20: The Maturity-Filled Home (Ch 3: Parenting Challenges)

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome back fellow travelers for Season 4, episode 20. Hello, Father.

(00:06) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. We’re once again back with the fellowship of the trail, right?

(00:11) Stephanie Warner: Fellowship of the trail! I don’t know if that makes anybody else as happy as it makes me, but it very much delights me. Yes. So everyone, this is your friendly reminder to join us live this weekend, or catch the replay. January 30th to 31st for a weekend of Heart-Focused Discipleship. It’s online. Name your own price. Details in the description. All right, Father. We are continuing our study of The Spirit-Filled Home, a highly underrated book I am very happy to feature.

And also, if anyone wants to do more than a podcast and do a group study or a book buddy read, you can find your free DIY book club guide in the description for this book. All right, last week we looked at flesh-filled homes and for this week…if you are following along in your book we’re in Chapter 3, which is entitled, “Parenting Challenges.” And I also sometimes think of it as the maturity-filled home. And I guess I’ll just throw that first question at you then. Why would I relate parenting challenges to maturity?

(01:27) Marcus Warner: The two biggest challenges I see in parenting are my child’s immaturity and my immaturity. What you’re looking at here is that the biggest parenting challenge is my personal maturity. If I am still struggling with infant and child level issues in my own life, it’s going to be very difficult for me to mentor my little ones. To move them through those stages well and into an adult level of maturity. So what we’re trying to do here is to lay out what’s supposed to happen.

And particularly at those first three stages, the infant, the child, and the adult stages, which are the ones that as a parent, I’m trying to guide people through. Now, the parent stage of maturity presumes that you are already an adult.That you have been functioning as an adult for several years, and you are now ready to sacrificially help your children move through these stages, of infant, child, and through the adult years.

(02:31) Stephanie Warner: So, all right, we’ll set that up in just a moment. This is my time to pop in with a happy little disclaimer. Now I shall warn you, dear reader or dear listener, this chapter is a heavy hitter. We are covering the five stages of maturity according to the Life Model. This chapter also covers three types of attachment dysfunction. And validation and comfort with six big negative emotions and more. So it’s gloriously a fire hose, and I love it. I hope that you all go and read through the whole thing. We are not going to fire hose you with all of that in 20 minutes. So read the chapter and I will also link a couple other helpful episodes for you in the description. So Father….

(03:18) Marcus Warner: Yeah, she’s not kidding. It’s like I was browsing this chapter going, what in the world was I thinking? So anyway, here we are.

(03:25) Stephanie Warner: He literally had that moment if you’re familiar with throwing your hands up in the air.

(03:30) Marcus Warner: Overwhelmed. Okay, I overwhelmed myself with the volume of material in this chapter. But anyway, we’ll get through it.

(03:36) Stephanie Warner: It’s great. It’s a good overview. It’s good. So the framework of what we want to take from this chapter is the maturity scale, and then we’ll talk through there. So you are already starting to hint at it, but let’s formally introduce it. So the Life Model is built around five stages of maturity development. Can you unpack that?

(03:54) Marcus Warner: Well, and it’s technically six because they include the in utero stage, but just from birth to death.That is why it’s called a Life Model, from conception to death. It’s like every stage of development, largely built off of the work of Dr. Alan Shore. The infant stage goes from birth until weaning, when I begin to eat solid food, so usually around age three. So it includes what we would think of as the toddler years. Infant includes everything from birth through the toddler years.

If you think about it then, that includes what we often call the “terrible twos” and things that are happening there. So we’ll talk a little bit about what’s going on in the infant years. And then there’s the child years, which is from weaning where I begin eating solid food till puberty hits. And all of my body goes through massive changes. And at puberty I become an adult.

And the simple answer there is, if I’m not careful, I could be a parent.Things have changed and throughout human history, puberty has been clearly identified as you are now an adult. You need to live as an adult for a few years, but only a few years in people started to think it’s time to think about getting married. So in some cultures that was 15, some it was 16. But almost everybody was beginning to think in terms of, it may be time to look for a life partner in your late teens.

So it’s only in our modern era that that’s been pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And there’s a lot of reasons for it. But those are the three main periods we’re going to be looking at. Infant, what’s happening in those infant and toddler years.Then the childhood years, what are we doing, and the adult years.

(05:47) Stephanie Warner: Could you touch on parent and elder real quick though?

(05:52) Marcus Warner: Yeah, the parent is basically that I’ve been an adult long enough that I have my own children, and I am now going to be walking them through the stages. And so the two assumptions there are, that I have mastered these stages myself, and I am prepared to sacrificially walk somebody else through it. Because I am going to have to make a lot of sacrifices as a parent, I can’t just live for what is best for me, I have to lay some of those things aside. And then you get to the elder years, and that means I have parented through all of the children that I have had and they are now at the adult stage of life.

