The Discerning Parent

Blending personal experience and practical advice with wisdom they’ve learned from Ignatian spirituality, Tim and Sue Muldoon, authors of Six Sacred Rules for Families, offer guidance for Catholic parents raising teens and tweens. You’ll gain confidence to help your teen make better decisions, deepen the roots for your parenting, and relate to your teen in a way that reflects the tenacious love of God. The Muldoons draw from their professional experience working with teens and their parents in high schools and colleges—Sue as a counselor and religious educator, Tim as a theologian and professor—to explain how the Ignatian practice of discernment is an excellent tool for the healthy parenting of teens and pre-teens. They share their hard-won wisdom as parents of three to offer you encouragement and practical guidance to: Let your teens know you love them Appreciate their gifts while accepting their limits Put them in touch with those less fortunate Guide them in choosing friends who will care about what’s best for them Appreciate the value of their faith and going to Mass Respect their bodies and make good choices about sex, alcohol, and drugs Think about what really makes them happy Tim and Sue describe discernment as slowing down, listening, being receptive, praying, examining our lives, and sifting the conflicting forces at play around us. In this wise and personal book, they share how Ignatian spirituality and discernment can help us keep a clear-eyed, prayerful perspective on the difficult decisions you and your teens face. The key is to open yourself to God’s presence and discover what he calls you to do. This thoughtful approach shows you how to talk with your children openly about freedom vs. limits, friendships, family time, sexuality, the use and abuse of technology, faith and Catholic practice, recognizing the needs of others, and getting through hard times together. You’ll discover when to be tough and when to be forgiving, when to control and when to give freedom, when to give feedback and when to wait. You will learn the importance of praying for your teens, and the important of praying together as a family. Daily and weekly prayers, devotions, and meditations will guide you as the Muldoons show how this is a time of discernment for you as well as your teens—and create a way for you to move through these challenging years together. The Discerning Parent offers you an opportunity to pause and consider your life and your teen’s in the light of faith.

Parents often feel at a loss with popular culture and how it fits in with their families. They want to love their children well, but it can be overwhelming to navigate the murky waters of television, movies, games, and more that their kids are exposed to every day. Popular culture doesn’t have to be a burden. The Pop Culture Parent equips mothers, fathers, and guardians to build relationships with their children by entering into their popular culture–informed worlds, understanding them biblically, and passing on wisdom. This resource by authors Ted Turnau, E. Stephen Burnett, and Jared Moore, provides Scripture-based, practical help for parents to enjoy the messy gift of popular culture with their kids. By engaging with their children’s interests, parents can explore culture while teaching their children to become missionaries in a post-Christian world. By providing realistic yet biblical encouragement for parents, the coauthors guide readers to engage with popular culture through a gospel lens, helping them teach their kids to understand and answer the challenges raised by popular culture. The Pop Culture Parent helps the next generation of evangelicals move beyond a posture of cultural ignorance to one of cultural engagement, building grace-oriented disciples and cultural missionaries.

Picture respectful, responsible, obedient children who entertain themselves without television or video games, do their own homework, and have impeccable manners. A pie-in-the-sky fantasy? Not so, says family psychologist and bestselling author John Rosemond. Any parent who so desires can grow children who fit that description -- happy, emotionally healthy children who honor their parents and their families with good behavior and do their best in school. In the 1960s, American parents stopped listening to their elders when it came to child rearing and began listening instead to professional experts. Since then, raising children has become fraught with anxiety, stress, and frustration. The solution, says John, lies in raising children according to biblical principles, the same principles that guided parents successfully for hundreds of years. They worked then, and they still work now! Through his nationally syndicated newspaper column and eleven books, John has been helping families raise happy, well-behaved children for more than thirty years. In Parenting by The Book, which John describes as both a "mission and a ministry," he brings parents back to the uncomplicated basics. Herein fi nd practical, Bible-based advice that will help you be the parent you want to be, with children who will be, as the Bible promises, "a delight to your soul" (Pro. 29-17). As a bonus, John also promises to make you laugh along the way.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The late, beloved Rachel Held Evans answers many children's first question about God in this gorgeous picture book, fully realized by her friend Matthew Paul Turner, the bestselling author of When God Made You. Children who are introduced to God, through attending church or having loved ones who speak about God, often have a lot of questions, including this ever-popular one: What is God like? The late Rachel Held Evans loved the Bible and loved showing God’s love through the words and pictures found in that ancient text. Through these pictures from the Bible, children see that God is like a shepherd, God is like a star, God is like a gardener, God is like the wind, and more. God is a comforter and support. And whenever a child is unsure, What Is God Like? encourages young hearts to “think about what makes you feel safe, what makes you feel loved, and what makes you feel brave. That's what God is like.”

Plugged-In Parenting comes at a time when parents find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They want to protect their children from the increasingly violent and sexualized content of movies, TV, the Internet, and music as well as cyberbullying and obsessive cell phone texting. But they fear that simply “laying down the law” will alienate their kids. Can parents stay connected to the media while staying connected to God and to each other? This book makes a powerful case for teaching kids media discernment, but doesn’t stop there. It shows how to use teachable moments, evidence from research and pop culture, Scripture, questions, parental example, and a written family entertainment constitution to uphold biblical standards without damaging the parent-child relationship.

Tim and Sue Muldoon bring a wealth of experience as parents, spiritual guides, and religious educators to this practical book for parents which offers six sacred rules for integrating faith formation into everyday family life. This basic guide to family spirituality not only provides parents with the practical tools they need but also offers the refreshing perspective that faith is not about adding to our to-do lists. Rather, it means doing what we already do with a new attentiveness. Drawing from the treasury of Ignatian spirituality and the breadth of Catholic tradition, the Muldoons present six sacred rules that encourage, stretch, and revitalize family faith¿helping parents give their children basic lessons in learning to pray, deepening love, widening faith, and cultivating a spiritual vision of life.