The sermon in church today was taken from a passage that reads, "Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God ..." among the things the preacher mentioned was the highlighting of "with thanksgiving". To him, this phrase shows that one effective way to counter cares of life is to count our blessings; or, in other words, to focus on the positives, much less on the negatives.
As I was sitting there, I thought this idea of focussing on the positives instead of harping on the negatives can also be applied to our dealings with our children. Too often, perhaps due to our Chinese upbringing, the instinct is to zoom in on the children's weaknesses and their shortcomings. We see their poor grades, bad habits, disrespectfulness towards us, and ingratitude. In the process, we are conveniently blind to their helpfulness, cheerfulness, care for one another, thoughtfulness, and other positives. Many parents I know are very discouraged with parenting partly because of this imbalanced view of the children's negatives over the positives. We see our children through a critical lens instead of via a thankful one. I think we will all have more energies to soldier on as parents if we remind ourselves more of the positives.
Life is too short to grieve over our children's deficiencies and brood over what they can be like: bright, beautiful, obedient, grateful ... - all the perfect dream characteristics that we imagine other people's children possess. I think we should spend a large part of that time on just enjoying them for who they are, and being thankful for them at that.
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