Active Parents
We all know that juggling work and family responsibilities, having fewer leisure hours as we engage in care giving, and enduring the financial strain of having children can all be stressful. But we also know that parenthood is profoundly rewarding.
At Wildwood, we meet some of the profound responsibilities and challenges of parenthood together. We know first-hand how difficult parenting is, and we coach each other along and lighten some of each other’s burdens.
Our children need our help with their physical needs and development, including safety, security, food, clothing, shelter, grooming, and health. We help them gain bodily dexterity and mastery and to become gifted in athletics or dance if they are so inclined.
Our children need our help with their learning needs and mental development.
We can help them develop their senses, their imagination, their symbolic and conceptual knowledge (especially language and numbers), their reasoning, their creativity, and their common sense.
Our children need our help with their social development.
With empathy, our children can apprehend and even feel other people’s emotions. Even infants try to comfort other infants. Toddlers take turns, share, take joy in playing together, are pained by separations, rejoice at reunions, and can be responsive to other people’s feelings. Children can sometimes be empathetic, helpful, tender, generous, and altruistic.
As parents, we try to help our children learn cooperation, healthy competition, intimate communication, ways to handle their aggression, negotiation, compromise, and other social skills.
Helping our children get along well with their peers is not always easy. Generally, children and youth are liked by their peers if they are socially competent: if they can initiate activities, respond positively to their peers, and resolve interpersonal conflicts. Positive, responsive, supportive, and cooperative kids with advanced role-taking skills and the ability to take playmates’ wishes into consideration are usually popular kids.
Our children also need our help with their moral development.
Each of us starts out life both amoral and egocentric. Narcissism is normal and healthy in toddlers and children. Children live by an egocentric, Me-only morality based on their own interests. They believe that whatever they want is what is right and good.
Most often, children obey rules external to themselves — and control their natural instincts and impulses — for the sake of personal benefits, especially to avoid punishment or to obtain rewards.
Around age 6 or 7, most children begin switching from a “Me-only” perspective to a “My-People-only” perspective. They shift their ego out to their groups: their family, their classmates and friends, their ethnic group, their fellow believers, their nationality.
At this point, their relatedness and social responsibility are growing. Their courtesies and love extend to their groups — to “my people”. They learn to treat members of their groups the way that they want to be treated. They are learning how to love.
However, they are in a My-Group-only mindset. They may internalize and conform to rules, but they are not truly moral or spiritual yet. They assume that what their group wants and believes is what is right and good, and their conduct is controlled by criticism and praise.
Beginning between age 11 and 15, our children become capable of introspection. They can heed their own thought processes. They can think about their own thinking, and perceive their own intentions, motives, and attitudes. Their interior world opens up before their mind’s eye. With the arrival of introspection, they begin moving from unreflective experience to reflective experience.
Our teen children are working their way toward a new sense of self, a new identity — and trying to integrate their beliefs, their values, their ideas, their understanding of relationships and roles, and their career goals. They can also engage in “what-if” thinking about possible selves and worlds, and contemplate personal and collective dreams and ideals.
From all this new thinking, introspection, and inner work, they begin active identity formation. Who am I? What are my values? What kind of person am I to be? What will I do with my life?
Given these and other extraordinary challenges involved in parenting, it’s no surprise that we’re getting together at Wildwood to discuss how to be better parents, and to coach each other along.
We invite you to join us as we attempt to lead kind, patient, nurturing, loving, close, supportive, and committed families where self-esteem and good values and habits flourish.
While playing together, praying together, sharing traditions and stories, and handling the inevitable tensions and clashes, we can challenge and support our loved ones. With our good example, energy, shared values, and wise love, we can encourage, affirm, and serve each family member’s uniquely unfolding journey.
As we share the struggles of life together as each family member develops his or her empathy, kindness, self-esteem, and trustworthy character. As Wildwood parents, let’s coach each other along as we stir our children, move them, give them direction, shape their identity in positive ways, and help them find the meaning and purpose in life.
Active Parents’ and Family Activities at Wildwood
Sundays
9:30 Sunday school class, with retired minister Harry Strong and Youth Education with Pastor Dave
9:30 Choir rehearsal
10:30 Worship service
11:40 Fellowship in fellowship hall
Coffee & Conversation
Every Tuesday morning, 9:00
In the church’s fellowship hall
Handbell Rehearsal
Wednesdays, 6:00 p.m.
Choir Rehearsal
Wednesdays, 6:45 p.m.
Sundays, 9:30 a.m.
Youth Group
Wednesdays 7:00PM
