What emotion characterizes the mood of your home? This is a question worth pondering.  Valerie Bell has written a book called Getting Out of Your Kids' Faces and into Their Hearts.

"Let your eyes light up when your children are around. Laugh more. Tell them how empty and quiet it is when they’re not there. Enjoy the things they bring to your life. Attend their activities, not as if they were compulsory for parents, but throw yourself into their lives."

--Valerie Bell, Getting Out of your Kids’ Faces and into Their Hearts

She said, children learn from their parents whether life is a wonderful adventure or an endurance of one disappointment after another.

I loved how Valerie so clearly identified the common and serious mistakes that many parents make and then wonder what went wrong in their relationship with their children.

Bell is right on target when she says that as a parent it is time for you to focus on your child and not your own childhood. So many thirty & forty year olds get caught up in their own issues that they do the same thing to their children, as they are complaining their parents did to them. Bell instructs the reader to move beyond themselves and focus on their children. AMEN!

A fellow room-mother (yes I’m a dude) told me about why she got the book. She had been fighting with her adolescent daughter when our kids were at Harvey Dunn and she realized some of that was because of her life circumstances.

Let me ask again, what emotion characterizes the mood of your home? Divorced homes, divorced families, how do you see the emotions?

What is your go-to emotion?  Think about it in light of this final quote from Foster Cline...

"We should not use anger so often that it becomes an expected emotion.  All of us, including our kids, LOVE emotion.  Once kids get used to a particular emotion--be it shame, anger, guilt, or love--that expected emotion becomes an emotion of choice."

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