Joy-filled Parenting

Helping children grow up in homes where joyful and peaceful are a way of life is a major goal of the Life Model. Joy is how we carry forward a strong, multigenerational community identity, prevent tramatization and avoid addictions. Joyful children build strong minds that love to learn, can persevere and are resilient when the inevitable goes wrong.

Joyful Beginnings calendar

One of the simplest guides for starting life is found in the Joyful Beginnings calendar developed by Life Model author Maribeth Poole. This week-by-week guide to the first 18 months of life takes parents though the major growth and development of the brain’s control center. Parents are guided through each step needed for training every new stage of brain development. Every stage requires a timely training period. Whatever is not trained and used by the brain during this critical period is forever removed from the brain at the end of that period. Children who are not properly trained at the moment of need will lose essential mental abilities for life.

Fear bonds or love bonds

For the brain to form correctly so it can take care of relationships and identity, a child needs to live in joy and peace instead of fear. Many religious and cultural practices for child rearing that receive much approval produce children who, as adults, do very poorly. The parts of the brain needed for moral and socially appropriate lives only develop well when children live in high levels of joy followed by times of quiet in the context of a secure, loving bond with both parents.

Child needs and tasks

Here, in an introductory way, are the basic needs and tasks that must be completed by right ages for normal growth for infants and children (from the Life Model Study Guide).

THE INFANT STAGE                                                 Ideal Age:  Birth > Age 4

Needs

•    Joy bonds with both parents that are strong, loving, caring, secure
•    Important needs are met without asking
•    Quiet together time
•    Help regulating distress and emotions
•    Be seen through the “eyes of heaven”
•    Receive and give life
•    Have others synchronize with him/her first

Tasks

•    Receive with joy
•    Learn to synchronize with others
•    Organize self into a person through imitation
•    Learn to regulate emotions
•    Learn to return to joy from every emotion
•    Learn to be the same person over time
•    Learn self-care skills
•    Learn to rest

THE CHILD STAGE                                                 Ideal Age:  Ages 4 > 13

Needs

•    Weaning
•    Help to do what he does not feel like doing
•    Help sorting feelings, imaginations and reality
•    Feedback on guesses, attempts and failures
•    Be taught the family history
•    Be taught the history of God’s family
•    Be taught the “big picture” of life

Tasks

•    Take care of self (one is enough right now)
•    Learn to ask for what he/she needs
•    Learn self-expression
•    Develop personal resources and talents
•    Learn to make himself/herself understandable to others
•    Learn to do hard things
•    Learn what satisfies
•    See self through the “eyes of heaven”

At this point most of the Life Model material on parenting is found in the unlikely sounding books called: The Complete Guide to Living With Men and The Red Dragon Cast Down. While the Life Model covers the basics of parenting in books like Living With Men, most of the parenting materials have yet to be written. The current goal is to have the first major presentation on family applications of the Life Model at the 2008 THRIVE conference. In the meanwhile, Barbara Moon has presented The Joy-filled Parenting Seminar in Georgia and Life Model author Anne Bierling speaks on parenting in California.