet Pea to land on us, just put the finger up horizontally and let the bird fly down. So he put Sweet Pea in a spare cage that they had— Barbara: They just happened to have a cage! Dennis: —and went to town to get some parakeet food. Barbara: Yes; and so while he was in town to get parakeet food, after he got what he needed at the pet store, he stopped at a yogurt place on the way home. It was real busy, so he had to stand in line. Bob’s very chatty/very conversational, so he started talking to the guy in front of him.  11:00 As they were talking, the guy said to him, “So, what are you doing today?” Bob said, “Oh, I had to come into town to get parakeet feed for this bird that I found.” The guy said, “Well, where do you live?” Bob told him where he lived; and the guy said, “Is that anywhere near the Raineys?” Bob said, “Yes; I live next door to them.” The guy said: “Oh. I’m the kids’ youth pastor.” He said, “I think they have a parakeet,” because Bob had said—for this parakeet that he found—he had no idea where it had come from. Dennis: That’s 15 miles from where we live— Barbara: —that yogurt store; yes. Dennis: —the yogurt place. Bob: Wow. Barbara: Bob goes, “Oh, well maybe that is where it came from.” When he called Monday morning, he was confirming, “Do you have a parakeet that is now missing?—because if you do, I have it.” Dennis: I told Barbara—I said, “After dinner, let’s just drive the point home with Deborah.” After dinner, I just stopped, and I looked at Deborah, and I said [emotion in voice], “Deborah, God really loves you.” 12:00 Barbara: And she was still not happy. Bob: Yes. Dennis: No; not happy at all. She wouldn’t look at me. I said: “Deborah, look at me. God really loves you.” She still wouldn’t look. I said: “Deborah, God loves you. Bob, our neighbor, has your parakeet.” Well, at that point, two things happened. First of all, our daughter, Laura, had been sitting with her head— Barbara: Well, the very first time you said to Deborah: “I want to tell you something. Can I tell you that God really loves you?” Laura piped up and said, “Do I have to listen to this?” [Laughter] Because she knew that her dad was about to talk to her sister about something— Bob: —some story. Barbara: —some lesson, because she was not happy. [Laughter] She’s thinking: “This isn’t about me. Why do I have to be here?” So she said, “Do I have to listen to this?” Dennis said, “You do have to listen to this,” and Laura went, “Ooh!” Dennis: So, at the point I told Deborah that the parakeet was up the hill with Bob— 13:00 —Laura screamed and said, “What?!” And Deborah slowly— Barbara: Yes; like an ice cube. Dennis: —almost imperceptibly, at a point, began to smile.  Barbara: She was real skeptical—she said, “Really?” Dennis: Yes; we walked up— Barbara: All four of us marched up the hill to the neighbors’— Dennis: —reclaimed the bird, put Sweet Pea back in her home, and all was well. But we just said, “Deborah, God really loves you and is looking out for you.” Bob: So, do you think Deborah every tied together the moral of the story?—that you don’t let the parakeet out of the cage? Barbara: —to go play with the cat? Bob: —to go play with the cat? Dennis: You know, I resisted—[Laughter]—giving the moral of the story! Bob: I’m a little surprised! Are you a little surprised that he resisted? [Laughter] Dennis: Keith, our engineer, is surprised! I mean, it was so obvious; it was just so obvious. 14:00 Barbara: Well, it was so obvious that it was God—because it was January; the parakeet had been outside for over 24 hours; it was really cold—so that it actually survived the night, and then showed up at our neighbors’ and banged on his window and not ours, where nobody was home—I mean, so many things.  And then, that Bob would run into that youth group guy—I mean, Bob never went to church. He didn’t know where we went to church. I mean, it was so obvious that God was all over this story that I think we knew that somehow this was going to sink in; somehow—whether we said anything or not—it was just too big for her to miss it. Bob: So, the moral of the story for parents is: “God has your back”? Dennis: Yes. Bob: Is that it? Dennis: Yes. Barbara: Yes; that is it. Dennis: I mean, you know, Deuteronomy 6 comes right after the giving of the Ten Commandments; and right after those commandments are given, God commands the parents of Israel—  15:00 —He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and you shall teach your children to do the same.” Parenting is God’s idea; He loves our kids more than we do. As parents, so many times we feel so helpless; but God does care about our kids. Now, He may not do it in our timing; but He does have a way of getting our children’s attention, because, really, children are God’s statement that the next generation must take our place. What we must do is impart to our children the truth about God, the experience of God, and also the gospel of God—how they can know Him. That’s our assignment, Bob; and that’s really why Barbara and I wrote the book, The Art of Parenting. We want to call a generation of parents—and there are some 16 million millennial parents right now—another one million have been added this past year—who are raising their kids according to some kind of plan.   16:00 The question is: “Is it the best-selling-book-in-history plan?—is it the Bible?” What we want to do—and what we’ve done in the book—is break down the Scriptures and give folks some very simple, practical ways—but biblically-anchored—of how to raise the next generation. Bob: I have found that parents, who are interested in parenting material—whether it’s a video series, or a book, or even what we’re talking about on the radio—if it’s focused on parenting, they tend to be new parents who are aware that they’re in over their head; because it doesn’t take long, after you’ve had a child, before you go, “Oh, I don’t know everything I’m supposed to be doing.” By the time parents are raising teenagers, I think a lot of them think, “Well, if we haven’t gotten it by now, there’s no hope for us.” You wrote this book with new parents and parents of teens in mind—  17:00 —this is for everybody who’s still in the midst of trying to raise their kids; right? Barbara: Exactly. If you still have children at home, even if it’s one who is 17, there is something for you in this book; because it’s never too late. That’s one of the big messages that we want to send—that: “It’s never too late to impact your kids for Christ. It’s never too late to make investments in their lives for things that will last forever.”  We feel it more acutely, I think, with newborns, and toddlers, and preschoolers; because it’s so new and fresh; and we’re so acutely aware of what we’re missing. We’re much more worn down when our kids get to be teenagers, and it’s easy to give up. But God doesn’t want us to give up, because He’s always available and wants to intersect our kids’ lives at any stage so that we come to Him. Bob: But you know parents, in the midst of the teen years—they get exhausted / they get discouraged—they think, “If we haven’t figured it out by now, it’s helpless for us to figure it out.” 18:00 Dennis: That really is a lie. We know the feeling—we’ve experienced that feeling. In fact, yesterday, Barbara talked to one our children—adult children—who has a teenager or two, and our daughter was discouraged. Just going through the teenage years had just sapped her strength and her courage. What we want to do, Bob, is—we want to give parents courage to hang in there / not quit.  Basically, what we’ve broken parenting down into are really four areas. Number one: relationships—relationship with God and with one another. That’s our assignment—to train our kids to know how to relate to God properly and also how to get along with human beings.  Secondly, character—that’s the Book of Proverbs—being wise and not a fool; choosing right and not wrong. That’s a big part of being parents today—equipping children with boundaries. The third area is identity.  19:00 Listen to me—there is identity theft taking place today that is far more important than somebody stealing your credit card. There is a sexual identity theft, a spiritual identity theft, and also an emotional identity theft that we talk about in the book to help parents know how to raise kids, who reflect who God is. Finally, there’s a child’s purpose—that’s their mission. We believe a child was designed by God to be raised and then released—released toward the bull’s eye on the target that God has for them. If you’re not sending your child to that destination on purpose, the world does have a plan for your child; and it’s not a good plan. Bob: These four areas you came to after spending months poring through the Scriptures to say, “What does the Bible say about parenting?” Dennis: Actually, years, Bob; because I spent the better part of one year studying the Scriptures, and Barbara and I would talk about it.  20:00 But over the next 25 years, we confirmed it. Over, and over, and over again, these four areas really were distilled down into the essence of what God’s trying to do in our lives. One last story before we’re done here. In writing the book, we had to decide how to start the book. We asked Deborah for permission to tell this story, and we were at the Creation Museum with 13 of our grandkids and 5 of our adult children and their spouses. We had a little time each evening where Papa—where Papa would have a little lesson for the kids of what they’d seen at the Ark or what they’d seen at the Creation Museum. I said, “I have a little story I’d like to read.” I pulled open the manuscript on my computer and I began to read this story. Deborah’s two daughters were in the room—they were all ears.  21:00 They were listening, because—one’s about ten and the other’s about six or seven—and they’re just nearing that time when they’re going to want to go do whatever they want to go do, with whoever they want to it with, for as long as they want. Deborah was just grinning, because she’s a great mom and is doing a great job at those kids. Bob: Well, and hearing you tell that story—and then thinking about what Deborah shared as part of the Art of Parenting™ video series—some of her comments are priceless. I know some of our listeners have had a chance to start going through the Art of Parenting series. It’s available as a free online video series for folks to go through. A lot of people are getting the small group kit and planning small groups for this fall, where they can go through this content. 22:00 And of course, your book—we’re expecting it any day now, here, at FamilyLife®. If our listeners would like to pre-order, they can go online at FamilyLifeToday.com; or they can call 1-800-FL-TODAY and get a copy of the brand-new Art of Parenting book from Dennis and Barbara Rainey. Again, you can order, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com. That’s where you can also get information about the Art of Parenting course, online, or about the small group kit; or you can call if you have any questions: 1-800-FL-TODAY is our number—1-800-358-6329—1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” We’re going to be talking about parenting tomorrow night. For those of you who are FamilyLife Today Legacy Partners—remember that tomorrow night, at 7 o’ clock Central time, you’ll be getting a phone call from us. You’ll be a part of an event, where we can interact together—you can ask questions.  23:00 It’s going to be kind of a big town hall meeting—a virtual parenting Q&A session that we’ll be doing.  Dennis and Barbara will be here; FamilyLife’s new President, David Robins, and his Meg will be here; I’ll be here as well. We’ll be talking about everything from screen time to discipline. If you have questions you want to ask about parenting, be sure to join us for the Legacy Partner Connect event tomorrow night at 7 o’ clock Central time. Again, you’ll get a phone call if you are signed up for the event. If you’re a Legacy Partner, and you’re not signed up for the event—or if you’d like to find out about becoming a Legacy Partner and join us for the event—call 1-800-FL-TODAY and say, “How do I get in on that parenting phone call tomorrow night with Dennis and Barbara Rainey?” This just a part of the way that we want to say, “Thank you,” to those of you who are regular supporters of this ministry as monthly Legacy Partners. All that we do, here, at FamilyLife Today we couldn’t do without you. In fact, if you’re listening to FamilyLife Today, and you’ve benefitted from this program, you really have our Legacy Partners to thank for all of this—they make this program possible.  24:00 So on behalf of our regular listeners, I want to say to our Legacy Partners: “Thank you for partnering with us, and we hope to talk to you tomorrow night.” And we hope you can all be back tomorrow when we’re going to continue our conversation about parenting with Dennis and Barbara Rainey. We’re going to talk about job one: “What is the big picture assignment for us, as parents, as we raise our children?” I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Needs of Kids, Part 1 Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: What Kids Need (Day 2 of 3)  Bob: Your kids need you to be a parent. Here’s Barbara Rainey.  Barbara: I think there is a movement / I think there is a common thinking today in parents that I see that mom and dad need to be buddies with their kids—they need to be friends / they need to be pals. There’s nothing wrong with having that kind of a relationship—like if you go camping or you go to the park—you’re going to play together; you’re going to do some things together; you’re going to get down on the same level; but that isn’t the posture that you need to have, as a parent, all the time.  Homes do not need to be child-centric. Homes need to be God-centric, and then mom and dad need to be in charge and directing the life of their child—not being dictated by the children. You need to train your child that he’s not the center of the universe, and that’s the difference—is helping them begin to understand that they’re not in control; they’re not in charge.  1:00 They do have needs; they do have wants; and they do have feelings; but they aren’t / don’t always have to be met immediately.  Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, September 6th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine. Your kids need to know that you love them, and that you care about them, and that you are their friend; but they need to know, first, that you are their parent and that you have authority over them. We’re going to talk more about that today with Dennis and Barbara Rainey. Stay with us.  And welcome to FamilyLife Today.  2:00 Thanks for joining us. You know, if you stop and think about it, there is a reason that God, in His wisdom, gave kids to moms and dads.  Dennis: Oh, you think? [Laughter] Why do you think He did that, Bob?  Bob: Well, I’ve been reading your book; so I know the answer to why He did that. [Laughter] Kids need a mom and a dad to do what moms and dads are supposed to do so that the kids grow up with an understanding of who they are and what they are all about; don’t they?  Dennis: Psalm 127, verses 3-5 say this—listen carefully—some parents who I read this to right now don’t believe this, because they have real problems with their kids—we understand that: “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.”  3:00 Children are a gift to be received. They are arrows to be raised; and then they are also arrows that were meant to be released. They were not designed to stay in the quiver; they were meant to be designed for a target.  Bob: And if parents are going to raise their kids successfully, they need to know what their assignment is.  Your wife Barbara is back again today. Barbara, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.  Barbara: Thank you, Bob.  Bob: Do you think most moms and dads start the parenting journey understanding what it is that they are supposed to do?  Barbara: Probably not. I would say they probably have some ideas of what they want to do. I think they probably have some ideas of what they don’t want to do / what they don’t want to repeat. Most young couples come in and say, “I’m not going to do it the way my parents did,”— Bob: Right.  Barbara: —or “I don’t want to do it the way I saw it done by So-and-so.”  I think they have a vague, general idea; but parenting is such a hands-on learning experiencing.  4:00 I often say that a woman can read a dozen books—on how to have a baby, what’s it’s like to have a baby, what’s happening inside, what you can expect—but until she actually goes through the experience, it’s all theory. In some ways, that’s true with parenting, too; because you can read tons of books; but once you get in there—and you know who your kids are / you know who you are; and you’re beginning to figure out, “How do we work together?”—then, that’s when you really need to have practical help.  Bob: My preparation for parenting happened over six summers from 1972 until 1977.  Dennis: Boy Scouts?  Bob: It was YMCA Camp Lakewood in Potosi, Missouri.  Dennis: I was close; I was close!  Bob: I was a camp counselor for many years at Camp Lakewood. As we would have kids come into the cabin, it was my job to take care of those kids for the week. I caught on: “Here’s the big idea of parenting. You want your kids to have a blast every day and sleep well at night.” [Laughter]  Dennis: —“and be clothed.”  5:00 Bob: “You feed them, and you make sure they get to the bathroom”; but you—the whole idea is to have fun. I really think, when we had our kids, that’s what I reverted to: “My job here is to make sure that they have a fun time in life— Barbara: —“and they are tired at night.”  Bob: —“and they are tired at night. They sleep all night long.”  There is a little more to it than just your kids having fun.  Dennis: There is. I’m glad you illustrated that, because I would have said that was mine as well. You would say that for— Barbara: What?—that I would say that was your expectation?  Dennis: Yes; wouldn’t you say that?  Barbara: Probably; yes.  Bob: His goal was fun with the kids?  Barbara: Yes; for sure.  Dennis: Yes; she would see me come in after work and says: “You’re just always having fun with the kids! I’ve been here all day with these— Barbara: Problem-solving, constantly, all day long.  Dennis: —“with these rug rats wrapped around my legs; and they are dragging me around,” and I [Dennis] come home and have fun with them.  Bob: Yes; so when you sat down to write the book that you’ve just completed, The Art of Parenting, you took a chapter and you said, “We want to help moms and dads know what their kids need.” Fun may be a part of that, but there is more to it than fun.  6:00 You decided, in this book, you were just going to tweet out the answers to the parents; right?  Dennis: Well, most of them are millennials, who are parents today.  Bob: Right.  Dennis: I wanted to get their attention. I thought, “Can we give our top ten tips of what every child needs in 288 characters or less?”  Bob: I bet you were glad they expanded Twitter® from 140.  Dennis: I was. [Laughter] Barbara: Yes.  Dennis: I really was.  Barbara: Yes; that did help us.  Dennis: We did do that. We’d just like to share our top ten Twitter tweets to equip moms and dads to understand what their kids need today.  Number ten: “They need a home that is not child-centric.”  Barbara: I think that’s a really big one, even though it is number ten. Actually, they are all pretty important; but anyway, nonetheless, number ten. I think that’s really important today; because I think there is a movement / I think there is a common thinking today in parents that I see that mom and dad need to be buddies with their kids—that they need to be friends / they need to be pals.  7:00 There is nothing wrong with having that kind of relationship—like if you go camping or you go to the park—you’re going to play together; you’re going to do some things together; you’re going to get down on the same level; but that isn’t the posture you need to have, as a parent, all the time.  