Raising Adults

Here's the thing.
It's our job to teach our children how to be adults. Not how to be good kids and how to only do what they are told. It is our job to raise adults, especially since they will spend most of their lives as adults, not as children. 

Raising adults means that we teach them how to make good choices and follow through on those choices. Often times, because of our protection, these learning experiences are superficial and made up, especially because we can just pluck them out of experiences that end up being too much for them to handle. However, we need to be careful that we don't make every experience in their lives free from sadness and difficulty. We do a huge disservice to them when we make them believe that we will always be around to bail them out and that nothing truly bad will ever happen to them.
Of course we let children be children, but we cannot, nor should we, shield them from everything, always. It's okay to let natural consequences happen. It's okay to have expectations (and chores and standards). And it's okay to teach them that they are not the center of all things, all the time.

You and your spouse are also people and your relationship with your spouse is important and needs to be tended to, even at the putting off of the children, from time to time. 

Children are children and as such they need us. We jump in and help whenever we can, but sometimes we need to remember that just because we can, doesn't mean we always should.

In my favorite parenting book, "The Parenting Breakthrough", the author does an amazing job at helping you see the balance between raising children and raising adults. By the time they are raised, we should want them to be adults and be able to handle life as such. 

At the end of the day (and end of their stay in your house) you want your children to be able to create happy homes and families of their own and be able to be stable enough to help others.

What will you let your children do for themselves today? Make a sandwich? Pick up their room? Load the dishwasher? Let them surprise themselves. And you!