[BornFreeBaby]

Heather, as always, you rock!

I also heard a veteran homeschooling dad speak recently about having low expectations and high appreciation- for our children and others too. Ofcourse this totally goes against so much of the current mainstream information of having 'high expectaions' so the child will 'live up' to them. But this veteran homeschooler has seen how many Christian parents with 'high expectations' cause so much pain, dissappointment, rifts and disconnected-ness between them and their children, which pushes children away from us and into a subculture that 'accepts them for who they are'. We really do need to lower our expectations for performance based behaviors and increase our love and appreciation of our children as they are, where they are at. So many parents focus on the 'goal' of parenting, of producing an outcome, instead of simply discovering who our children are as individuals with their own God-given gifts and bends.

I have quoted this before, but here is one of my favorite quotes;

'People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, people with great minds and a strong personality rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

L.S. Vygotsky