Homes do not need to be child-centric. Homes need to be God-centric; and then mom and dad need to be in charge and directing the life of their child—not being dictated by the children.  Bob: You know, here is the thing—when your kids are born, their needs are—we’re talking survival. We’re talking about the child is— Barbara: Right.  Bob: —dependent on you for everything.  Barbara: And his needs supersede parents’.  Bob: It’s very easy for us, as parents, to fall right into that and go: “This child can’t survive without me. My spouse can survive without me. The whole world can survive without me; but not this child.” So, from the beginning, we think, “My number one job is this child.”  8:00 It’s easy for the home to, then, become child-centered.  Barbara: It is the job of parents to keep that child alive, and your child does need you to survive; but you need to train your child that he’s not the center of the universe. That’s the difference—is helping them begin to understand that they’re not in control; they are not in charge. They do have needs; they do have wants; and they do have feelings; but they aren’t / don’t always have to be met immediately.  You’re right. It is easy to fall into that with newborns, because their needs are so important when they are tiny.  Dennis: Bob, I hate to correct you, here, on the broadcast; but each of these tweets are to take 288 characters or less, and you just burned up 765 as you illustrated it there. [Laughter]  Number nine is one you believe in strongly, Barbara—go ahead.  Barbara: Yes. Number nine is: “A home led by intentional and purposeful parents.”  Bob: Do you want to speak to that, Mr. Intentional?—[Laughter]—since that’s how your son referred to you.  Dennis: Well, here’s the rest of the tweet—  9:00 —it says: “Being intentional means investing lots of time planning, making wise decisions, and assuming responsibility for raising the next generation. Purposeful means working to be in agreement on discipline, boundaries, and standards.”  Bob: Again, I have to tell you—my orientation toward parenting, when we had our kids, was more spontaneous than purposeful: “What is the need of the moment?”—not—“What is the need of the year?—or the need of the next decade in the life of this child?” When you’re thinking in the moment, you’re missing the strategic purpose of parenting; you’re just dealing with dailyness of it.                                                                                                 Dennis: See, here is where the Bible pulls you out of the daily stuff and the horizontal and lifts you to the vertical. The Bible is constantly challenging you to teach your child to think like an eternal creature, because they are  Barbara: Right.  Dennis: —like a boy or a girl, who was created in the image of God—like one, who God has a mission and purpose for. 10:00 They are not just random molecules. Children are God’s gift to this generation, and what we have to do is equip them to think rightly about themselves.  Bob: Our friend / our mutual friend, Tim Kimmel, says in The Art of Parenting™ video series—he says, “When you realize how long your child’s going to live, it changes everything.” Then, he says, “I happen to know how long every child’s going to live—they live forever.” When you are parenting with eternity in mind / when you are parenting with the idea, “This child is going to live forever,” that does reorient and refocus what you’re doing.  Barbara: Exactly.  Dennis: You did a little better on that—that was 500 characters, Bob. [Laughter] Number eight.  Barbara: Number eight is: “A secure home,”—and we’re talking about more than just an alarm system, and child safety locks, and car seats in the car. We’re talking about the kind of security that comes from emotional stability and having a peaceful environment at home.  One of the biggest keys to kids feeling safe at home is building a strong marriage, because marriage has to come first.   11:00 It’s important for moms and dads to make sure that their marriage is strong, and stable, and secure, and you’re feeding your marriage at the same time that you are feeding your kids.  Bob: A strong, healthy marriage can cover a multitude of other failings for parents; can’t it?  Dennis: It’s been said, over and over again, that the most important thing your children need to know, practically, as they are growing up is that mommy and daddy love each other. They’re surrounded with kids—at school, on the playground, in their neighborhood—who are growing up in homes, where that’s not the case. They are wanting to know: “Are my mom and dad going to hang in there and go the distance?”  I remember, in 1953, a fight/an argument—not physical, but an emotionally-heated moment—in my parents’ marriage, where, as a little boy, I asked the question: “Are Mom and Dad going to make it?   12:00 “Are they going to get a divorce?” I remember shaking out of fear.  Now, that was 1953, when divorce was never heard of. I went to school, all the way through high school as a young man, with only one classmate who grew up in a broken home. Today, your children are growing up with 60 percent of their classmates coming from a home of—either a single-parent family / a blended family—something other than an intact family that goes the distance for a lifetime.  Our children need to feel secure, and the way they can feel secure is if they know their mom and dad are committed to one another for a lifetime.  Bob: Okay; this time you went way over your tweet limit. [Laughter]  Barbara: That’s true.  Bob: So, what’s number seven?  Barbara: Number seven: “Parents who pray together every day.” This is something that Dennis and I have done since the early months of our marriage.  Dennis: It was December of 1972.  Barbara: Yes; Dennis went and talked to a friend of ours—who had been married, at the time, 27 years, I think; they had four or five kids—  13:00 —and asked him: “What was the most important advice he would give him, as a new husband, and for us, together, as a newly married couple?” He said, “You should pray together with your wife every day.  Dennis has told this story multiple times—that he was shocked it was something so simple and seemingly so insignificant. Yet, we began to pray together every day; and it’s not long-winded—most of the times, it’s not. We’re not praying through every need that we know of. We’re not naming every name of someone who needs intercession. We pray very simply, but we do pray together every single day. Of course, we pray at meals too; but that [prayer] has made a big difference in our marriage, because we, together, come before God and we humble ourselves before Him.  Bob: So, why does that matter, as parents? I can see where it bonds you together in your marriage, but how does it affect your parenting?  Barbara: Well, if you are humble together before God, you’re submitting to Him and to His authority in your life.  14:00 Then, you’re going to be much more receptive to His leading you in how you raise your kids; and you’re going to have more unity. Now, that’s not going to be automatic. You’re still going to have to work through things; but if you pray together, and you’re seeking God together, then you’re going to be more open to His guidance in your life.  Dennis: I love the way Ephesians, Chapter 3, concludes—it just reminds us of the truth about God. Why wouldn’t you want to pray if this is true about God? “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” It’s a prayer of sorts in the Book of Ephesians.  Bob, if God’s in charge—if He knows what our kids are up to / if He loves them more than us, and He does—He knows how to get their attention. I think, sometimes, it’s the parents’ prayers that bring children back to their faith, even as adults; because they’ve been tracked down by the Lord God Almighty, who is now answering the prayers of parents over a number of years. 15:00 Bob: Okay; we’re talking about what kids need from a mom and dad. This is from your new book, The Art of Parenting. You’re giving us tweets—just the bullet points on what our children need. What is tweet number six?  Dennis: Number six: “Parents who don’t freak out when their children fail or caught lying, stealing, kissing under the stairs at the church— Bob: Wait, wait; wait.  Dennis: —sneaking out— Bob: Did that happen? Did that happen with somebody?  Dennis: Yes—not one of our kids. [Laughter] Bob: Okay.  Barbara: Not one of our kids.  Dennis: —hiding things, making stupid choices, doing drugs, and even more. They also don’t freak out when their children have doubts or pushback against their parents’ faith.”  Bob: Barbara, this is tough— Barbara: This is real hard; yes.  16:00 Bob: —because when you see your kids making bad choices / doing childish things, you can get a little freaked out, as a mom.  Barbara: But this is why it’s so important—and I agree with you totally, because I freak out as a mom—but this is why it’s so important that parents are growing their own relationship with God; because if you are, then you understand, and you can remind yourself: “Oh, that’s right. My child is a sinner. My child has a wicked heart. My child needs to be saved. My child needs to be redeemed and needs God to work in my child’s life.”  When your child does these things, it’s not so much your fault as much as it is a reflection of what your child’s heart is. Your child’s heart needs a relationship with God. The more moms and dads can be grounded in their faith, and taking their children before the throne of God, the less caught off guard you’re going to be. You’ll still be caught off guard some; but you’ll go, “Okay, this is a reflection of the work that God needs to do in my child’s life.”  17:00 Bob: One of the things that Elyse Fitzpatrick, who was a contributor to the Art of Parenting video series, said—that I thought was very helpful—she said, “A lot of parents are discipling children for being childish.” She said: “That’s what children do. When they are being disobedient, you discipline them. When they are being childish, you’ve got to leave room for there to be childish irresponsibility and not freak out when a four-year-old is acting like a four-year-old.”  Dennis: I’ll tell you—we’ve been on the receiving end of a teacher calling from school, saying, “Your child was caught cheating on a test.” Now, never mind, when I was a college student, I cheated on a computer test. Now, it’s easy to forget what you were like when you were that age; you know? [Laughter] But it’s back to what you were talking about, Bob—a proper view and understanding that we’re all broken / we’re all just a step away from doing something really, really tragic can help us in not freaking out. 18:00 Bob: You know, it is one thing, Dennis, when you see your kids making childish choices—they’re writing on the walls or they get into a wreck with the car and knock over mailboxes—that kind stuff has happened to you; right?  Dennis: Oh, yes.  Bob: Yes.  Dennis: We’ve got—one of our children holds the record number of rear-end collisions.  Bob: —in the state of Arkansas? [Laughter]  Dennis: No; in our family—that’s the record—not in the state.  Bob: It’s something else, though, when your kids are starting to have doubts/questions. They are starting to wonder about whether there really is a God, and whether they want to follow Him, and about the moral choices they are going to make as teenagers, about the spiritual choices they are going to make. It’s pretty tough, as parents, not to become anxious when you start to see some of these things emerging in a child’s life.  Barbara: Well, especially, if your number one goal is for your children to walk with God; and that was our number one goal.  19:00 I think our kids pick up on that too; but again, parents need to remember: “What were you like when you were that age? Were you questioning? Were you wondering?” Just embrace those questions, as hard as it is to do, and “Let’s talk about it.” Understand that everyone is going to go through that; and if you react, your kids are going to go, “Oh, I can push her button by talking this way.” You’re giving them an entree into them controlling, which isn’t healthy.  So, not freaking out is a big one. It really is important that you do it as little as possible; but it is a hard one to not freak out, because we love our kids so much. We don’t want them to suffer, and we sort of mistakenly think that we can prevent a lot of that.  Bob: We’ve had guests, over the years, who have coached in this regard. I remember one guest saying, “You have to practice your not-freaking-out face.” As a parent, you need to kind of prepare for—imagine a child saying, “So, I just found out my best friend is a lesbian.”  20:00 As a parent, all of a sudden, it’s like: “A what?!”—but you have to go—“Oh, that is interesting. How did you learn that?”  Barbara: “Tell me more.”  Bob: —and ask questions. All the anxiety that’s bubbling up in you, in those moments, you have to figure out how you’re going to just keep that in the background while you interact with that child.  Dennis: This really goes back to an earlier point we made, where the home needs to be a safe place/a secure place, where you can bring your doubts out into the open. I just want to ask—every parent, every grandparent, every aunt and uncle—who is listening to this broadcast: “Wouldn’t you rather your child, or your grandchild, your nephew/your niece—wouldn’t you rather them express that doubt—that question/that rebellion—against God to you rather than express it with their friends and have peer pressure shape the answer?  I wish I could say, Bob, that Barbara and I really did this perfectly.  21:00 We didn’t. There were times when we did freak out, but you have to tell your face something different than what you’re feeling. You’ve just got to stonewall it a little bit and say, “Oh,”—like you said, Bob—“Oh, really? Let’s talk more about that.”  I’ve got a friend—one of his children came back and said, “I don’t believe in God anymore.” “Oh, okay; that’s interesting. Let’s talk about what’s happened that’s caused you to come to that conclusion. What’s the evidence? How are you weighing?—what are you thinking?”  Bob: Then, you have to, in the midst of that, resist the temptation in that dialogue to want to get them right back on track.  Dennis: Oh, you can’t preach at that moment!  Barbara: Immediately; right.  Bob: That’s right.  Dennis: You can’t preach. You have to be a shock-absorber for that child to be able to pushback and become his or her own person. They’ve got to have their own faith / their own experience with God. I think that’s why this one is so important. Parents don’t need to freak out. They need to be shock-absorbers for their kids to be able to test their parents and see how their parents respond. 22:00 Bob: We’re going to have to come back tomorrow to get through the rest of this list of tweets for parents about what our assignment is, as a mom or as a dad. I’d encourage our listeners—if you’re not already signed up to get a copy of Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s new book, The Art of Parenting, you can pre-order, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call to place your pre-order. Our number is 1-800-FL-TODAY.  The Art of Parenting video series is available; and there are churches that are already showing our movie, Like Arrows, as a way to kick-off the parenting series. There is an Art of Parenting, free, online series that moms and dads can go through as well. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com to find out more about all of the Art of Parenting resources we have available, including Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s brand-new book. Our website, again, is FamilyLifeToday.com; or call if you have any questions or if you’d like to order by phone: 1-800-FL-TODAY— 23:00 —1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”  A quick reminder: Tonight, at 7 o’clock Central time, we’re going to be connecting with many of our Legacy Partners, who are joining us for a FamilyLife® Legacy Partner Connect event. We’ll spend a little less than an hour doing Q&A around parenting, and our Legacy Partners are invited to join us. Not only will the two of you [Dennis and Barbara] be with us, but FamilyLife’s new President, David Robbins, and his wife Meg are going to be here as well. We’ll be interacting, and taking questions, and talking about parenting issues.  This is one of the ways that we want to express our gratitude for those of you who are monthly Legacy Partners. You are the ones who have made today’s program possible for everybody who has been listening—not only here in this country—but all around the world. We are so grateful for the partnership we have together. We look forward to talking to you tonight.  Again, if you’re signed up for the call, you’ll get a phone call just before 7 o’clock Central time.  24:00 If you’re not signed up, you can call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY; we’ll get everything coordinated so that you get a phone call and can be part of the Legacy Partner Connect event tonight—again, at 7 o’clock Central time. Look forward to talking to you then.  And we hope you can join us back tomorrow as we continue with our tweets for parents—the big ideas around parenting. Dennis and Barbara Rainey will be back again tomorrow. I hope you can be here as well.  I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I’m Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Needs of Kids, Part 2 Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: What Kids Need (Day 3 of 3)                         Bob: While you’re making sure today that your children are fed—that they’ve got something to wear—that they’re doing their homework and that they’re protected—Barbara Rainey wants you to remember there is an even higher priority that we should never lose sight of, as parents. Barbara: The number one thing that kids need from a mom and dad is to know how to have an authentic faith for themselves. They need a relationship with Jesus Christ, so that they can live for Him and take the message of Christ to their generation. What they need from you is to see it! Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, September 7th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine. Your children are going to live forever, just like you are. That’s why their spiritual condition is the most important thing we need to be focusing on, as parents. We’ll talk more about that today with Dennis and Barbara Rainey. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. So one of the great things about learning about parenting from parents who’ve already done it is they’ve made the mistakes you don’t have to make; right? [Laughter] Barbara: I wish it were that easy! Dennis: Well, we were parents. We still are parents, by the way. Bob: Right. Dennis: But we were parents in the thick of it for 28 straight years: six children—now, all adults; now, all married; lots of grandkids—[our kids] raising their own crew. I have to tell you, Bob—my hat goes off to them. Bob: Yes. Dennis: I think they’re raising this generation in much more challenging days than we ever thought about. Bob: We’ve been taking time this week, and your wife Barbara is joining us. Barbara, welcome back. Barbara: Thank you, Bob. Bob: We are talking about parenting, because you guys have just finished a book called The Art of Parenting. The book is, really, the centerpiece of what has become a parenting initiative, here, at FamilyLife®.  