How to Help Your Children Grow

By: Missionary Team

We all love our mothers. Well, at least we all should love them. I care for my mother deeply, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that we don’t always see eye to eye with each other, as many others struggle within their own families. The usual arguments about my attitude and personal gripes on her rules and how she raised my sibling and me seemed to be a never-ending issue. Regardless of all the arguments my mother and I have, there are many more instances of the choices she made in raising my family with my father, and they truly helped me grow into the man I am today. 

Helping me grow through the early years 

In my young days, my mother began sending my older brother and me to catholic school for a year, then changed us to homeschooling until my Freshman year of high school, which was both a blessing and a curse. In many ways, being homeschooled ended up being responsible for several struggles growing up, even into adulthood. For example, it limited my ability to find and interact with other kids to make friends. Another burden that homeschooling added onto my life was loose schedules and limited teaching time from my mother led to me having a poor work ethic and often falling into procrastination. However, as much as I could go on and on about how much I disliked homeschooling, I am really grateful for how it allowed me to have more personal time and instruction with my mother as I was developing physically, mentally, and spiritually. Ultimately, I am extremely thankful for my mother homeschooling us and for knowing when it was right to move on and send us off to private school to experience being taught and to learn alongside new faces. 

House Rules

There is no family without some rules to live by, and my mother provided some memorable ones, be they good or bad. As most kids like myself complain about every rule their mother tells them, there are quite a few rules, to this day, I fail to understand, but they are very few and far between the ones for which I am thankful. One of my mother’s strange rules was if any TV cartoons looked “weird” by her standards, we couldn’t watch them, and seeing these shows much later in life, I realized they were no different than what we were already watching at the time. With minor instances like the previous example, most of her rules proved very beneficial, and as much as I disliked them as a child. Some of these rules included a nine P.M. bedtime, which was extremely helpful for getting a healthy sleeping habit, and punishments for swearing and using other foul language, which really formed me in avoiding using profanities.

Highschool to College

My mother can agree that raising her children through high school is no easy task. Even though she was no longer homeschooling us, she pushed past all the struggles that come along with it to make sure that we all graduated with bright and respected futures. Throughout most of my time in high school, I grew quite distant from my mother, as I desired to be more independent and in control of everything I was doing. As much as I wanted to keep that habit up, I came to realize that I’ll always need her help, be it for work, girl problems, or my education, and all those times I went to my mother for help, it seemed to help and bring more joy to her. Even to this day, she is always cheerful to hear that I need her advice and support, and she encourages me never to be afraid to ask for it. 

In conclusion

I am so thankful for all the good and bad choices my mother has made because, through God’s wonderful grace, I am able to be in this spot in life. There are so many great things my mother gave me in life that are worth so much to be learned and used by many mothers and future mothers to help their children truly flourish. The list I could make for all the good things she impacted my life with would go on forever. Like her want to make sure we spent quality time with her and my family, her desire for us to grow up smart and healthy, and her desire to want us to always come back to her in times of confusion and distress. In the end, I could never ask for a better mother, and I hope that you all can take in this advice and love our beautiful mothers God has given to us.