Proactive Character Training

My husband and I went to a conference a few years ago led by Paul Tripp.  He is a Christian family counselor but had a lot of really good stuff to say. One of the things that stuck with me was that he said he and his wife used to systematically sit down and discuss how to encourage specific character traits in their children.  I liked the idea because it was very proactive…as opposed to just reacting to things as they happen. 

So now my husband and I are sitting down “regularly” (not to be confused with often LOL) and choosing things to work on with our kids.  Just thought I’d throw the idea out there because I really liked it! 

This is a really fabulous idea. I’ve heard it before somewhere. Maybe Dr. Dobson? I think my husband and I have done this informally all along. For example, we’ll discuss how one daughter seems to be angry a lot lately and what can we do to help her overcome that. I really like Tripp’s more methodical method of purposely working on character traits.

I have to say one unintended side benefit of starting to do this is that it has really helped get my spouse and I on the same page about things.  LOL Although we believe very strongly that we are a unit and we work together—we have such opposite personalities that our ideas on how to do stuff just tend to be completely opposite.  So it’s caused us to discuss even smaller situations in terms of how might this help or deter from our overarching goal.