2:00 It led to the video series—the Art of Parenting™—that churches are starting to use in small groups. People are using this in their living room with their neighbors, inviting them over for dinner and going through the video series. And this is what led to the movie that we produced, called Like Arrows, which is also going to be available very soon for people to purchase and to watch. I know a lot of our listeners did not get a chance to see it in theaters—they’ve been asking me, “When does it come out on DVD?” We’ll have news for you about that soon. Your book, The Art of Parenting, is really the headwaters for all that we’ve been talking about here. We’re spending time helping parents understand what their kids need from them. You put these needs in the form of tweets, and we’ve already covered half of your list of ten tweets. Do you want to go back through the first five that we covered? Dennis: I think it might be good; yes. Barbara: Except it starts with ten; so the first five, but it— Bob: Okay; we’re counting down until we get to number one. [Laughter] Dennis: Number ten—it’s: “A home that is not child-centric.” Bob: Your kids need the home they grow up in not to revolve around them. 3:00 Dennis: Exactly. Number nine—it’s: “A home led by intentional and purposeful parents.” That means parents who are really thinking through where they are taking their kids— Bob: Yes. Dennis: —and “What is the target that they’re going to release their arrow toward?” Bob: —not just in the moment—but you’re thinking, long-term and strategically, with your kids. Barbara: Yes; you’re thinking: “Why are we doing what we’re doing? What’s our goal?” Bob: Yes. Barbara: “Where are we headed?” Bob: Alright; what else? Dennis: Number eight: “A secure home.” Security is different than an alarm system. It’s the security of a mom and dad, who are committed to one another, and who are committed to following Jesus Christ. Bob: It’s emotional security. Barbara, that goes beyond a mom and a dad being together. It is part of how we communicate to our kids, “It’s safe here for you to be who you are”; right? Barbara: Yes; and mom and dad model that by being committed to one another and having a love relationship with one another that spills over to their kids. Their kids feel that—they feel that security and that freedom to be who they are. 4:00 Dennis: Number seven: “Parents who pray together every day.” I believe this more than ever—parenting is a spiritual battle. Marriages and families are taking place on a spiritual battlefield today that is unseen, but you are in a battle over your child’s soul. Bob: And let me just say—in August, we launched a “30-Day Parenting Prayer Challenge,” where moms and dads can sign up and get a prayer prompt every day that will give them things to be praying for their children. It’s not too late to sign up for that. You can go to FamilyLifeToday.com—give us your email address—and every day, for the next 30 days, we’ll send you a prayer prompt. You can be praying, together, for your kids. Dennis: Number six: “Your child or children need parents who don’t freak out when their children fail.” When they’re developing a faith of their own, parents can be a shock-absorber/a safe place to share their doubts. Bob: Okay; we’re to number five. So, Barbara, as we count down to number one, what’s the number five tweet? 5:00 Barbara: Tweet number five is: “Parents who embrace God-given differences, as male and female.” The tweet goes on to say: “Men and women are made in the image of God, and yet we’re very different. Your children need to see you relating to one another, working together as a team, and modeling maleness and femaleness.” Bob: We’re going to talk more about this as we continue to talk about your book, but our kids need to understand their own identity— Barbara: Yes. Bob: —their own sense of the fact that God made them male or female and what that means. Part of the way they understand that is by seeing a mom and dad understand what it is to be a man or a woman and, then, model that for them. Barbara: Yes; and that’s the best place for them to find that out—not out in the world, not from the school teacher, or kids on the playground. Their first and most important image of what it means to be a man / what it means to be a woman needs to come from mom and dad at home—seeing mom and dad relate to one another, day in and day out, year after year. 6:00 Bob: Yes. Dennis: And you don’t have to do it perfectly.  Barbara: Of course not! Dennis: But you just have to—                                                                                                                     Barbara: And you won’t. [Laughter] Dennis: No; you sure won’t, but you have to have enough of an idea of: “What is manhood?” and “How is it different than being a woman/than womanhood?” God began the Book—the best-selling book in history, the Bible—with a very clear statement that there were two sexes: male and female—two different sexes, who were uniquely imbued with the image of God. Those distinctives of being a man / being a woman were meant to complement one another, especially in marriage. Bob: And this is something I know both of you spent a lot of time—thinking about, looking at the Scriptures, praying about, reading broadly on this subject—because you’re not trying to encourage moms and dads to follow a stereotype when it comes to manhood and womanhood; right? Barbara: That’s right.  7:00 We aren’t. Actually, that chapter, where we talk most about this, was the hardest one we wrote. It was the one we finished last, because it is such a complicated and complex subject.  What we did, in that chapter—what we hope will be communicated as you read the book—is we went back to Genesis and looked at: “What was there in the beginning?” God doesn’t tell us a lot, but there’s enough there that we can begin to understand what His purpose was for men, what His purpose is for women, and how He made us different, and how we complement one another. There’s purpose and order—and all kinds of things—that help us begin to understand what a woman is, and what she’s supposed to do; and what a man is, and what he’s supposed to do. Dennis: The fourth tweet in our ten count-down to number one is one that Barbara needs to comment on—not me. Barbara: “Children need a mom, who is a nurturer, lover, and a vigilant protector of her children.”  8:00 Your kids’ souls need to be nourished by a mom, who understands her indispensability. Moms are indispensable. Mommas love, and believe in, and defend, and rescue, and encourage, and fight for their children like no one else on earth; so be there for them! It’s the whole idea of being invested in your child. Moms—because we give birth to these kids; because we pour our lives into these children; because we believe in them, and we love them, and we care for them—we want the best for them. Sometimes, you have to fight for them, like a momma bear does her cubs. That’s what your kids need from you. They need you to fight for them for what’s best for them—for what they need—not just to give them the best privileges—that’s not what I mean by fighting for them, but I mean fighting to protect them. 9:00 One of the stories I tell in the book is how I was vigilant about the messages and the images that came into my kids’ eyes, and into their heads, and into their hearts. I monitored television like a hawk. We watched very little of it, and it was highly supervised; because I knew enough about my children to know that they didn’t have the ability to process some of that stuff that was visually presented to them on television or in movies—even in music / in certain kinds of music. I wanted them to not experience some of that until they were mature enough to process it and understand it, as an adult. That was one of the ways that I protected my kids. Bob: Okay; so let me ask you—because some of our listeners are dads, raising their kids on their own. Barbara: Yes. Bob: Mom’s not there, either because of death or divorce. There’s not a mom in the home to be the vigilant defender, and protector, and guardian. What does that dad do? Dennis: I think he looks for some very influential mentors and women, who can nurture his children in a way that’s appropriate in a relationship, going forward.  10:00 You’re going to find those folks, not out in the marketplace, but in the church. I wouldn’t do it causally. I would do it after a lot of prayer, and I would interview a few folks and I would make sure the person or the woman that I selected—or a couple of women, maybe—really emerged as those who had something to say to the next generation of children. Bob: This could be a teacher at school. Barbara: Yes. Bob: It could be somebody who is working with the youth group at church. Dennis: Right. Bob: You just give them a heads-up and say: “Hey, my son’s in the youth group. We don’t have a mom in the home. You could have influence in this area,”—just kind of nudge them to help you out here a little bit. Barbara: Well, I think it could be a relative too. I think there are a lot of grandparents in this generation, who are stepping in and providing those missing links, because there are so many families that are split by divorce or the death of a spouse; so there are a lot of grandparents.  11:00 I know of people our age—aunts and uncles of kids—who are doing that too. I think there are lots of opportunities out there; you just need to ask God to guide you. Bob: And we just have to say here—because of the climate we live in, you want to do this with eyes wide open. Barbara: Yes. Bob: Because to have an opposite sex mentor for your son, or even a same-sex mentor for your daughter, who’s not a part of the family—you just want to make sure that you’ve done the vetting you’re talking about, Dennis, and that you don’t leave that relationship unattended. Dennis: I totally agree. Tweet number three: “Kids need a dad who is a servant-leader, a protector, and provider.” What we talk about here is how your children need to see what a real man does—how he pursues a relationship with God, his wife, and his children. I think this is a tough assignment, Bob, because modeling humble leadership / being a servant-leader really demands death to self.  12:00 I remember going home, on more than one occasion—I didn’t want to die anymore. I didn’t want to die to self! Bob: Right. Dennis: I wanted to go home and live for myself. But I think, to have the kind of home you’re going to have to have today, you need to recognize your kids need to see a dad who can demonstrate what self-denial looks like—love his wife—but also, love his kids. Bob: And Barbara, again, in this culture, there are a lot of kids going home—to homes without a dad. The same advice applies here. Barbara: Yes. Bob: It’s good to have coaches, or youth group leaders, or some uncles, or some grandparents, who can come along and model for your sons and your daughters what godly manhood looks like. Barbara: Exactly, because they need to see it. Honestly, they need to see it, most importantly, of course, with their dad; but they need glimpses of what it looks like with other men. 13:00 Great coaches have always been highly influential with young men, and so are teachers. There are stories—tons of stories—about teachers who have changed the life of students. Be involved with your kids with where they are. Try to get the right teacher for your child; try to get your kid involved in an activity that has a really good coach, that you know will model some things for your son—or even for your daughter—that will make a difference in their life. Bob: Yes. Dennis: School choice is always a debatable point between moms and dads— Bob: There’s controversy there; yes. Dennis: —but also between families. Bob: Yes. Dennis: You and I, Bob, have done a lot of radio over the last 26 years, talking about the school choice issue. Barbara and I talked a lot about this. I remember, as a dad, just thinking, “I am called to be my children’s protector as we send them to the public school,”—which is what we chose to do after much prayer, much discussion, and a lot of doubt, by the way. 14:00 I realized that if I was going to protect them, by sending them there, I had to be engaged at a far deeper level than if I sent them to “a safer” place. It was interesting what that extracted: meetings with teachers around delicate subjects that they were wanting to teach our children that we didn’t agree with—needing to handle that in a diplomatic way in front of our kids. I’m a person of conviction and, you know, I don’t mind sharing my convictions; but we’ve always got to be loving. As a dad, we can be protectors and do that in a shepherding way that is peaceful and can protect our kids as they go into harm’s way. Bob: Okay; we’re talking about what kids need from moms and dads as we’re raising our children. This is from your new book, The Art of Parenting. We’re down to tweet number two. Barbara: Tweet number two is: “Parents who have surrendered to Christ, because of His sacrificial love.”  15:00 There is really nothing more important for a mom and a dad, as we’ve hinted to and mentioned previously, than for a mom and dad to be surrendered to Christ; because if you are, He is your Master and you are following what He has to say. You are studying the Bible to find out what He has to say about parenting, what He’s called you to do in your marriage, and what He’s called you to do with your kids too. That creates a stability, in and of itself; because you aren’t doing this flippantly. You’re not raising them casually, but you understand the weight and the importance that God has put on you to raise the next generation so that your kids might grow up and be Christ-followers so that they might take Him to their generation. That weight gives you the impetus to want to do well and to do it God’s way. Bob: The other way we could turn this around and say it is: “Kids don’t need a mom and a dad, who are the blind leading the blind.”  16:00 You’ve got to know where God’s leading you and, then, take your kids in that direction. Dennis: You know, Bob, we are watching a generation of young people, who are leaving the church when they graduate from high school. At least for the present time, they are not coming back. There are a lot of people asking the question, “Why is this happening?”  I believe, when your children do not see a faith that matches up with what you practice at church with what you’re doing at home, there’s a divorce that occurs. It’s a divorce that a child tries to reconcile in his mind: “Why is it that mom and dad say they believe this at church, but they live like this at home?” That’s not reconcilable to a child; but after 18 years, the reality is glaring—the parents aren’t really in love with Jesus Christ.  If you go back to the Scriptures—Deuteronomy, Chapter 6—there’s so much wisdom in this!  17:00 Listen to me! God commanded—to the nation of Israel through Moses—He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. And you shall teach your children…” the same thing—pass it on! You can’t pass on what you don’t possess. Children today desperately need to see their moms and dads attempt to be Christ-followers. Why do I say “attempt?” Because you’re not going to do it perfectly. You are going to fail, and you’re going to have to turn, on more than one occasion, and ask your kids to forgive you for being a poor model. I did that; Barbara did that. We’ll talk more, in this series from the Art of Parenting, about that. I think, more than ever, children today need to see their parents with an authentic faith—a love for God and Christ that, again, is not perfect; but it doesn’t quit! It’s not a one day per week for one hour.  18:00 It’s an attempt to live for Christ—and for His purposes and glory—seven days a week. Bob: Okay; so we’ve been going through our top-ten countdown. We’re all the way to number one, so the top of the list for parents?—the thing kids—would you say: “This is what kids need most from a mom and dad”? Barbara: Yes; that’s why we put it number one, actually. [Laughter] Bob: Yes. Barbara: And the number one thing that “Kids need from a mom and dad is to know how to have an authentic faith for themselves.” They need a relationship with Jesus Christ—that’s your ultimate goal, as a mom and dad. And so, what they need from you is—they need to know how to do that.  As Dennis was just talking about, you’ll need to ask your kids to forgive you more than once. I thought: “Yes! Like about a hundred times more than once—per kid!” [Laughter] That’s how your children know that it’s an authentic relationship; and that’s how they know: “Oh, when I mess up—when I make a mistake / when I do something wrong—I can go to God and talk to Him, because my mom and dad have shown me how to do that. They’ve done it with me. I’ve watched them do it with each other.”  19:00 That’s just such a normal part of our family life that they don’t think anything about it—they know: “Oh, I can go talk to God about this problem. I can take my concerns and my fears to God, because we’ve been doing that my whole life.”  So the goal—the number one goal—is to lead your children to Christ so that they can live for Him and take the message of Christ to their generation. What they need from you is to see it! Bob: And we can’t guarantee. There’s not a formula here to make sure your kids are going to follow Christ, but we can be faithful to what God’s called us to. Dennis: That’s right! We didn’t do it perfectly—we’ve already said that. But what we did attempt to model is a word we don’t talk about much, certainly within the Christian community—it’s the word, “repent.” Repent means you turn and do a 180. Bob: Yes. Dennis: You turn from going the wrong way to turn to God, and admit you’ve been going the wrong way, and go His way.  20:00 That’s what children need to see / that’s what children need to hear. How do you do that?! You know they’re going to fail. You know they’re going to sin! They need to know: “How do I handle my sin, as a follower of Christ, going forward?” Bob: You guys—I assume you’re okay with us putting these top ten tweets on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com— Dennis: Absolutely! Bob: —so that parents can download this. Barbara: Yes. Bob: They can look at this and they can have dialogue/conversation about: “How are we doing in these areas? What needs adjustment?” Dennis: And what I would say, here, at the close of the broadcast—if you haven’t taken a look at the Art of Parenting video series—it’s for small groups—it’s for a pair of parents to get together with four or five other couples and to experience community and to go through content that’s going to open you up to talk with other parents. You need to do this! 21:00 There are going to be hundreds of thousands of homes—and maybe millions of children impacted—by the parents who go through this brand-new video series. If you’re looking for a way to grow and apply what we’re talking about here, this is how you do it. Bob: Yes; there is a version of the Art of Parenting video series that’s available as an online course that moms and dads can go through together for free. You can find out more about that on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com. We think it’s probably best for you to get together with other parents and go through the video series together—have the workbook; interact / talk about the issues you’re facing, as parents; and help one another in the process. Find out about the Art of Parenting small group kit when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com as well; and then, of course, your new book, The Art of Parenting, is going to be here any day. If folks want to pre-order a copy of the book, they can go to FamilyLifeToday.com to pre-order; or they can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get on the list to receive the book as soon as it arrives.  22:00 Again, the website: FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” You know, if you are a regular FamilyLife Today listener—if you’ve been on our website and looked at the articles that are available / the resources we have there, if you have been to any of our events, or if you’ve used any of the materials that FamilyLife has produced and created—you need to thank one of our Legacy Partners. FamilyLife Today Legacy Partners and those of you who donate, from time to time, to support this ministry—you are the ones who make all that we do, here, at FamilyLife possible. There are hundreds of thousands of people who have engaged with us today around parenting all because of you. On behalf of all who have listened today, and throughout this week, and this month, and this year—those who have been online / those who have been to our events—we just want to say: “Thank you for your partnership with the ministry of FamilyLife Today.  