Afraid you don’t have what it takes to parent well? Tired of fearing what might happen to your children?
This informative and raw book reveals a freer way to parent: dismantling fear, putting relationships first, and equipping you to parent powerfully no matter what.
In life, there are no guarantees that our children will be safe or choose a healthy path. Controlling the outcomes cannot be a parent’s goal. It lies outside our control and leaves us gripped by fear. We can, however, control how we respond.
4 Keys to Parent Fearlessly unlocks new parenting realities you never knew existed. Taking her 30 years of relational coaching, prayer-based trauma recovery, and leadership training, Toni shares what these skills look like in a family setting.
Seeing her various children through a myriad of difficulties, Toni delivers four keys to dismantling fear and building the resilient family you’ve always wanted, promising peace amid uncertainty and crisis as a pathway for greater resilience and joy.
Learn to
Recognize when fear is active
Realize you are not alone
Receive truth’s perspective
Respond by co-creating new realities that unlock your family’s resilience
Are you ready to Parent Fearlessly?
Learn to parent your children by letting God parent you! This book walks you through the steps of learning how to sense God's presence with you so that you can parent the way he does!
The real-life practical stories of what it looks like to live these steps out in vulnerable situations from adapting to preschool to a child cutting themself.
If you are anything like me, you may have a hard time understanding what you are feeling at any given moment. Many of us, for different reasons, have been cut off from our feelings for so long that we don’t even know they are there, much less what they are. In my case, I was teased as a child for feeling too strongly about things. I apparently “carried my feelings around on my shoulders”…like a “sissy” nonetheless! As a woman trying to excel in the world, I needed to be as level-headed as possible. And if I was passionate about a topic, I was labeled “emotional.” I AM NOT EMOTIONAL! (Ahem…)
These are just a few of the cultural-based shaming and destructive messages we face as we seek to build resilience and overcome fear. If we truly want to be fear-free parents, we first must recognize that fear is here. Undoing years of ignoring our feelings, burying them or treating them as absolutes is no small task, but it can be done. Indeed, it must be done.
I picked up a guitar on my own when I was 18. I was not really a musician, but my rhythm was good, and I could play enough chords to lead worship for our college group. I loved playing and singing, so, eventually, I wanted to take guitar lessons to improve my skills.
During my first lesson, the instructor informed me that the way I held my hand for making chords was incorrect, and there was no way I would get better if I did not change the way I played. I was dismayed to learn that I had logged hundreds of hours practicing the wrong form, and that if I wanted to get any better, I would have to retrain my brain to hold my hand differently. The new way was difficult, unnatural and uncomfortable. I left the class depressed as I faced the fact that improving my playing would mean starting from ground zero and relearning everything. Yet, the truth was that the foundation I had laid would only get me as far as I was. If I wanted to play better, I had to start over.
This applies in the realm of emotional maturity as well. Most of us learned to cope with our emotions in ways that have brought us this far in life. Now, however, these same habits are keeping us from growing beyond where we are.
As parents, learning to handle our fear in life-giving ways can only be done through training ourselves in different skills. Recognizing fear involves three micro-skills that give us the self-awareness to perceive the feelings flooding us so that we do not simply react out of them. Instead, we learn to use them to grow and deepen our relationship with ourselves, with God and with others. These three micro-skills are:
Connecting relationally
Quieting our thoughts
Checking in with ourselves
These micro-skills are similar to skills needed to learn a sport or an instrument. Like my stunted guitar playing, many of us have learned to play the “emotional maturity” instrument incorrectly. Therefore, building these new skills is not just about training new habits but unlearning old, unhealthy ones. The only way I could unlearn and relearn new skills was through practice...sheer repetition. Practice doesn’t make perfect…until we practice the correct habits.