I am no longer responsible for taking my children through the stages of learning how to be an adult, they’re there. I find it interesting that God often has us living half of our lives as elders. From age 45 to 90, I can find myself in the elder stage of life where I am helping to be a grandparent, helping to fill holes in other people’s lives. I am helping to parent the community, taking on a different level of weight. And it’s good to have elders around because they’ve seen a lot of battles.They’ve seen a lot of ups and downs and navigated them. So it tends to give you a lot of emotional stability in your community if you have a lot of people with earned elder level maturity.

(07:30) Stephanie Warner: And it helps fill the gaps then when we talk about, “it takes a village”. When we see maturity gaps and deficits. A parent can’t pass on to a child what the parent doesn’t have, but other people can. So anyway, that’s a lot to cover. Could you take a moment to talk about what you have described the ideal is, what the design is for physical maturity, emotional maturity, and skills maturity. We often find ourselves saying, oh well, I’m technically an adult, but I was just acting like an infant. What’s going on there?

(08:20) Marcus Warner: The Life Model itself, does start as an idealized model of what is supposed to happen. When you’re assessing what has gone wrong you’re looking at it like, all right, well, was that an infant-level task that didn’t get resolved? Or is this a child-level task that didn’t get done? And it helps you to assess okay, where is the level of repair that needs to happen here? What the idealized model is meant to do is help us with the diagnosis, so this is where things went wrong, and therefore this is the solution that is needed.

(08:59) Stephanie Warner: When you’re in the process of diagnosis. If you are actually a parent, it can also help you be like, okay, what is appropriate? What should I be expecting from my infant right now or from my child right now too?

(09:09) Marcus Warner: Yeah, you could run into all kinds of problems there. And one of them is that I treat my child as if they’re older than they are. One is that I keep my child emotionally younger than they need to be. So there’s all kinds of problems that come in here, from hover parenting to under parenting to over parenting to abusive parenting. I mean, there’s all kinds of things. So what we’re looking at here is what’s supposed to happen, and let’s keep it simple. So I’ve got like three things that are supposed to happen in the infant years, two things that are supposed to happen in the child years, and two things that are supposed to happen in the adult years.

So we’ll try to keep it simple.The three things that we’re trying to accomplish in the infant- through- toddler years are first, smiles, the second is security, and the third is synchronization. So big long word, but all S’s. And the idea of smiles is that we’re helping them build their joy center in their brain. And the way we help them with their joy center in their brain is they need lots of smiles.

They need lots of people lighting up like, I am so happy to see you, it is such a delight that you are here!  And they just need a lot of people smiling at them, up to eight hours a day of people smiling at them saying, I am delighted that you’re here! And that is helping them build the joy foundation for their life, that is going to give them the capacity to get through all the hard stuff that they’re gonna have to do in life. Second they need security, they need to know they’re not alone with these things. When life gets big and gets hard, Mommy and Daddy are there and they’re gonna be held. They’re gonna be taken care of and they’re gonna be fed. They don’t have to do anything to get taken care of, they are going to be taking care of regardless of the behavior. You don’t say, well, if you behave, I’ll feed you. The unconditional love is going to be experienced through the smiles of the security.

Then we get to synchronization and synchronization has to do with that my emotions are going to get shared. People are going to stay relational with me through my big emotions. And so it’s here that we introduce people to the SAD, SAD, emotions. And what I need to recognize in my little one and how to connect to them in those. And those SAD, SAD, emotions are shame, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety and despair. We have a lot of material on those things at Deeper Walk.

I need to as a parent, attune to my child’s emotions. help them resolve those emotions, and then move into correction and discipline. Too often we try to discipline our kids out of their emotions and that’s not really what needs to be happening. So I got a whole book on that written with Chris Corsi called, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids. But for now, that’s a starting point to what are the challenges? I got to make sure that my child’s getting a lot of smiles, getting a lot of security because things are just being taken care of for them. and that their emotions are being synchronized.

Which means years later, we want them to be able to think back and remember a time when they were overwhelmed and their parents stayed relationally present with them. They were still happy to be with them and helped them to recover. And if a child gets lots and lots of those memories of somebody who stayed relational with them through the upset emotions and helped them recover, they were synchronizing with them, then that is going to create emotional stability.

And so the infant has almost no responsibility in developing emotional stability. It is all the parent. And so I do that through the smiles, through the stability, through the security, and through the synchronization. If I do that well, then the infant will go into their child years with a level of emotional stability already developed just because they got what they needed.

(13:25) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Any more you want to say on infant or do you want to move to child?

(13:31) Marcus Warner: Again, I would refer to the book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids if they want more on this.