23:00 “We couldn’t do what we do without you.” If you’re a regular listener, and you’ve never made a donation to support FamilyLife Today, let me just say—we want to make sure that, as you think about giving to our ministry, you don’t do anything to take away from your financial support of your local church. Giving to your local church needs to be your number one priority when it comes to financial support. But, beyond that, if you’re able to help with ministries like ours, we’d love to have you be a part of the FamilyLife team.  You can donate, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And if you make a donation this month, we’d like to send you, as a thank-you gift, a book from our friend, Bryan Loritts, called A Cross-Shaped Gospel. It’s a powerful new book that Bryan has written—we’d love to get a copy in your hands. You can request it when you donate at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FLTODAY to make a donation. Again, thanks for your support of the ministry. 24:00 And we hope you have a great weekend. I hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. And I hope you can join us back again on Monday when we’re going to meet D.A. and Elisia Horton. This is a couple who, if you had met them during the first year of their marriage, or during their courtship for that matter, you’d have thought, “No way can this couple survive as husband and wife!” But they’ve learned some things along the way, and they’ll be here to share that with us. I hope you can be here as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back Monday for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Leaning on the Lord Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                                   From the series:       Art of Parenting: What Every Parent Needs (Day 1 of 3)                             Bob: The demands we face as parents are daily and, sometimes, urgent demands. Barbara Rainey says, in the midst of that, we’ve got to keep in mind the long-term perspective of parenting. Barbara: As parents, we’re so often reactive; and we’re so often mired in today and the issues of today—whether it’s potty training, or lying, or first day of school, or whatever it is—we get really bogged down in the today. It’s hard to make ourselves think ahead. Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, October 29th. Our host is Dennis Rainey; I'm Bob Lepine. In parenting, it’s important that all of us keep the main thing the main thing. We’re going to talk about how we do that, as parents, today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. I don’t know if you guys have had this kind of an opportunity—I say “you guys” because your wife, Barbara, is in the studio with us today. Welcome Barbara. Barbara: Thank you Bob. Dennis: Hi Sweetheart. Barbara: Hi!  Bob: Have you had the opportunity to sit down with expectant parents, who are about to have their first baby, and just say: “Okay; let me give you the lay of the land. Let me tell you what’s coming”? Have you had parents like that, who have said, “Would you just prep us?” You know, we do premarital counseling, but we don’t do a whole lot of pre-parenting counseling for first-time parents. Have you ever had that opportunity? Barbara: Well, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk to young women, who are going to have their first baby about the birthing process, because that’s really front and center in most of their minds—it’s: “How am I going to get this kid here? How am I going to survive it? How are we going to…”—all that stuff at the beginning—feeding and all of that. That’s really where most young women’s minds are: “How am I going to survive the first six months?”  2:00 So they don’t really think much beyond that—I don’t think. I think it’s getting the baby here, getting it healthy, learning how to feed it and take care of it—and that’s about as far as I think they go, mentally.  Bob: When I was a young parent, I wasn’t thinking much beyond the here and now—the next couple of weeks. I didn’t have the big picture in mind. I think, for a lot of parents, that’s just where we live. Dennis: I think it’s a time of blissful joy, and they really don’t know what’s ahead for them. I think there is a lot of optimism—and may I say it about us?—a lot of arrogance. We thought we’d do a better job than our parents would do. It wasn’t that we thought we were better people; we just thought we’ve been better-equipped. We’ve had some great teachers of the Bible; we’ve had some mentors that have built into our lives, and we thought we could do it, Bob. I don’t think I thought it would be easy, but I thought it was going to be easier than it was. [Laughter] 3:00 Bob: So today, what we’re going to do is—we’re going to do some of this pre-parenting counseling that will, hopefully, help moms and dads think—not so much about labor and delivery—because they’re taking classes for that; right? Barbara: Right. Bob: They’re going through sessions on how to breathe and all of this. But we want them to be thinking about the next 18 years with this son or daughter that they are about to have and to come back and say, “Okay; what’s the big objective here?”  And this is one of the things you deal with in the book that you’ve just written called The Art of Parenting. You’ve got a chapter in here—a section of the book—that’s all about what parents need in order to be good parents; and at the center of that, they need the right perspective; don’t they? Dennis: They do. This first point we’d like to make for parents is absolutely essential. It’s like gravity—it is—it must be in place in your life, in your marriage, in your family to be successful, as a parent.  You see what I’m holding. Bob: I do. Dennis: It’s a Bible.  Bob: Yes. 4:00 Dennis: We say, “A dusty Bible will lead to a dirty life.” It will also lead to children who are aimless, spiritually, and who don’t know who they are and why they were created. Barbara: So the most important thing we believe for every parent is that you must be individually, and then as a couple, dependent on God. Assuming that you know Him—which we’re assuming that at this moment—if you know Him, then the most important thing for you to do is to grow in your relationship with Him so that you can, therefore, guide your child according to the principles that God has put forth in His Scripture. Bob: When you talk about parents being in God’s Word and following God, you’re talking about being in there with more purpose and more intentionality than just taking a Bible verse vitamin every morning; right? Barbara: Yes; and I mean more than just going to church on Sunday morning. I think we—and especially when we’re young, because Dennis and I were this way too—I think we were trying to learn how to walk with God.  5:00 We didn’t really know what that meant; so it was real easy to feel like—if we went to church, and we were in a Bible study, or we read our Bible occasionally—that was accomplishing that. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things—you have to start there.  But I think what we’re saying in the book, and what we’re saying to you, who are listening, is that: “What you really need is—you really need a heart that is surrendered to Christ and is totally dependent on Him.” Because, as we learned in raising our kids, it wasn’t just enough to take our kids to Sunday school. It wasn’t just enough to have them memorize a verse here and there. What they really needed is—they really needed to see a mom and dad, who are completely dependent on Christ, as individuals—not just talking about it—because, if you just talk about it, your kids are going to rebel. But if they see a mom and dad—who are in love with Jesus, who know Him, and who are trying to please him with their lives—then that’s going to be much more attractive to them. Your whole family is just going to work together better because you’re following Christ—not just your mixed-up ideas.  6:00 Bob: Barbara, I’ve never talked to a young mom without hearing something like this: “Before I had kids, there was margin and space in my life for a quiet time, or to go to the women’s Bible study, or to really get deep. I loved it. I really enjoyed it. After I had kids, margin is gone. Barbara: —“gone.” Bob: “It’s vanished. Getting five minutes in the Bible seems like an impossibility unless I just lock myself in the bathroom for five minutes.” Barbara: Well, and that doesn’t always work because my kids always found me. [Laughter] Dennis: She tried to hide in there! Barbara: Oh, I did, and it didn’t work. I remember that so well, and I felt exactly the same way. I think now, as I look back, one of my regrets is that I didn’t fight harder for margin. I think I could have created some margin if I had worked with Dennis on that and if we had made more of a pact and more of a goal for that to happen.  It’s real easy for moms to become martyrs and to become indispensable, because it feeds who we are.  7:00 I loved it that my kids needed me. I liked it that they actually wanted me over their dad sometimes—it made me feel important—I liked that. And yet, that was, in some ways, I think a trap to keep me from doing what I needed to do, which was to spend time with the Lord. There were times when I didn’t do Bible study, and I didn’t have a quiet time. I gave up on it; because it was so hard, and I’d rather not try than try and feel like a failure. I know that that’s normal for moms.  But I’m saying, on this side of the equation—I’m saying on this side of the line, having finished raising my kids—if I had it to do all over again, I would work harder to make sure I had that margin and to protect that in some way in conjunction with my husband—for us to work together to find a way for me to be communing with Christ on a better level. Dennis: And I have a confession to make.  8:00 I don’t have tons of regrets that I wished I’d done; but on this one, I did not understand the burden children place on a mother. I grossly underestimated that drain. I wish I’d understood what Barbara just said, because I wouldn’t have been waiting for her to come to me and ask for margin. I would have been looking out for her—saying to her, “What do we need to do for you to nourish your soul and look out for your own heart?” Bob, I don’t think I did that enough—I really don’t.  Barbara: I think the reason you didn’t is the reason most young men didn’t—and probably, Bob, you would say the same thing—it is really, really hard for a young man to understand the load and what it means to be a mom. I’m watching it with our daughters and our sons—and their wives. It takes years for a man to fully grasp what it costs her to give birth, and to raise these kids, and to give her life for the kids. 9:00 Bob: The physical and emotional toll— Barbara: That’s correct. Bob: —that a woman pays.  If a mom and dad, in the season of parenting, just say: “Look; we’re overwhelmed. Something’s got to give. We’ll get back to the Bible eventually; but for this season, we just don’t have the margin to do this. We’ll keep going to church, and we’ll still do some things—we’re listening to Christian radio,”—I mean, right now, they’re listening to Christian radio; so that’s got to be worth something. You would say, “If you neglect the Bible…” what’s going to happen to your parenting? Dennis: Well, I want to go back to a message that I heard 50 years ago—it just dawned on me: I heard this when I was a junior in college—his name was Dr. Chet Wood. He was a professor at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. He came to a Cru® meeting, where a bunch of us—Barbara was probably there— 10:00 —and he held up a batch of grapes—plump juicy grapes that were all held together in a cluster.  Then, he held up a vine that was withered—there were no grapes on it—all that was left was just little spindly stems; okay? He held it up and he goes: “This is a picture of the Christian life. Jesus said, in John 15, ‘If you abide in Me and My words abide in you,’”—here’s what he said—“‘you’re going to bear fruit.’ Why? Because the word, abide, means to draw your life’s source from. Jesus stands up in John 15, the first 11 verses, and He says: ‘Abide in Me and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.’”  11:00 Our life’s decisions, our values—the things that are important to us—are drawn from this Book; and it teaches us how to do life God’s way. Bob: Yes; I’m thinking, “If you want God to be a part of your parenting, then He’s got to be brought into your thinking, on a regular basis.” Dennis: Well, Bob, in the movie you created, Like Arrows, there’s a time in that movie where the dad confesses to the kids—do you remember it? Barbara: Yes. Bob: Oh yes; it’s a pivotal point in the movie, where the dad says, “We’ve learned that the Bible is more significant than we realized—that we need to be in this book every day, as a family.” He calls his family back together around it. Dennis: And “This needs to be our center.” He said— Bob: Right. Dennis: “It hasn’t been. It’s been a part of—over to the side.”  That’s why I think we start with this one—that you need to have a Bible that isn’t dirty—but a Bible that’s marked up and that has some edges to the pages, where you can tell it’s been read more than once. It is your manual to know how to raise children in this generation. 12:00 Bob: Okay; so we’re sitting with new parents—we’re saying: “Here’s what you’re going to need. Number one, don’t let this slip away as you have your kids—get the margin—fight for it; stay connected; abide in the vine—be in God’s Word.” We got that. What else do parents need? Dennis: Well and one other thing, the Bible will show you what a straight line looks like; because you’re going to run into a lot of lines, as you raise kids—other parents with other values. The only way you know if a line is crooked is if you know what a straight line looks like. The Bible lays out truth: the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, all the teachings of Christ—the New Testament. It teaches you, as a parent, how to live a wise life.  We’ll talk more about that, in this series, later on; but parents today need to know what a truly fruitful, successful, effective family looks like.  13:00 Bob: Alright; so if you’re in God’s Word, that’s going to give you perspective on—like you’re saying—all the issues that you’re going to face, as moms and dads. This is where parents need, not just time in the Word, but they need wisdom that comes from being in God’s Word to face the challenges they’re going to face every day. Dennis: That’s the second thing parents need. They need to understand the times. When I say that, I’m saying you need to look beyond what’s just happening to see the symptoms—to see the worldview of how people are making decisions in their families and in their lives—and not get distracted. But you need to have an understanding of the times; and you need that wisdom that you were talking about, Bob—wisdom to know how to act and how to lead your family forward. Bob: There’s a verse in the Old Testament, Barbara, that talks about the men of Issachar; right? Barbara: Issachar; yes. Bob: They were men who understood the times. Barbara: Yes; and they were really important to David, because he had his soldiers—he had his battle lines all drawn up and all the men— 14:00 —but he needed these men; because they were wise, and they were looking ahead, and they were thinking ahead.  As parents, we’re so often reactive; and we’re so often mired in today and the issues of today—whether it’s potty training, or lying, or first day of school, or whatever it is—we get really bogged down in the today. It’s hard to make ourselves think ahead.  What we’re talking about in this one—in the second one: “Be wise,”—and you get your wisdom from the Bible—it’s thinking ahead and looking ahead—watching: “What are the issues that parents are dealing with?” who have kids that are maybe five years ahead of you; so you know what’s coming, and not as caught off guard, and not always playing defensive. Bob: I read an article online—this was a while back—but a story about parents, who had decided that they’re going to raise—not babies—but “theybies.” Have you heard about “theybies”? Barbara: No; I haven’t heard about “theybies.” Bob: “Theybies”—where they’re not going to disclose to the child, or to anybody else, what the child’s gender is as they raise that child.  15:00 They refer to the child with plural pronouns: “they”/”them” rather than “him” or “her.” The children know what their anatomy is; but they don’t make a gender differentiation and say, “Well, you’re a boy,” or “You’re a girl.”  Now, I’m thinking about parents, understanding the times and knowing how to respond. If you’re in God’s Word, it’s going to help you understand, “Okay; that’s a novel idea, but that runs against what the Bible tells us about God’s good gift of gender.” Dennis: Our book, The Art of Parenting, really wants to help a parent anticipate these issues we’re talking about here and many, many more. It comes as also a part of a package, Bob—the Art of Parenting™ video series, which has a—it’s a planning document that is in the shape of an arrow. That arrow is headed toward a target, and that’s your child.  16:00 Your child is like an arrow in the hand of a warrior.  I think one of the best things it does is—it has two diagrams that show wind. Wind can blow an arrow off target. One of those depictions—it challenges a parent to think of the top one or two things, in the next six to twelve months, that a parent is going to face with this child: “What are the issues your child is going to face?”—or maybe they’re facing it right now; you just need to address it. Then there’s the depiction of wind for 18-24 months—a couple of years out. You’re making choices about values. Bob: This is where understanding the times—it makes sense for parents. You’ve got to know: “What are our values and where are our boundaries going to be?” So let me ask this: “What can a mom or a dad do to understand the times?” 17:00 Because just being involved in the household issues that you’re facing with your kids—that’s one thing—but to know what the culture is throwing at them, right and left, you have to stay vigilant. I mean, it’s like you have to stay on Facebook® and Twitter® 24/7 just to see what might be coming their way. Barbara: Well, I don’t think it takes that much time. [Laughter] Bob: That might be an exaggeration. Barbara: I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I think you could—at your church, you could volunteer with the kids’ group that is older than where your kids are. If your oldest is in second grade, help teach the sixth-grade class. Or if your oldest is in sixth grade, walk into the high school youth group; or sign up to be a chaperone for the youth retreat, just for a weekend. Begin to hang around some of these kids that are older than your kids. See what they talk about; see what they wear; see what they’re thinking—how they act / how they use their devices—what are their parents letting them do and not letting them do? If you’ve got friends—that’s even better—who have kids that are ahead of your kids too. Talk to them and say, “What are the issues?”  18:00 But the important thing is just find ways to engage with parents or students—children who are older than yours—to know what they’re actually dealing with. Bob: I remember some parents I talked to—this was years ago—who said their daughter had gone on the youth retreat with the church. When she came back, they were debriefing about it and said, “So what happened?” They said: “Well, it was really cool. It was a cool night; and so we all took our sleeping bags out, and we all slept under the stars out on the lawn.” [Laughter] Dennis: Oh yes; sure. Barbara: Yes. Bob: And they said, “We all went out there.” “Who’s ‘We all?’” Dennis: Was that one—that was one of the retreats our kids went on?  