Work-Life Balance

04 How Busy Working Parents Win Their Children's Hearts

Hello, I’m Elaine Kung, blessings from California, United States. We’re happy to continue on the 4th topic of Work-Life Balance. Today, we're gonna focus on the spiritual influence of joy at home. When we talk about work-life balance, of course, our home is so important, because basically in our life, home, and work, take up all of our time primarily, and there are others, and we'll discuss more in the future.

So today we're gonna focus on the ‘TIMES’, in our work life balance, to have good ‘TIMES’, as spiritual influence, joy at home, and how do we achieve that? I'll use my own family as an example. For a family to have joy at home, it's very important to know our correct priorities, which is, our relationship with God being number one. If we are right with God, then everything will fall into place. Number two, it's our marriage. My relationship with my spouse is the most important, between God and marriage, these are the two greatest gifts that we can give our children, and that's number three in our priority. Then the children will come after a relationship with God, our happy marriage. That way, the two gifts we can give to our children that are most precious would be the best, our relationship with God and our marriage, being good example to our children. And our prayer is our marriage should last longer than the 18 years that our children live in our household.

So, what is our goal for parenting? Helping the children to have happy life? Of course, we want them to be healthy, happy, having good sports, celebration, vacation, and really having good success. And throughout the study, and eventually in the career and in the family. Yes, we want to hit that target for them to have a happy life and a successful, healthy life. Hopefully we are not just tiger parents pushing them.

Now, how do we achieve that? In my experience as a married woman for 35 years, with my children now at age 32 and 30, we learned the most important is actually to win the heart of our children so that I can become a trusted lifelong friend with them. We parents have such benefit that we can spend all our life with our children, because their friends could influence them over time, and yet they could come and go. They may not last for a whole lifetime. We as parents, we have the best opportunity to win the heart of our child by ‘H.E.A.R.T.’, the Heritage of our Christian value that we want to pass down to them. Effective communication at home, however we show our love, we've got to be smart in how to communicate and then living out the six ‘A’s which we’ll go into more detail in a bit.

To Accept them the way they are. Appreciate every bit of their progress, their hard work, and their strength, and even their weakness we accept them and show our Affection and having good body connection and good relationship and setting Authority that we can respect each other and protect each other and willing to Apologize when I’m wrong. And I’ve done quite a bit of that with my children. And there were times they may respond and say, “would you forgive mummy, I just lost my temper, I didn't mean to, would you forgive me?” And they say, “not yet.” Then I will ask again and being having a thick skin. And yet it doesn't hurt our respect for them, because the more we are willing to apologize, the more we can draw closer distance with them, and they actually would have more respect for us and setting a good example for them, and then very important, Amen, as we pray for each other and pray by each other. And we've really enjoyed that.

And then ‘R’ is the role model, how we can set the right tone in our attitude and in our action? And finally, timeless friendship, because we have our whole lives to build that trusted relationship without children. So, let's work on winning the heart of our children, not so much winning them or beating them and competing with them, but winning their heart, so that we can go on a journey together and learn and grow together.

So, throughout these 18 precious years, 6570 days, how do we learn to let go and let God. I'm an engineer, I like to use a graph to represent how over the years, in the blue line, we want the children to grow, to be more mature and independent over time. That's the right way to be. We want them to be independent.

And then over time, as parents, our influence or so-called control on them (though we really shouldn't control them, but more so influence them, and encourage them and be their cheerleader and be their coach) would actually decrease because they are gonna grow and be more independent. Just like how in Psalm 127 reminds us, children are heritage from God. So, it's a gift from God for us to steward to help coach during these 18 years at home and then of course the rest of their life, we continue to build that trusted relationship. So, we learn how to let go and let God.

So, our children, as an example, we are actually from the Confucius family and children and the 75th generation. That's their middle name that we used to name them to follow the generation. We have an older daughter and a younger son. They're in the 30s. We are so blessed being their parents. We also have a daughter in law. So, during Mother’s Day and Father's day, they give us very creative cards, like what they have designed. And they would write us very thoughtful words. And here's one example. I love acrostic, so our children wrote to me and being a very thoughtful and encouraging.

So dear mom, we are blessed by you, love you, and thank God for you are the best mom. And I don't think I’m the best mom, but they encourage me with the B.E.S.T. M.O.M. acrostic that I “Bring good in the family and those around me”. For “Example in my speech, in conduct, my love, faith and purity”, my “soul and spirit for God, our Lord.” I'm a “teacher, thank you for giving to the lord”, “mover and shaker at home, church, work and doer of the Word.” ‘O’ is “obedient servant like Mary”, ‘M’ is “maker of disciples”, and they have scripture for each one of these seven qualities that they so encouraged me with. Thank you to my children.

And then for my husband, my husband doesn't do acrostic, so they actually wrote a very thoughtful letter saying, “dear dad, thank you for being there for us, and the rest of the family in all circumstances and situations. Our admiration for you as a man of God, and leader in our family, deeply rooted in our love for God. We appreciate you and realize how blessed we are to have you as God created you. Thank you for “guiding us in the way we should go”, “following Christ example, as a selfless husband to mom”, “serving as a peacekeeper in our family, church and elsewhere”, and “loving us unconditionally”. We love you very much. And our children are so right, and I fully agree and resonate with what they have written.

So, over the years, as we built trusted lifelong friendship without children, we are grateful and blessed by how they have, given back to us. For example, at our 30th wedding anniversary, they flew in from New York and California to Texas where we live at the time and created this beautiful menu and cook this fancy gourmet meal to celebrate our 30th anniversary. It looks good and it also tastes really good.

So how do we do that? We built this home like this house to demonstrate, like Psalm 127 tells us, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.”

So, over the 30 some years, we built this house of joy at home with the foundation of love and acceptance, the five ‘A’s that we talked about. Appreciation, Acceptance, Affection, Apology, and Amen. Investing in this lifelong account of relationship, like pouring and watering these plants and investing through these five ‘A’s. And then what do we put in the house for decoration?

We use the five languages of love to decorate our interior home. ‘G’ is the gift that we give each other. ‘I’ is our insightful words of affirmation. That's our communication skill, how we say it to be positive, to encourage them instead of criticizing and being negative. ‘F’ is faithful, spending, quality time. That means so much to each other. What do you enjoy most? And we have one on one dating with each other, each of our children to do whatever they enjoy, not for us to nag them and push them. And then the touch to build affection and service. How can we serve each other? So that's our gifts that we give each other.

And then on top of our house is the rooftop that protect us by the right authority, the boundary, respecting each other, and having responsibility to serve one another. And then we have our family tradition which could be a rules or guidelines that we know how to respect and build good relationships. That way, they would obey the boundaries we set. If you have a bad relationship, then they tend to rebel against your boundaries. So that's how we build our joy at home in this house.

And always giving each other, the three ‘R’ blessings. Relationship, it all boils down to having good relationship. Second ‘R’ is Role model like a mirror, looking at ourselves, reflecting. Am I setting the right role model for our children? In our words, in our action, in our attitude? Because the children are very sensitive, they catch everything we do. So, it's not just taught, but also caught. They caught what you do. So, it's not just do, as I say, not what I do. That's not gonna work. So, they're gonna only do what you do as well. And finally, Responsibility, through these three are we help them to grow in our maturity and responsibility. So that would be our purpose and principle in building joy at home. So that's today's focus, spiritual influence, joy at home. See you next time.

Reflections:

1. How is your relationship with the children in your family? Do you feel like friends when you get along?

2. Think about it, is there any way to get them to participate in your work and ministry?

3. What is your goal with regard to the education of your children?