(13:38) Stephanie Warner: All right, so what’s going on once we have moved from infant into child?

(13:45) Marcus Warner: In the infant years it’s all about receiving. So it’s a lot about grace, right? I’m learning to receive something that I didn’t earn that’s being done for me regardless of my performance. In my child years, I am learning wisdom. And from a Biblical perspective, wisdom can be thought of as two things, and that’s discernment and discipline. So discernment is that I have to learn to discern between what’s good for me and what’s bad for me. And so I don’t enter my childhood years with any understanding of what is good for me and what is bad for me.

I do all kinds of things that are gonna potentially kill me if I keep doing these things. And the parent has to teach their child, this is not good for you. Everything from, don’t put your hand on that hot stove. Don’t climb the stairs with that butcher knife in your hand. There are things you’re like, no, don’t do that, that will kill you. Yeah,there’s a whole story behind that. And then as we grow older in our child years, we learn the difference between what is satisfying and what is only temporarily pleasurable. And I realize that I can’t spend my whole life just doing temporary pleasures. I’ve got to learn what is truly satisfying.

And so as I learn discernment, that teaches me what I want to say, yes to. I want to say, yes to what’s satisfying. And if I know what to say yes to, then saying, no, gets easier. And so that’s where we start getting into the discipline. Developing discipline is about the ability to say, no to the things that are not satisfying, to things that are not good for me. And as a parent, one of the big challenges is teaching and helping my child develop an understanding of what’s truly satisfying. What’s truly good for me and what I want to say, yes to. And so I develop a big enough yes, for those things that saying no gets easier.

And I’ll give one basic tip, children, when you’re telling them to obey, will often say, why? Why should I obey? And I generally advise parents to tell them that I will answer that after you obey. I want you to obey me first, because I have said to obey. And then once you obey, I will explain why. But if you explain why first, then they say, I don’t have to obey until I understand, you’re just setting yourself up for trouble. But that’s all part of it. The “why” is important. You do want to get to that at some point. It’s part of how you teach them.

(16:33) Stephanie Warner: I really appreciate that you emphasize that because a lot of people just leave it at, because I said so, and move on. Yeah, that’s good.

(16:41) Marcus Warner: You want to teach wisdom and that means you have to teach them discernment. You got to help them build this discipline. And those are big childhood skills.

(16:51) Stephanie Warner: Sometimes you talk about playing the piano or things like that as examples of learning discipline. Can you think of any everyday life kinds of scenarios that would help with discernment and discipline besides touching stoves?

(17:08) Marcus Warner: It’s one of the reasons that we give our kids a lot of different experiences. They can experience gardening, they can experience art, they can experience music, they can experience sports, and they can experience different things. They kind of find out, okay, I really love this. I really get excited about that. But if I want to get good at it, I’ve got to develop skill, and to develop skill, I’ve have to have the discipline of repetition and doing things. The nice thing is the child’s brain is wired for repetition and wired for absorbing these kinds of new things.

And so it’s the perfect time to be learning these skills and to be learning these habits, learning information. It is you teaching them how to read and then they learn how to read. And so it just goes on and on with this. And so those child years are a time for giving your kids a lot of different kinds of experiences. And helping them learn that this really is a whole lot more satisfying to do this creative thing. To construct this thing, or accomplish this thing, then it is to always just sit there and be entertained passively.

(18:22) Stephanie Warner: Or if you don’t get it once, it’s not for you, you know. all that’s good. All right, any more to say about child? Are you ready to see how children become adults?

(18:31) Marcus Warner: I just remember teaching junior high kids about this stuff and saying, freedom comes from skill and skill comes from discipline. And they’re like, well, what do you mean? If you sit in front of a piano, what are you free to play? If I sit in front of a piano I’m not free to play anything, I don’t know how to play the piano. And so my freedom at a piano is very limited because I don’t have the skill. And why don’t I have the skill? Because I didn’t have the discipline, the discipline to develop those skills. So I said, this is the way all of life works. And one of the things that we’re trying to do as parents for our kids, is to help them live with greater freedom and have more opportunity. And their freedom and their opportunity are directly related to their skills, which are directly related to the discipline that they accomplish. And so discernment leads to discipline, but those things lead to skill that lead to opportunity.

And that’s partly what we’re trying to do is set our kids up for success. And I used to tell you and Ben this all the time. When I would correct or instruct I would start with, I want you to be successful. I want you to be happy. I want you to have lots of friends. I want you to have this stuff. So we need to get you off of this habit and onto this other one. We need to get you to stop doing this and start doing this other, because I love you. I want you to be successful, I want you to have a lot of opportunities.

(19:58) Stephanie Warner: Very good,  Adults.