Barbara: That’s sounding real familiar. [Laughter] Dennis: That is sounding very familiar. Bob: I was trying to protect the names of the guilty here, but—[Laughter] Dennis: Okay; okay. Bob: —it was a situation where the parents, and probably the youth leaders, got blindsided. But here were boys and girls, out spending the night together under the stars, on the youth retreat. 19:00 Dennis: We went on a bus with a bunch of junior high kids on a youth retreat one time. I couldn’t believe that they showed a movie that was rated “R”— Barbara: —on the bus. Dennis: —on the bus on the way to a conference, where you’re talking about getting to know God and living life as God intended it.  I tell you—one of the smartest things we did—we did some pretty clumsy things, but one of the best things we did was teaching a sixth-grade Sunday school class—not once/not twice—but we taught it for 11 years. Those kids only thought that Mr. and Mrs. Rainey were teaching them. Those kids took us to school.  Here’s the lesson for moms and dads, everywhere, who are listening to us: “Your sixth grader, your tenth grader, your senior in high school—all of them know a whole lot more than you ever imagined—a whole lot more than you knew at that same age. Anticipate that and ask them some tough questions:  20:00 “What have you been looking at?” “What are friends looking at?” “What are you battling with?” “What’s tripping you up?”  Bob, these are days when parents can’t afford to allow their kids to push them out. Parents have to find a way in—a gentle way—that builds a relationship and delivers the truth of God’s Word—and compassion for when your child fails. Bob: There’s a great Old Testament metaphor where the guards of the city are referred as the watchmen on the walls. Their job is to keep the city safe, and keep the walls guarded, and to look for the enemies who might be encroaching. That’s really what you’re calling moms and dads to be and to do to: “Stand guard and keep a wall of protection around their children—physically, emotionally, spiritually—as you raise them,”—not that they’re never going to face hardship—you want them to face hardship.  21:00 But moms and dads are here to make sure we’re keeping our kids protected.  This is something you address clearly in your new book, The Art of Parenting, which of course, we’ve got in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center. It’s the companion to the eight-part small group series—the video series on the Art of Parenting—which is also available. Get more information about both of these resources when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com. Get copies of the book; get copies of the small group series—get together with some other parents and go through this content and interact together, as parents, around these subjects. Again, it’s The Art of Parenting by Dennis and Barbara Rainey—the book and the small group series. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com for more information on how to order. Or call 1-800-FL-TODAY—1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” 22:00 By the way, some of you have been asking about the Like Arrows movie, which is a part of the Art of Parenting video series. This fall, we’ve been making that available for churches to show for ministry use. We hope to have it available for you to order your own copy very soon, so stay tuned for that.  You know, every time we have conversations like this, I know there are parents, who say to us, “That was helpful, because it reminded me of things I know but I forget.” I mean, all of us do, as parents—in the midst of the dailyness of all we’re going through, we can start to slip from our priorities. Here, at FamilyLife®, the goal of this program is to provide you with a regular, daily reminder that keeps you focused on what really matters in your marriage and in your family. Our goal is to effectively develop godly marriages and families. We believe godly marriages and families can change the world.  23:00 For those of you who make this program possible for everyone else—in your community, in your city, and for people all around the world—thank you for your commitment to these same principles. Thank you for partnering with us to provide practical biblical help and hope for marriages and for families. We couldn’t do it without you.  If you’re a regular listener and you’ve never made a donation, or if you’re a long-time listener and you’re ready to step up and become one of our monthly Legacy Partners, why don’t you get in touch with us today? Go online and make a donation at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. When you do get in touch with us, we want to send you our 2019 FamilyLife calendar which is all about building togetherness as a family. It includes specific ideas for things your family can do together during the year and Scripture verses you can memorize throughout the year. It’s our thank-you gift to you when you support the ministry of FamilyLife with a donation—again, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or by phone at 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”  24:00 Tomorrow, we’re going to continue to talk about the kinds of parents we need to be as we raise the next generation. What are the core qualities that we need to make sure are a part of our lives? Dennis and Barbara Rainey will be back with us again tomorrow. I hope you will be back as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. What Do You Want Your Kids to Be? Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       Art of Parenting: What Every Parent Needs (Day 2 of 3)  Bob: Do you and your spouse have the same set of parenting priorities as you raise your children? Barbara Rainey remembers when she and her husband, Dennis, sat down and compared notes. Barbara: What was surprising to me was how different our lists were. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because we had been flashing over this; but nonetheless, I think, when you get married, you think, “Oh, we have so much in common,”’ and then—after a few years or maybe after the kids come along—you realize, “Well, maybe we’re operating off of two different sets of instructions.” Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, October 30th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. What can you do, as parents, to make sure you’re on the same page and that your values are in sync together as you raise your children? We’ll spend time talking to Dennis and Barbara Rainey about that today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. We’re spending some time this week doing some pre-parenting counseling. We talked about the fact that a lot of couples get premarital counseling; and a lot of couples, when they’re expecting a baby, go to birthing classes; but nobody’s doing parenting classes. Well, we’re doing parenting classes now with the Art of Parenting™ video series and with your new book, The Art of Parenting, that is now available. Your goal with that book, and our goal with the series, is to equip moms and dads to have a big-picture perspective on what God’s calling them to do. Dennis: Exactly. We’re joined again on FamilyLife Today with Barbara. Welcome back to the broadcast, Sweetheart.  Barbara: Thank you much! Glad to be here. Dennis: Here’s the thing about children—I think most of us look at our children way too simplistically.  2:00 Let me depart from a conversation about children at this point and just talk about the Weekend to Remember® marriage getaway. One of the things we do at the getaway is—we cast marriage in the grand scheme of things—of what God is up to on planet earth. We say to couples: “Your marriage isn’t just about two people trying to get their needs met. Your marriage is supposed to demonstrate who God is to a fallen planet. There are angels looking onto the planet—they’re in the audience, watching how you two handle your conflict.” Well, you know what? The same thing is true about children. It’s not just a little person—you’re talking about an eternal being. In the Art of Parenting video series, which we just launched, we’ve got a number of marriage and family experts in there, one of whom is Tim Kimmel. Tim and Darcy have been on the Weekend to Remember speaker team for a number of years.  3:00 One of the things that he said in this series on the art of parenting was—he said, “I know how long children live. They’re eternal! They last forever.” That means, Bob, that they are worth so much more than any of us ever imagine at a point in time.  I think it’s why we need to go back to the Book—back to the Bible—and just read and see how children are described. I’m going to go to, I think, a classic passage in the Old Testament—Psalm 127, verses 3-5, that describes children. It says: “Behold! Children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward,”—not a curse, but a benefit/a reward—“Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.” The picture here—I want every parent to imagine this with me— 4:00  —God could have chosen any metaphor in existence to describe children, but he chose arrows. He pictures a warrior: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior.” What’s the warrior doing? He’s engaged in battle. What are you, as a parent, doing? You are engaged in a battle over the soul—the moral condition and the development of your child—to be used by God in his generation.  So the question is: “Are you viewing your assignment as a sacred assignment?—children being a heritage—a reward/a blessing. I’m sorry to get so intense here, at the beginning of the broadcast here, Bob; but I just think there’s a lot of really lazy thinking about children. We forget—it’s so easy, in the midst of the battle—we aren’t raising rug rats. We’re raising image-bearers, who reflect who God is, and will carry on in the next generation. 5:00 Bob: If you were sitting down with a couple, who were about to begin that journey—Barbara, one of the things I know you would tell them is: “You need to begin your parenting journey with the end in mind. Rather than thinking about the first six months, think about a 20-year-old, who is ready to be launched. Start now, thinking: ‘What do we want that 20-year-old to be shaped by? What do we want the influences in that 20-year-old’s life to look like?” so that all the choices you’re making, along the way, are choices that support that vision. Barbara: Exactly. I think a lot of parents don’t think about that. They are trying to survive today. [Laughter] They might be worried about what’s happening tomorrow, because they’ve got a to-do list longer than their arm; but they’re not thinking about what the outcome is for their kids, when they’re 18, 20, or 21. They’re thinking about surviving the immediate future.  We all know, if we can think ahead to what we want something to become, then we’re going to make decisions today that will help achieve that outcome.  6:00  Parenting is really no different: “What do you want your kids to be like when they leave your influence?—when they leave for college, or go into the military, or get married, or whatever?” “What characteristics—what qualities/what attributes—do you want to invest in your children to see grow and determine who your kids become?” Bob: And I think, with us, we were pretty nebulous. We kind of knew, in a general way, what we wanted for our kids; but I don’t think we put words, or even values, to it. Barbara: Yes. Bob: So if you had said to me, when my child was two years old, “What’s your hope or dream?” Well, you know, I would have said: “I want them to love the Lord. I want them to have a good work ethic. I want them to know how to get married to someone and be a good spouse.” Barbara: But mostly, you just wanted them to be potty-trained at two! [Laughter] Bob: You’re right! [Laughter] 7:00 Bob: I might have been able to go to a big picture; but honestly, my big picture probably would have been shaped more by suburban American values than by what God says ought to be the values you’re raising your kids with. Barbara: Well, we were essentially the same. We didn’t really start thinking about values in specific terms until, maybe, our oldest was, say, mid-elementary? Dennis: Right. Barbara: Somewhere in that time frame, we started realizing that Dennis and I—and the reason we did this was practical, because Dennis and I came with different values into our marriage, which most couples do. You have a lot of things in common—and we had a lot in common—but we also had a lot of values that were different. Bob: There was a Saturday where this became clear to you— Barbara: Yes. Bob: —that you were not valuing the same things. Barbara: Yes; because on Saturday, in my house, we worked—we washed windows. My dad had us—you know, he had spent some time in the Army in World War II, and he had his kids lined up and ready for battle on Saturday mornings. [Laughter] 8:00 Bob: You got up early? Barbara: We’d get our chores done. Bob: Yes. Barbara: So I thought that was—I thought that was what every family did. It never occurred to me that anybody else lived any other way, because I had no comprehension of how other families spent their Saturdays other than what I did. Bob: Did you not do chores on Saturdays at your house? Dennis: I do not remember ever being told to do chores. I thought it was every child’s American right to be able to nuzzle in next to my dad and watch the game of the week. Bob: —on TV? Dennis: —on TV. Bob: —a baseball game? Dennis: A baseball game, because my dad was into baseball. That was just what we did on Saturdays.  Bob: Saturday was about fun at your house. Dennis: It was! And I’m sure I had to do some things, but I really don’t remember about chores. [Laughter] Bob: So there was a particular Saturday—I’ve heard you say—  Dennis: Oh, my goodness! Bob: —you were packing the kids up for a fishing trip; right? Dennis: Oh, yes!  9:00 I still remember Barbara on the back porch, with her arms folded, as I backed out of the driveway and pulled off to go fishing. [Laughter] Bob: Do you remember this? Barbara: Your face is getting—[Laughter] Dennis: I mean, I’m reliving the moment! [Laughter] I had a couple of the kids—Daddy was being the playful Daddy: “Let’s go fishing!” I took a couple of the kids. Barbara: Well, you took a couple of the older ones and left me with the little ones, who needed naps and diapers. Bob: Were you scowling a bit? Barbara: Oh, I’m sure I was scowling a lot!! Dennis: So I get out there, and we’re in this boat; and it wasn’t much of a boat—it was just a little aluminum boat—it was rocking, and the fish weren’t biting. Bob: Yes. Dennis: And I kept thinking about Barbara on the back porch. I didn’t just keep fishing—I said: “You know, this is the wrong picture right here. This is a husband, who is being selfish.” I said: “Come on, kids! We’re going back home to see Momma.” Bob: And I think, truth be told, you were probably thinking, in the back of your mind, “The longer I stay out here, the more trouble I’m going to be in when I wind up getting home.” Don’t you think? [Laughter] 10:00 Dennis: You know, I guess, Bob, I was just kind of ashamed at what I’d done. I pulled out of the driveway and looked at Barbara, and I thought about it at that moment—it was like: “What are you doing? Oh, I’m going to do it anyway.” So I drove off, but I turned around pretty quickly. That day of fishing didn’t last very long. Bob: So that led to the two of you actually getting some time away together— Barbara: Yes. Bob: —to map out: “What are the things we value?” and “What matters to us?” Barbara: Right. Bob: Was this something that you just came to off the top of your head? Dennis: It really was. I think it was because of all these clashes around our values. Barbara: Exactly. Dennis: So we were on a retreat, north of Little Rock, about an hour-and-a-half away on Greer’s Ferry Lake. Bob: Where you could do some fishing?! [Laughter] Dennis: Where we could do some fishing, but I— Barbara: There were no kids! Dennis: I just remember that—I think what was happening, Bob, was that the pain of our differing values had reached such a point that I was looking for some relief. I thought, “This just isn’t—this is not good.” Barbara: You would say, “This doesn’t feel good.” [Laughter] Dennis: “It doesn’t feel good.”  11:00 So I told Barbara—I said: “You get alone by yourself, and you pray, and read the Bible, and think. List out your top ten values that you want to teach the kids; I’ll do the same. You’re going to be over there; I’m going to be over here. Let’s take about an hour,”—as I recall—“Then, after you’ve got your top ten, I want you to prioritize the top five; and let’s get back together.” Honestly, Bob, no one told me to do this. It was just—I was facing a time when I wasn’t agreeing with my wife about a lot of things in raising the kids. I felt a need for us to be singing off the same song sheet. So she did that; I did that, and we got together. Our lists were the same on a few, and very different on others. Barbara: Yes; and we had decided that we were not going to put “Love God and walk with Him,” on our list. Dennis: —not overly-spiritualize the whole thing. 12:00 Barbara: Right, because we both knew that we both valued that. That was a commonality that was without dispute or without question in our relationship. We knew that was important to us; we knew that that was the most important thing we wanted to instill in our kids; so we said: “That’s going to be off the table. Let’s put all of the other things,”—so like: “work ethic,” and “having time to play together,” and “learning how to forgive and love other people,” and “having good manners.” We just went on and on, down the list.  What was surprising to me was how different our lists were. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because we had been flashing over this; but nonetheless, I think, when you get married, you think, “Oh, we have so much in common.” Bob: Right. Barbara: And then—after a few years or maybe after the kids come along—you realize, “Well, maybe we’re operating off of two different sets of instructions.” Bob: There are really two points you’re making here, and both of these are things you have counseled parents with.  13:00 One is— mom and dad need to be on the same page— Barbara: Yes. Bob: —when they’re raising the kids. And two, they need to spend the time talking about: “What is it that we really value?” Dennis: And what I didn’t anticipate is how many problems this would address later on, in raising teenagers. It was immediately practical to our young family. As I recall, at that point, what did we have—four or five children? Barbara: Probably four. Dennis: And we were making decisions out of our values, and we were comparing our decisions with our friends. It is so easy to doubt your decisions; but if you have hammered out what you agree to, and “What our family’s going to stand for,” it enables you—not to do what the Joneses are doing—but to do what you’re supposed to do. Bob: Yes. Barbara: Exactly; and so one of the things that we did, when our children became teenagers is—that all of our kids began to work at Chick-fil-A®. We did that for several reasons. One was—we wanted them to learn to follow direction from somebody besides mom and dad.  14:00 We wanted them to learn how to serve other people with a good attitude, and we wanted them to learn how to have a good work ethic for someone else besides mom and dad too. Dennis: Yes. Barbara: And it taught them how to build relationships. But we did that in such a way that they worked on Saturdays, but they didn’t work all day Saturday. So, sort of our pattern became, “Get your chores done and get your work done in the first half of the day.” And then, in the second half of our Saturdays—when we were home—that would be when we would do fun. Having fun was a reward for getting your chores done, or your work done, or after you’d put in your time at Chick-fil-A. Then, we went and did whatever was fun.  