My newest parenting challenge to myself

Often I find myself challenging myself (that totally doesn't sound right...) with a new style of parenting. Sometimes it's a long term goal, sometimes it directly deals with the day we're having or the situation we're in. This summer I have been challenging myself to allow my children to more freely explore God's green earth. Always before I have put so many restrictions on them. "Don't dig in those rocks, you'll get dirty", "no, we can't have a water fight with the hose, we don't have our bathing suits on", etc.

Some of my long term goals are to make sure that my children feel like citizens of the world, and not JUST the United States. Don't get me wrong, we are the most blessed, richest (in material things), luckiest nation in the world, but I don't think those are the most important things necessarily. I want to make sure that my children are aware of, and experience first hand the way the rest of the world lives, acts, and believes. I don't want to raise sheltered children.

Back to the original purpose of this post... I have been trying to instruct and discipline the sin, not just the action. I have been doing my best to discuss with my children what fruit of the spirit they are lacking when they act out in a wrong doing. This means I must know them by heart myself...right?

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law."

—Galatians 5:22-23

In my quiet time (confession: it doesn't happen every day...sometimes we have loud time!) I have been trying to study these more. I have found this website very helpful.

It seems to me that most of what my kids get in trouble for with each other deals with patience, kindness, and gentleness. Most of what they get in trouble for with Lincoln and I deal with patience, kindness, and self-control. I make sure that as we're discussing what happened that I point out that God expects us to possess these qualities in our lives, and that they are lacking ____(which ever one fits the situation). We talk about how we can do better to possess and demonstrate that quality.

I hope that this will help instruct my children in the way they should go rather than just disciplining a negative behavior.