(20:00) Marcus Warner: Adults, we talk about the two R’s, which are relationships and responsibilities. In the adult world, my relational skills really need to grow, because my adult brain is moving from taking my identity from my parents, to taking my identity from my peers. And so if I have not mastered all these child level skills and I am starting to learn them now as a teenager, I will now start to learn these skills from my peers, instead of learning them from my parents. And I’m going to learn discernment and what’s good for me and what’s bad for me from my peers.

And so the more I delay learning those child things until my adult years, the more influence my peers have over my development. If I already know that it’s like me to enjoy this, and it’s like me to find satisfaction in this, guess who I’m going to want to bond to once I enter into my teenage years? I’m going to want to bond to those people who also find satisfaction in doing those things, who also have a common sense of discernment about what’s good for me, and what’s bad for me.

But if I haven’t figured those things out yet, then the odds of me bonding to people who are going to lead me astray go up dramatically. So it is going to happen. When I get into my teen years, the bond to my parents is going to begin to be replaced by the bond to my peers. Learning how to be myself among my people is going to be job number one. So as a parent, what I’m doing now is coaching my child through that transition, and I am serving more as a sounding board for what’s happening and giving advice.

I am no longer just saying, you will do it my way or else kind of thing. It’s a different level of parenting now when they become into those teenage years. So the first one is those relationships. The second is responsibility. They’re now learning that my actions have consequences not only for me, but for my people.There is a sense of responsibility for my friends and for my friend group, and for learning how to take care of other people.

So I’m looking for a win-win situation more often. I’m looking for a way that it’s not either or, I’ve either got to take care of my friends or I’ve got to take care of me. I got to find a way to take care of myself first and take care of my friends, and make all of this work. And so what I’m doing is I am preparing myself for marriage, because when I get married I’m going to have to find a way to take care of both people. And I’m preparing myself for parenting, where I am definitely going to be taking care of a bigger group than just me. And so that’s responsibility. The responsibility of finding solutions that aren’t just for my own good, but that are for the good of my people. And so those are kind of the simple ways I look at, what are we doing in infant? What are we doing in the child years? What are we doing in the adult years?

(23:00) Stephanie Warner: So can you take a moment and address the parents specifically now that we’ve gone through all of this? As a parent, as somebody who has raised two adult children, do you have any words of wisdom, I guess? Or you have talked to a lot of parents over the years like, I see you’re in this straight.

(23:21) Marcus Warner: I think what happens is that it’s really easy to second guess yourself as a parent. I think the most common thing I’ve heard from this is, I wish I had known it 20 years ago. And all you can do is start where you’re at. So if you are starting with adult kids because that’s where they’re at, then you start with adult kids. And you realize that my job as a parent is different in the adult years than it is when they are little. It’s helpful that if you’re at the grandparent stage and you’re teaching your kids how to parent, giving them advice, you want to make sure they know what the priorities are. And our core priorities in those infant years is, I am taking care of you and I am doing everything that you need.

But I don’t do that in the child years. If I treat my child like an infant, that’s what creates a hover parent. I’m taking care of everything for you, I’m not making you grow any responsibility. Or I can go the other way around, like,okay, you’re a kid now, it’s all on you. And I’m treating them like an adult, no, they’re children. There’s a specific thing that’s supposed to be happening in those child years as I am training them on how to do these things. It’s in the adult years that I give them the responsibilities that are suitable to the adult years. So all of this is learning what is appropriate to the age, and what is not appropriate to the age, and trying to do my best to provide that for my kids.

(25:01) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. And grace, grace to your former self. I have to preach this to myself and others frequently, like Dad said, we start where we’re at. And I wasn’t as mature as I am now, prior in my life. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And five years from now, I’ll look back on who I am right now and be like grace, grace, on that self. And now you pick up where you’re at. There’s hope, and there’s hope for building new skills and helping people with their skills.Yes, hope.

Well, we are pleased to offer this podcast free across the world. Thank you to all of our volunteers and our Trailblazers and our prayer warriors, and everybody who is on the trail with us in whatever capacity. You’re so epic. Thank you for being with us. And we hope we will see you this weekend for our Heart-Focused Discipleship Conference online. Father, any closing thoughts for this episode?

(26:09) Marcus Warner: Parenting is an overwhelming thing. And when you try to put it all into one session particularly, it just is doubly overwhelming. It’s like, oh, this is more than I can remember or think. And this is why we walk in the Spirit. Because moment by moment, and in what do I do in this moment right now, it can help to have these big concepts, but it still boils down to, Father, what do you want me to do in this moment?

What does the Spirit want me to know? And so it kind of comes together. And when it starts to get too big and you’re like, God, I need you to make this smaller for me. Show me what the thing is that I need to know right now. And he’s really good about that. He’s a very excellent parent.

(26:48) Stephanie Warner: A good, good Father. Awesome. Thank you.