We did both of those things. We found a way to keep both of those values that we each brought into our marriage and into our parenting—to keep them both alive and to feed off of each other. Dennis: One other thing—Barbara, I want you to tell the story of how our core values ultimately helped us make a decision that we couldn’t agree to.  15:00 It had to do with Rebecca and gymnastics. Barbara: Yes; I know. I thought about that a minute ago, when we were talking about it. Our fourth, Rebecca, was born limber—I don’t know where she got it—she didn’t get it from me, I don’t think; and I don’t think she got it from you, either; did she? [Laughter] But she just naturally knew how to do the splits. She could just sit that way if she wanted to. So, anyway, when she was in first or second grade—somewhere along the line—we put her in gymnastics. It was just great fun, and she loved it. Because she was naturally good at it, she advanced pretty quickly. By the time she was in fifth grade, she was being recruited to go to the next level. We were trying to decide what we were going to do about this, because it meant more hours a week—it meant farther driving time, because the gym that she would have to go to was, at least, 45 minutes one-way—and it meant that she was going to be spending more and more time at the gym after school every day and into the evenings. It would mess up our family dinner hour and all kinds of things. 16:00 Dennis and I began a three-month conversation. Have you ever had a conversation that lasted three months? [Laughter] Bob: I don’t think so! Barbara: You don’t think so! Dennis: Would you like to know why it lasted three months? [Laughter] Bob: “Cause we never got to agreement”? Barbara: We never solved it. [Laughter] Dennis: We didn’t get to an agreement. I was determined not to just: “Boom! Decision made!” Bob: Right. Dennis: I wanted to honor my wife, because I believe she’s perfect for me; and, together, we reflect what God wants our kids to be about. So I was listening to her for all of her reasons why she wanted Rebecca to continue on in competition.  Barbara: And we didn’t talk about it every day, but it did take us three months to finally come to a consensus. It was lots of conversations, where we went back and forth over the same things over and over again. I kept thinking: “Maybe she’ll get a college scholarship. Maybe she can go to the Olympics.” You know, I had these visions and dreams of what she might do.  Dennis’s side of the conversation was always: “Yes; but she’ll be spending more and more time away from us,” and “The coaches will have more influence on her than we will.”   17:00 And I go, “Yes; you’re right, but I really don’t want her to quit!” You know, it was one of those kind of things—I really understood what he was saying, and I agreed with him; but I was trying to find a way we could have both. Bob: Yes. [Laughter] Barbara: And so we went back and forth for a long time. Finally, I thought: “Okay; we are not coming to a solution; we are not coming to an agreement,” and “One of us needs to give.” I thought: “I need to be the one to give; because Dennis is my husband, I have to trust that God is working through him for—not just for my good—but for Rebecca’s good and for her well-being.”  I said to the Lord, before I said to Dennis—I said: “Okay! I’m going to be the one to give on this; and we’re going to go with his value system, which is: ‘We have more time with her,’”—which I agreed with; I wasn’t disagreeing with it—but “I’m going to follow his leadership in this decision in our marriage and in our family.”  18:00 I said: “I think he’s wrong, and I think I’m right; so I’m going to give You 24 hours to change his mind. I want You to change his mind. [Laughter] And then I’ll tell him!” I kind of had this little deal going with God, and I don’t think I said anything to him right away. Dennis: I’d forgotten about that prayer. Barbara: Oh, I did pray that prayer!—I remember it vividly.  And God didn’t change his mind. I went: “Okay; Lord, then that must mean that’s not what you want for Rebecca. You want her to come home and be with us.” I told him that, and I was so surprised at how easily Rebecca took it. I thought she would be disappointed; I thought she would be heart-broken; I thought she would really miss it. She hardly skipped a beat, and we gained an hour-and-a-half-plus every day of just car trips and carpooling with other families to get these girls to this gym. It was such a remarkable shift, and such a clear confirmation from God—that it was like: “Okay; you were right. Clearly, you were right; and I’m so glad that I was willing to trust God in this.” 19:00 So that was a values decision that we went, back and forth, over for months. Most parents are going to do that, over one thing or another, in the course of raising children to adulthood. Bob: And again, we’re back to the two big ideas here, which are: “Mom and dad need to be on the same page.  Barbara: Yes. Bob: —“If you’re divided on this, and if the kids know you’re divided, that’s not good for them.” Barbara: No. Dennis: No! They’ll exploit it. Bob: That’s right. In fact, our kids knew—instead of coming to me and saying, “Can I do this?” They learned to come to me and say, “Would you talk to mom about this so that I can get an answer?” [Laughter] They just knew!—anything they were going to ask, “Can I do this?”—my answer was going to be, “Your mom and I are going to talk about that.” Dennis: Yes. Bob: We made that a default decision in our home. Dennis: And weren’t you a little bit more of a softie than Mary Ann? Bob: I was a little more. Mary Ann said, at one point, “You will probably never be too firm with the children.” [Laughter]  20:00 And she was right! It was going to be my natural tendency to be soft and pliable. I needed her to balance out my soft side on that.  So they [parents] need to be on the same page; and then, if you’ve got some core values that you can look at and say: “You know, this is important to us—time with our kids is probably more important than them excelling in some skill area.” Barbara: Exactly. Bob: And honestly, you look at it today, Barbara—and you see what it takes for a kid to become an Olympic gymnast, or football player, or whatever it is—  Barbara: Yes. Bob: —and how to get to that level—the compromises and the things that are given up can often be detrimental in the child’s life. Barbara: Exactly; and it really does rob you, as a mom and a dad, of time with your kids that you will never get again. You know, it’s so easy, when you’re in it, to feel like you’re never going to get beyond the parenting years; but they really are so short.  21:00 If you allow your child to give his or her life to a sport, or a cause, or something that takes them away from the family, and away from your influence, you never get those years back. Bob: You include instructions for how to do the core values project— Dennis: That’s right. Bob: —in the book. Do you include what your list of core values were? Dennis: We give folks a pretty comprehensive list for them to choose their own, because what ours were— Bob: —doesn’t really matter. Dennis: —it doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to adopt our core values—I’m trying to get you to pray—decide as a couple, and then begin to hammer it out; because you’re going to be far more effective, as a couple, if you are in agreement and God is leading that agreement, going forward. Bob: Well, you can get a copy of Dennis and Barbara’s book—and the core values project is a part of that—the list of some potential core values / things that may help spur your thinking about what your core values really are. It’s included in the book, The Art of Parenting. The book is available in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center.  22:00 You can order the book from us, online; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy of the book. Of course, we’ve got the companion Art of Parenting video series that’s available for church use. You can order that from us online as well at FamilyLifeToday.com. The core values project is a part of the small group series as well. So, again, look for the book or the small group series when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com; or call to order either resource at 1-800-358-6329—that’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.” You know, I wish there was some way to measure what happens in a family when mom and dad are aligned on their core values—what that brings to a family. We know the power that there is in having that kind of alignment, but there’s really no clear-cut way to measure how important that is.  23:00 I say that just because I want our listeners—and especially, those of you who support this ministry and who make it possible for everyone else in your community—part of what you’re supporting is this kind of dialogue and interaction as we seek to equip, and to train, and to encourage, and to challenge moms and dads / husbands and wives all around the biblical principles related to marriage and family. We want to effectively develop godly marriages and families; and we’re grateful to those of you who share that mission with us and who make it possible for FamilyLife Today to be heard by more people, more regularly. Thanks for your support. In fact, if you can help with a donation today, we have a gift we’d like to send you. It’s our 2019 “Year of Togetherness” calendar. It’s all about things your family can do to help build togetherness in your home—activities that you can do throughout the year; verses that you can memorize together; ways that you can connect, relationally—and we’ve talked today about how important that is.  24:00 Again, the calendar is our thank-you gift when you donate today, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com or call to donate at 1-800-FL-TODAY.  And we hope you can join us back tomorrow as we continue our conversation about what we need to be, as parents, to help the next generation thrive as we raise them. Dennis and Barbara Rainey will be with us, again, tomorrow. I hope you can be here as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. The Team Approach Guests:                      Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       Art of Parenting: What Every Parent Needs (Day 3 of 3)  Bob: As parents, it’s important that you continue to grow in your relationship with the Lord and in your understanding of Scripture, because Barbara Rainey says you never know when your kids are going to ask you a question that’s a stumper. Barbara: I’ll never forget—my grandson said to our daughter—he said, “Mom, why do I need to tell God what I did when He already knows?” Those are the kinds of things that parents run into. You’ve got to teach your children—what it means to forgive; why you need to confess your sin to God—because kids are smart, and they’re going to start thinking about that stuff. They’re going to press you on it. You have to know why you’re going where you’re going with your kids.  This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, October 31st. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. As parents, we don’t have to have all the answers to the questions our kids ask us; but we need to know where to find the answers. We’ll talk more about that today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. We’ve been spending time this week talking about: “What’s at the heart of parenting?”—what parents need to be thinking about and processing, together, as they raise their children. I’m thinking back to when you first started working through what the Bible has to say about parenting—this was more that a quarter of a century ago— Barbara: Gosh, that’s sounds forever. Bob: I know. It does; doesn’t it? [Laughter] Right in the middle of— Dennis: I think it is forever. [Laughter] Bob: —in the middle of raising your kids, you took an extended season of time and dug into the Scriptures, and talked to a lot of pastors, and Bible teachers, theology professors. Dennis: —men and women. Bob: You got a lot of input. What is in your book, The Art of Parenting, is a lot of the fruit that came from those conversations, back years ago.  2:00  The thing I love about that is the fact that it’s still as relevant today as it was then, because we’re talking about things that are eternal—not things that are temporal.  Barbara: Yes.  Dennis: This was created in 1990 and ‘91, prior to radio. Because once radio started—it’s daily—I wasn’t able to get the time away to be able to do the fresh thinking that I took over a 12-18-month period. But I looked to see if I could condense down: “What’s the essence of parenting? What does God want us to do?”—and I found four things. I think He wants us to teach relationships to our children—how to relate to God / how to relate to another sinful, selfish human being. We’re preparing our children, someday, probably for marriage. But our kids need to know how to love God and love one another. Secondly, we are establishing and building their character. We’re shaping a child, who’s wise and not a fool—who knows what’s right and what’s wrong—how to choose one and not the other.  3:00  Character development is something that God works, over time, in our lives to create. The Bible is full of all kinds of illustrations of this. In fact, I think we take a whole chapter in the book, talking about how God develops character in us. I think we could take a page out of “How God Does That” and apply that to us, as parents; and we do that.  Third is the issue of identity. Keep in mind this was developed in 1990 and ‘91. We talked about how God created us with a spiritual identity: “Who are we?” “What are we to be about?” “Do we have value?” “Do we have purpose?” The answer is: “Yes.” Also, sexual identity. One of the first descriptions of man—in Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 26-28, was that He identified them as male and female. He says that definition three times in a matter of three verses.  4:00 Our sexual and spiritual identity, I believe today, are on the line as never before. Finally, the fourth area is mission: “Why are we here?” “What’s our purpose?” These arrows were not designed to stay in the quiver. Children were made to be pulled back on a bow and let go and released to fulfill God’s mission for their lives. Bob: Your wife Barbara is joining us this week as we talk about what parents need to keep in mind as we raise the next generation. Barbara, we’ve talked about the big picture—having the end in mind as you raise your kids. But parents need to also have kind of a working strategic plan for what they’re doing. Dennis: Yes. Bob: In fact, this is really the heart of you book. You help parents come up with a short-term strategic plan that needs to be reviewed and updated throughout the parenting years so that you’re always thinking: “In the next 12 months, what are the priorities?” 5:00 Barbara: Yes; right. Bob: “In the next 24 months, what are the priorities?” Then come back—revisit that/readdress that—so that you’re being intentional as you raise your kids. Barbara: Yes; and that’s a big word for us. Dennis and I have always wanted to be very intentional with our kids, and with our marriage, and with our lives; because we think that is what God has called us to do. He hasn’t called us just to exist and have fun. He has created us that we would glorify Him, and that we would raise godly children, and that we would have a marriage that would honor Him. That takes intentionality; it isn’t going to happen accidently. It’s not going to happen just by doing life. You have to make decisions that cause that to happen. As we talk about parenting, you have to begin with the end in mind.  In our book, we write and try to create a vision—try to help parents see the big picture—help them see the wonderful calling it is to be a parent, because it’s so easy to get caught up in the messiness of being a parent.  6:00 We are constantly casting that vision; but we’re also trying to be very practical and help—you know: “How to make decisions,” “How to work together as a team,” “How to be intentional,” “How to have the right values govern your everyday life, as a mom and a dad,”—so it’s both, together. Dennis: And the way we did that was on a date night. We’d get out on a date; and initially—I’ve got to admit—I was kind of looking for some romantic date nights, [Laughter] where we just had a fun time; because we had six kids in ten years. Ultimately, those date nights became the Vice-president and President hiding away from the kids [Laugher] on a date in a restaurant.  Barbara: They were strategy sessions on how to survive the next week. Dennis: They were! [Laugher] We would look at the calendar—we would look at where we were going. We would review our road map: “Where are we taking them?” “What does this child need?” “What does that child need us to especially work on in his or her life?” Barbara: And sometimes, our dinners were preoccupied by one child that was especially needy at that particular time.  7:00 Dennis: Exactly. Barbara: We didn’t always go over all of them.  Dennis: No, no; sometimes, there was no room for romance.  Barbara: Oh, most of the time. [Laugher] Dennis: Okay; most of the time. [Laughter] But Bob, here’s the thing—we would use those times to pull back to the big picture and get a clearer road map, going forward, and just say: “What are we doing here? We don’t want to be held hostage by comparing ourselves with other families that may be too busy—that don’t have the same stuff going on that we have.”  We tried to say: “Lord, here’s what You called us to do to make an impact in other people’s marriages and families. Help us to not lose our own marriage in the midst of this, but also raise effective children in the process.” Bob: Anybody, who’s in the business world, understands a couple of things: First of all, there are some things that are urgent, and there are some things that are important. We usually focus on the urgent and ignore the important—and that’s not good.  8:00 Secondly, you understand that, unless you take some time to develop strategic priorities, you can get caught up in the day to day but never be thinking about: “What are our goals or our aspirations?”  You’ve mapped out in your book, The Art of Parenting, a way for parents to do some concrete, short-term, strategic planning—to get away from the urgent for a little bit and focus on the important. There are seasons, where the urgent is going to dominate—I get that; right?—the house is on fire—you don’t think, “Where do we want to go on vacation next summer?” But get away from the urgent for a few minutes and look at the bigger picture—the important.  When parents do that, it’s a fundamental shift in their parenting; and all of a sudden, now, they’re parenting with a level of intentionality.  Dennis: Here’s where our book and the video series, The Art of Parenting™, spells out and takes people through a process where they reduce in writing on a sheet of paper that is called “Your Child’s Arrow.” It’s actually a picture of an arrow, where you fill out each of the four areas I mentioned at the beginning of this broadcast—  9:00 —relationships, character, identity, and mission—you look at those.  It’s interesting—Barbara and I would move from child to child and look at where they needed to be developed. From time to time, every one of them had something of those four things that they needed us to either anticipate an issue that was coming down the pike, or where we needed to give them a little more focused attention to be successful in one of those four areas. Barbara: It seems to me, as I look back on that, that we most often talked about character and relationship issues; because those are the ones that seem to be the ones that we run into, day in and day out, in raising a family. We would talk about: “What are we going to do about lying?” We would talk about: “What are we going to do about hitting siblings?” or “…not respecting your sister’s closet?”—you know: “You can’t just go in and take stuff.  10:00 “You’ve got to ask.” There were all of these character/behavioral kinds of things that we were instilling values in. Then, the relationship side we talked about all the time, too; because we had sibling rivalry every day—thousands of times, it felt like, every day. We were teaching over, and over, and over again about being kind; about how to ask for forgiveness; how to say you are sorry / “Will you forgive me?”; how to pray and ask God to forgive you, and why you wanted to. I’ll never forget—my grandson said to our daughter—he said, “Mom, why do I need to tell God what I did when He already knows?” Those are the kinds of things that parents run into. You’ve got to teach your children—what it means to forgive; why you need to confess your sin to God—because kids are smart, and they’re going to start thinking about that stuff. They’re going to press you on it. You have to know why you’re going where you’re going in all four of these areas with your kids.  Bob: When your kids hit pre-adolescence and then adolescence, that’s where the identity piece starts to really emerge.  11:00 Barbara: Yes. Bob: During toddlerhood and elementary years, you’re probably not focused a whole lot on identity. Of course, in these days, it’s happening younger and younger with these kids as they start to say: “Okay; who am I?  Barbara: Yes.  Bob: “What did God make me to be? What am I good at? Will I ever be popular? What’s my life all about?” This is more subtle than some of the character and relationship issues we deal with— Barbara: That’s right.  Bob: —but parents can’t just tune this out and think it’s going to happen; right?   Barbara: No; and I think probably, in this culture, you need to be more intentional and more aggressive even than we were; because, you know, your kids are hearing it. If you don’t know your kids are hearing it, we want to tell you: “Your kids are hearing it. They’re aware of it. They may hear somebody say something at school or even at church.”  Bob: You’re talking about gender identity. Barbara: We’re talking about gender identity issues; yes. I think you have got to be—parents have to be proactive today, even at younger ages, because of what children are being exposed to.  12:00 Bob: Even beyond the gender-identity question, which is huge, every junior high kid is figuring out: “Am I one of the popular kids?” “Am I a jock?” “Am I part of the theater group?” “Am I a nerd?” Barbara: Yes.  Bob: They’re coming up with a self-assessment, saying, “Where do I fit into the pack here?” Those can be challenging years for an adolescent. Dennis: They can. I think the adolescent years are where the character begins to emerge and where you’re still not done with discipline of your children. Bob: There are a couple other things that you think are vital for moms and dads if they are going to be effective, as parents—one is that they not try to go this alone, just the two of them. They need to be in community with other parents. This is essential; isn’t it? Dennis: It is absolutely essential.  Barbara: Yes. Dennis: I think, especially, today with the issues coming at young people, as never before, it takes a village. Bob: Well, I’ve shared this before—you guys have heard me say this— 13:00 —but we were part of a small group with other parents with kids the same age as our kids. I remember many a Sunday night when we were headed over to our small group, leaving the house and just going, “Okay; they’re all going to jail pretty soon,”—[Laughter]—you know—“because they’re all just messing up.”  We would get to small group and, somehow, in the conversation that night, we’d learn that everybody else’s kids were acting out too.  Barbara: Yes. Bob: And we’d drive home going, “Okay; we’re not alone in this.” It just gave us a such a sense of relief.  Dennis: I want to give the shout-out to a principal, who’s just a couple of miles up the road from FamilyLife’s headquarters—one of the top schools in America. It’s called Little Rock Christian Academy. Dr. Gary Arnold courageously stepped up and he said: “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to require every sixth grader to go through Passport to Purity™ with their parents.” I thought—when Gary told me that, I thought: “This is the best kind of peer pressure— 14:00 Bob: Yes. Dennis: — “to have 140 sixth-graders—with their mom / with their dad—go through this Friday night-Saturday experience by themselves with their parent. But then, come back to school and begin to talk about it.  Here’s a whole class of kids—they’re [now] seniors in high school—so they’ve got other eyes, who know what the content was in that Passport to Purity weekend—the entire class having been through it. I think it’s the best kind of peer pressure that’s available today.  Barbara: Another thing that we did—that I think was really helpful for our kids and for us—is we knew a lot of people—still do—who are great faith heroes / people who walk with God. When we had the opportunity to bring them over to our house for dinner, we would get the kids around. We’d all sit at the table; and we would just hand it over to our friends and we say, “Tell our kids the story about what happened when you went to Africa,” “Tell our kids the story about…”—whatever—because I wanted our children to hear that faith was real and authentic for people other than Mom and Dad.  15:00 Because it’s real easy for kids to think: “Aw, it’s just Mom and Dad,” and “They’re old, and they’re archaic,”—and whatever. If they can hear someone else being in love with Christ, and being excited about walking with Him, then they might go: “Oh, maybe Mom and Dad aren’t so dumb after all. Maybe they’re on to something.”     That was something that we did. It’s an idea that I think a lot of other families can incorporate, just with people who are in your church. There are heroes of the faith in your churches that you can bring over and say, “Tell a story to my kids.” Bob: There’s one other essential for effective parenting. This is one of those things that we could say it—and people would go, “Yes, yes; that’s one of those ‘Put it on the list, so you can check it off.’” But you guys really feel this is not a cliché—this is a vital part of parenting. Dennis: This is how you do it—Proverbs 24: 3 and 4 says: “By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established.  16:00 “By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.” How do you get the wisdom to build a house?—you cry out to God and you say: “Help! Help! We don’t know what we’re doing, God.”  We’ve prayed the prayer of a helpless parent on so many different occasions, because we were brought to our knees around issues we didn’t know how to answer/address——didn’t know how to tackle. We would pray for the kids; we would pray with our kids. We would pray we’d catch our kids doing what’s right and we would catch them doing wrong—all for the purpose of shaping their lives to reflect what God wants to do in their souls.  Bob: We put together a prayer challenge for parents not long ago. Barbara: Yes. Bob: This was as kids were heading back to school; but honestly, this is something you can do at any point in time. We were sending out prayer prompts every day, where a mom or dad would get an email that says:  17:00 “Here’s what you can pray for your kids today…”—a 30-day practice—just to try to jumpstart this discipline in the life of parents so that you get into a rhythm of regularly praying for your kids. I know, for a lot of parents, it can feel like: “Okay; I did that. I can check it off the list. Did anything really just happen there?” This is where we got to, by faith, go: “There’s a God, who’s listening, who’s called us to pray / who wants us to pray. This will be good for us and good for our kids.” God hears those prayers and responds to them. Barbara: Yes; and t’s important that we pray with our kids, and in front of our kids, and for them; so that they see it modeled. They don’t just hear that we do it; but it’s something that they participate in, as they’re growing up.  When we were writing the book, The Art of Parenting, one of the things I wanted to do was get our children—who are all grown now—I wanted to get their voices in the book; I wanted to get some of their experience in the book, because all of them are married and all of them have kids now.  18:00 I wanted them to kind of say: “What have you learned?” “What are you using that you learned?” “What are you changing that you thought we did terrible, and you’re doing it differently?” I wanted their voices to be heard.  We asked our kids to write some stories. One of the ones that came in first—that we still, to this day, delight in—is the story of Dennis praying with the kids when he would drive them to school in the morning. He didn’t do it every day, but he did it enough that this one child—our daughter—remembers him praying.  What’s so fun about it is that, when we would do this—when we would pray with our kids in the morning before school / when we would pray with them at night—so often, they would give us this, “Oh, do we have to?” kind of a thing. As parents, you think: “My gosh; is this making any difference? Am I getting anywhere?” You just so doubt yourself and second-guess yourself.  But our daughter wrote the story of how she remembered Dad taking them to school in the morning.  19:00 She describes him “Octopus-arm Dad”; because he would have his coffee in one hand, a handful of cereal in the other. Then, he’d be shaving with another hand, [Laughter] and throwing the cereal into his mouth and eating while he was driving all along. The way she described it—it was just this beautiful picture of all the things that were happening in his seat, as he was driving to get to school.  But she said, “I remember he always prayed for us; and he always prayed three things: that God would protect us from evil, and from harm, and from temptation; and he ended all of his prayers with that.” She said, “I remember, at the time, thinking, “Ya, ya, ya—whatever.” But she said, “Now, that I’m a mom, when I take my kids to school every day”—they’re in elementary school—“I pray the same words, every day, over my kids; because I know God hears, and I know that’s what He wants me to do with my girls.”  It was really encouraging to see, as parents; because we do want to quit and give up, because we don’t see results. You’re not going to see results quickly like we would like.  20:00 It’s not a short-term process. Hang in there; and pray together, as a couple. But pray for and with you kids; so that they can hear it, and see it, and you can model it for them.  Bob: I know your heart for this book and for the video series is that moms and dads will not just read this and go: “That was a good book. That was helpful.” You want this to be a strategic plan. Barbara: Yes. Bob: You want them to begin to implement things in their parenting that are going to have an eternal impact on their children’s lives. Dennis: We know it will impact generations— Bob: Right. Dennis: —because that’s what children are all about. Bob: Well, we’ve got copies of your book and the video series in our FamilyLife Today Resource Center. I’d encourage our listeners—if you don’t have a copy—or if you know a couple, who have just begun a family / maybe some moms and dads, who’ve got three or four kids, and they could use a little help—get a copy of the book, The Art of Parenting, and pass it on as a gift to them. You can order from us, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order.  21:00 I’ll tell you what—better yet—if there are four or five couples that you know in your neighborhood or in your church, why don’t you invite them over, have a potluck meal, and then watch session one of the Art of Parenting small group series, and say, “Would y’all like to come back in a couple of weeks and we’ll go through Session 2?” Take them through all of this content—it would be a great outreach—a great way to help equip and train the next generation.  Find out more about the Art Parenting small group series kit when you go to FamilyLifeToday.com. You can order that from us, online; or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order. I tell you what—you could invite them over—and the kit includes the movie, Like Arrows, that was in theaters, back earlier this year. Invite them over for a movie night—watch the movie together, and then ask them if they’d like to go through the content from there— 22:00 —maybe a little less threatening; huh? Again, all the information is available, online, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or call to order: 1-800-FL-TODAY.  You know, we think the things we’ve talked about today—these issues are eternally significant. When we talk about marriages and families, we’re not simply talking about how you can all get along better and have a happier family. We recognize there’s more at stake here than just happiness. We’re talking about the eternal trajectory of your life, your spouse’s life, your children’s lives.  Here, at FamilyLife®, we want to effectively develop godly marriages and families—not just happy marriages and families—but godly marriages and families. We are so grateful that some you, who are regular listeners, feel as we do—that this kind of conversation is critical. We know that because you have supported us in the past.  23:00 You’ve made today’s program possible, and it’s been listened to today by hundreds of thousands of people. On behalf of those who have benefited from our conversation today: “Thank you for your support that has made it possible.”  If you are a long-time listener and you have never become a part of the team that helps FamilyLife Today happen, we’d like you to go to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, to donate to support this ministry or to become a monthly Legacy Partner. You can donate, online, again, at FamilyLifeToday.com; or you can call to donate at 1-800-358-6329—1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word, “TODAY.”  When you do, be sure to ask for the gift we want to make available to you this month. It’s our 2019 calendar, “A Year of Togetherness as a Family.” There are activities and Bible verses to memorize each month—things that you can do to build, and bond, and grow together, as a family.  24:00 Again, the calendar is our gift to you when you donate to support the ministry of FamilyLife Today. We appreciate that support.  And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we’re going to hear from a mom, who got a wakeup call one day when her pastor handed her a jar of pennies. Eryn Lynum will be here tomorrow to explain why that was so significant. I hope you can be here as well.  I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas; a Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2018 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Emotional Identity Guest:                         Dennis and Barbara Rainey                       From the series:       The Art of Parenting: Identity (Day 1 of 3)  Bob: When our kids act out—and they do—as parents, we want their behavior to change. But, as Barbara Rainey says, ultimately we want something that goes deeper than that—we want to get to their hearts. Barbara: The side that Dennis and I erred on as parents is that we were focused on what we call behavior modification. It’s changing how our child behaves, rather than helping them understand, “Feeling angry at your brother because he took your toy is normal. It’s okay that you feel that way. But how can you learn to express that in a way that’s helpful and not harmful?” Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, January 28th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Helping our children identify and know how to deal with their emotions—that’s a big part of our assignment as parents, and we’ll talk about that today. Stay with us. 1:00 And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us.  Dennis: I can’t lie, Bob. Bob: No, that’s not true.                                                                                                  Dennis: I can’t lie. [Laughter] Bob: I’ve heard you lie before. [Laughter] Dennis: Well, I can’t lie about my grandkids, okay? Bob: Okay. Tell me about your grandkids. Dennis: Last Christmas Barbara and I went to Memphis and we held our new grandson. Bob: Yes, number 20— Barbara: —four. Dennis: Lincoln Timothy. Bob: Twenty-four. Wow. Dennis: Lincoln Timothy—and what a cutie! What’d you think, sweetheart? Barbara: Oh, cutest baby ever! Dennis: Ever! Bob: Don’t tell the other 23. Barbara: No. No, no, no. Dennis: And he was born on the day that Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address? Bob: Is that why he is named Lincoln? Dennis: No, not at all. Barbara: It’s purely coincidental, because they thought it was going to be a girl, so— Dennis: The OB doc—as she was delivering this little boy—the OB doc said, “Oh, and by the way, what’s his name?” So, Laura told her what the name was, and she said, “Well, you know this is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.” Bob: And they had no idea. Dennis: They had no idea. Bob: There we go! 2:00 Dennis: So, we’re talking about parenting today—this is very relevant stuff here. Bob: We’re going to be talking about something this week that—if you went to parents and said, “Give me your list of your top 20 felt needs of things you need to know how to do as a parent,”—I don’t know that this concept would be on that list of top 20 felt needs. This is one of those things that, as you’ve taught about it and as I’ve thought more about it, this is one of those important but not necessarily urgent parenting needs. Dennis: Well, we’re talking about—just so our listeners understand here—we’re talking about the four pillars of parenting. Barbara and I studied the Scriptures over the past 30 years and—first of all for our own benefit, but now for the benefit of listeners—we have come up with four areas. We’re going to talk about the third one today. The first one is relationship—helping your child develop a relationship with God and training them in knowing how to relate to one another.  3:00 Okay? Second one is character. That’s doing what’s right and not wrong—that’s living out the book of Proverbs—which is wisdom. This third one we’re going to talk about today is the issue of identity. You said people wouldn’t list that. Bob, I’m afraid I might disagree with you. Bob: Really? Dennis: I think we are in a major identity crisis today in our country as we raise the next generation of boys and girls. Bob: Well, certainly by the time a child is in middle school there are questions about gender identity today that weren’t there 20 years ago. But you expand this, not just around gender identity—you want to talk about all aspects of a child’s identity. This—by the way—is from the book that the two of you have written called The Art of Parenting. We didn’t get to the fourth of the four pillars—which is mission—we’ll talk about that another time.  Barbara, this issue of identity—were you conscious of the fact that—as you were raising your kids—you were helping them— 4:00 —understand and discover and feel comfortable with who they were? Barbara: Well, I was—on some level—but I think the level that Dennis and I understood, when we were actually raising our kids—was their gifts and talents, which is a part of a person’s identity. I think we were aware of looking for, “What does this child gravitate toward? What does this child like? What are they good at? What are they not good at?” That is a piece of identity. The part that I was not aware of—I don’t think either one of us were really aware of intentionally—was that we all have an emotional identity. That’s because we were made in the image of God. We don’t think of God as being an emotional being necessarily—we may think of Him as being aloof, we may think of Him as being even unfeeling because of His distance from us—but we are made in His image. It says in Genesis—in the creation story—that God made Adam and Eve, man and woman, “in His likeness”—like Him. 5:00 Throughout the Bible—it was really fun when we wrote the book, because I just went through the Bible to find all these instances where it talks about God’s emotion. He laughs, He cries, He expresses anger—those are common emotions that all of us as human beings feel. So, a part of raising a child is helping a child know that those feelings he has are designed by God—they’re made by God in him for a reason, and parents have the responsibility of training that emotional side of their children, too. Dennis: You know, as I was thinking about this, back to your question, Bob—I think we were pretty clueless. I think we were like most parents—we began this journey thinking, “Yes, we need to give our children a spiritual identity, we need to think about sex education and their sexual identity,”—but this area of emotional identity I don’t think was even on our radar screen. Interestingly enough, I think it was Barbara’s own upbringing and some of the— 6:00 —deficits that she experienced as a little girl growing up—and what we experienced early in our marriage of having to work through some tough issues around this—I think we assumed that everybody kind of had a healthy view of their emotions and understood them. I think the problem today, Bob, is I think we’re more concerned with our kids’ I.Q. than we are with their E.Q.  Their E.Q. is their Emotional Quotient—their ability to relate to other people, to have an understanding of their own emotions, to understand other people’s emotions as broken people. What do you do with it when people get angry? How do you respond? If you do the wrong thing, how do you correct that at that point? Bob: This is something that, again, wasn’t on our radar screen, either. In fact, I think as we were raising our kids we were probably more focused on trying to mold their identity than we were on trying to discover their identity. That’s a key calibration that I’ve gotten from you guys. 7:00 As parents, we need to figure out, “Who has God made these kids to be?” Dennis: Right. Bob: “What are they good at? What are their gifts, talents, and abilities—and how do we help shape that?”—rather than, “How do we turn them into little versions of us,” or, “How do we make them achieve the things that we were not able to achieve, and try to live our lives vicariously through them?” So, while that’s on our radar screen—“Who has God made them to be?”—we also need to be thinking about helping them have a healthy understanding of this area of emotional identity. Barbara: The reason that’s so important is that as people, we experience emotions, and if we don’t know what to do with them the temptation in our flesh is to express them in negative or hurtful ways. The side that Dennis and I erred on as parents is that we were focused on what we call behavior modification. It’s changing how our child behaves, rather than helping them understand— 8:00 —“Feeling angry at your brother because he took your toy is normal. It’s okay that you feel that way, but how can you learn to express that in a way that’s helpful and not harmful?” That takes a lot of thinking for moms and dads. That means you have to be planning ahead, you have to think ahead, “How am I going to handle this?” rather than reacting. It’s being proactive rather than reactive, and it’s being intentional rather than responding in your own flesh as a parent. Bob: I was just thinking about a three-year-old I spent time with recently, and— Barbara: Who will remain unnamed, I assume? [Laughter] Bob: Yes, but he and his parents know who he is. This three-year-old, throughout his day, he’s in touch with his emotions. It’s like, “Am I happy in this moment? If I am, it will be pleasant for all of you. If I’m not happy in this moment, it will be unpleasant for all of you.” But he’s pretty sensitive to whether he’s enjoying the moment or not. 9:00 How do you help a two-year-old and a three-year-old—who are just responding impulsively to whatever their circumstances are in the moment—how do you help them with this issue of learning their emotional identity? Barbara: I think this is where parenting becomes really a challenge for moms and dads, because we want quick fixes, and quite honestly, this is the kind of situation—and there are multiplied hundreds of them over the years of raising children—where it’s both correcting their behavior, because they often act in ways that are harmful that need to be corrected—but it’s instructing at the same time.  It’s not just correcting behavior or just instructing—it’s both. It’s helping them know, “It’s okay to be angry, it’s okay that you feel this way, but the way you expressed it was not correct. Here is how you can express how you feel correctly next time.” You coach and you role-play and you go over and over these things. You don’t do one without the other; you don’t just correct the behavior— 10:00 —or just explain how to do it right the next time; you do both of them in tandem. The hard part about it is you have to do it over and over again before they get it. It’s not a quick “flip a switch” lesson that you can teach your kids. Dennis: Here’s the problem: it’s not just the three-year-old— Barbara: It’s not just the three-year-old—it’s mom and dad. Dennis: —who is in process of learning how to handle his or her emotions—we’re still not grown up either! Barbara: That’s right. What was your favorite quote? “God gave us kids to help us finish growing up”?  Dennis: Yes. Barbara: Isn’t that what you used to say? It’s really true! Dennis: I think He gave us six kids to finish the process of saying, “Hey, are you going to become an adult or not? Are you going to become an adult before you die?” Because there are a lot of people who move into old age, and they’re carrying negative emotions and the expression of them all the way to their graves. Bob: Barbara, Dennis has hinted at this. Did you grow up in an environment where you didn’t feel free to explore or to express your emotions? Barbara: Yes, absolutely. 11:00 You know, I think it’s because my parents didn’t know how to, either. I mean, they grew up in an environment where it was not healthy to express how you feel, whether positively or negatively, whether you’re happy or sad. My home was not that much different. It was not a safe place to express when you were angry or hurt—it wasn’t a safe place to cry. When you suppress your emotions—when any human being suppresses emotions, you can’t just push down one; they kind of all are connected together, and when you push them down they all go down. So I spent a lot of my mommy years learning about my own emotions, before I could even teach my kids. I had to learn to name them—I had to learn what they were. As I learned and began to understand that “this is the way God made me, and how do I use it correctly?”—because I didn’t use it wrong, necessarily, in a behavioral way—I didn’t yell at people, I didn’t hit people. But as I began to understand those emotions— 12:00 —then I could finally begin to teach my kids, “This is angry,” “This is sad,” “This is happy,” and the other ones, “And here are positive, helpful ways that you can express that—but you can’t express it in hurtful ways.” Bob: And Dennis, you talked about helping kids list and put names to the emotions they’re feeling, so that they become aware of what’s going on in their own hearts. Dennis: Yes. We have a daughter who—we’ll leave this family unnamed, because we have a lot of grandkids that might listen in to the broadcast someday—but we have a daughter who decided she was going to take a couple of her children—who were teenagers—through a dinner table experience of naming their highs and lows for the day and describing the emotion they had experienced, and why. The child couldn’t figure it out. Barbara: One of the two— Dennis: One of the two. Barbara: —had a hard time expressing, even identifying, what he felt in these situations he encountered in school.  13:00 He had a really hard time putting names on them. He would say things like, “Well, I felt okay.” Well, what does that mean? The other one, it was quite easy. So it was interesting, because it was a lesson to our daughter and to us that God has made us all very different. I was really proud of her, quite honestly—for beginning the process of helping that son of hers begin to name his emotions—because someday he will be an adult, someday he will probably be married and be a dad—and he’s going to have to do that with his own kids. Bob: I’m watching parents today do this with two- and three-year-olds, where the three-year-old’s fussy and throwing a fit, and the mom is saying, “I know what you’re feeling is anger,” and trying to process this logically. I’m thinking, “Is that really going to work with a three-year-old?” I mean, what’s your thought—is that— Dennis: Well, it may not work with the three-year-old, but by the time they’re 19 years old and they leave the home— 14:00 Bob: —that’ll be imprinted? Dennis: I would think they would know what they’re experiencing. I think, Bob, the Christian community kind of gets a little edgy when you start talking about naming your emotions, because I don’t think we know what to do with this category of life. I think one of the reasons for that is we’ve really never studied who God is.  In putting together this book, Barbara put together the emotions of God, and we have them listed out. I’ll not hit them all, but He’s love, He feels delight, He laughs, He’s kind, He enjoys, gives pleasure; He feels gladness, has compassion, feels grief, deep sadness and loss. We’re made in His image, and I think a part of the Christian faith is that we reflect who God is and how He responds to people that are in tragic situations and that we can come in and step in and wrap our arms around them and express emotions that identify with what they’re feeling. 15:00 Bob: So, there feels like a tension here between wanting your children to express and know and embrace and live out their emotions, but wanting them to handle those appropriately, maturely—not just to give free reign or free bent to their emotions. Trying to find that spot where, “Let’s talk about what you’re feeling, let’s validate what you’re feeling, but let’s also handle that with wisdom and maturity.” You understand the tension I’m feeling? Barbara: Yes. Bob: What advice do you have for parents in that area? Barbara: Well, I think there’s a lot of back-and-forth, and I think you’ll make a lot of mistakes as parents—I mean, we did. You just are going to go overboard in one way or the other, and then you’ll realize that was too much, not enough of this—I mean, there’s a lot of trial and error, because no two kids are alike, and no two parents are alike, and no two situations are exactly alike. I mean, I think the mom you were talking about—of the three-year-old—saying to her child, “I can tell you’re feeling angry right now”— 16:00 —I think that’s really good, because she has to help him have a name for that emotion that he’s feeling. Now, she shouldn’t be able to reason with him, because kids don’t have the ability to reason with logic at three years old.  But if you are going to God as your Father and saying, “I want to parent the way You want me to parent. Will You help us? Will You help me? Will You help my spouse represent You well? Will You help us communicate to our kids well who You are and who You’ve made them to be?” He’s going to guide you. You’ll make mistakes, but if you’re doing that—if that’s your goal—God’s going to get you to the right place with your kids. Dennis: I just want to remind our listeners—if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, if you’ve trusted Him as your Savior, Master, and Lord—then you also have the Holy Spirit. Now, why did the Holy Spirit come? He came to guide us— Barbara: —help us. Dennis: —comfort us, to teach us, and to point out when things aren’t quite right with our kids— 17:00 —and that we need to step in and help our children. I’ll give you a great illustration of this, and I’ll just ask Barbara this question and she will know immediately what the story was. I have to tell you—at this point Barbara was brilliant beyond human understanding with one of our daughters. Bob: You already know what he’s talking about? Barbara: No! I don’t! Dennis: It was when you were about to undergo a major heart surgery to correct a congenital problem— Barbara: Now I do. Dennis: —where you might die, back in 1990. Remember the situation that happened with our daughter? Barbara: Yes. Dennis and I knew this was coming up. We’d scheduled the surgery, we’d met with the doctors, we’d done all that. But we had not told our kids—our six children—very much, because…as a parent you’re thinking, “How much do we tell them—how much do we not tell them?” So our kids knew a little bit about it, but they didn’t know a lot. This was one of our younger daughters— Dennis: Let me interrupt you there, because they knew that Mommy’s heart had taken off on a number of occasions and had beat 300 beats a minute. 18:00 That’s five beats a second. So they knew their mom had to be rushed to the ER on a number of occasions, and they knew this procedure was going to take some time. So, they knew enough that they had to have these little ripples going across the pond emotionally, not knowing exactly where to take all of what they were feeling. Barbara: But they didn’t think about it on a day-to-day basis, because this didn’t happen daily. But anyway, I asked our kids to go pick up their rooms after dinner and to get ready for bed. One of our younger two had picked up her room in record time and was ready for bed, and I don’t remember exactly what she was doing, but it just didn’t make sense to either one of us—to Dennis or I, either one—that she could possibly have cleaned up her room that fast. I mean, something was just not adding up. So we went in and talked to her and we said, “How did you clean up your room so fast?” Then we figured out—and I don’t remember how right now—that she had just— 19:00 —scooped everything up that was out—clothes, toys, books, everything—and shoved it all under the bed in a huge wad—literally, was burying—was getting rid of it. We just started talking to her—“Why did you do that?”  Again, I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but it came out that she did it because she was afraid. “What are you afraid of?” “I’m afraid Mommy’s going to die when she has her surgery.” It was—her way of managing her stuff was to bury it all and to hide it all and to put it all under the bed. You know, it doesn’t make sense to us as adults, but we know that that wasn’t normal for her. So by asking some questions we got to the bottom of it—that in the back of her little mind throughout the day, she was worrying about this. She never said it, she didn’t communicate it to us, but that abnormal response to “pick up your room” communicated to us that something wasn’t right. 20:00 Dennis: I don’t think she could communicate it to us. Barbara: She may not have. Dennis: I don’t recall exactly how old she was at that point— Barbara: Seven. Dennis: So, how much does a seven-year-old know about their emotions, to say, “I was feeling afraid”? She finally was able to express that after we questioned her a bit. Here’s kind of the bottom line that I want to challenge parents with—this thing called parenting is really a challenge. I mean—the remarkable assignments you’re going to be given in these boys and girls that are gifts—by God, to you—are going to challenge you to your core. But I want to encourage you—don’t give up! Make your home a safe place where emotions can be expressed and can be experienced and where children learn a lot about God because of their emotions. A second application here, Bob, is I want to encourage some couples to go on a date and talk about where you’re taking your kids emotionally and—by the way, start with yourselves.  21:00 Just do a little evaluation. What kind of model are we demonstrating before our kids? If they handle their emotions like we do, would that be good enough? Would you have done a good job if your kids did that? And then finally, a third thing is—if you’re a single parent, call a friend and say, “Could I just tell you what I heard on the radio? Maybe let’s get that book and let’s talk about this together, and let’s discuss how we’re developing our children’s emotional identity.” And the one last challenge—I have a bunch at the end here—one last challenge is, there are a number of listeners who need to get The Art of Parenting video series and lead a small group of parents through this. I’m running into parents all over the country, and they are going through this video series that Bob Lepine created. It’s not a lecture—it’s highly applicational—it’s a lot of fun, and it’s eight sessions long. 22:00 It will be one of the best things you’ve ever done for the parents of the kids your children are hanging out with, because you need them to be singing off the same song-sheet, too. Bob: The video series is connected to the book that you guys have written called The Art of Parenting. We should say you can read the book and go through the videos, and you’ll get a different experience. The video is not just the video version of your book. The fence posts are the same, but the content— Dennis: Yes, you even changed the order of the four areas. [Laughter] Bob: The sacred order? Dennis: The sacred order that we came up with originally. You’ll just have to read the book and get the video series— Bob: And then you can write us and tell us which one was right. Dennis: Write us and be the first one! [Laughter] Be the first one who writes me, and I’ll send you an autographed copy of the book. Bob: The book is called The Art of Parenting, and in fact, right now we’re going to make the book available to FamilyLife Today listeners who want to make a donation to help support the ministry. 23:00 So, you go online and donate to support the ministry, and we’ll send you a copy of Dennis and Barbara’s book The Art of Parenting as our thank-you gift. You can also order a copy from our FamilyLife® Resource Center at FamilyLifeToday.com. Either way, make a donation to get the book or purchase a copy. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com and the information is available there. There’s also information about the video series, and you can order that from us.  Again, the website—FamilyLifeToday.com—you can go there to make an online donation and get your copy of Dennis and Barbara’s book, The Art of Parenting—or you can call to donate and receive your copy of the book. The number is 1-800-358-6329. That’s 1-800-“F” as in family, “L” as in life, and then the word “TODAY.” And by the way, thanks for supporting the ministry of FamilyLife and the work of FamilyLife Today. Thanks for helping keep this program on your local radio station and on stations all across the country. Your ongoing support is appreciated and it is needed— 24:00 —and we’re grateful for those of you who partner with us to make this ministry possible for your friends and your neighbors, people in your community, and people all around the world. Thanks for supporting this work. Now, tomorrow we’re going to talk about another aspect of your child’s identity—we’re going to talk about his or her spiritual identity—and how as parents we can help cultivate the spiritual identity of our children. That happens tomorrow—hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.  FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas. A Cru® Ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.  We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you. However, there is a cost to produce them for our website. If you’ve benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs?   Copyright © 2019 FamilyLife. All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com