Knowing Your Family’s Mission

If you missed the first installment, I’m doing a short series on “Parenting Your Child’s Story.” Today we’re thinking about goals, vision, mission. That begins with a question that can be stated several ways.

What do you want for your children? (What do you want them to ‘be’ when they grow up? (Stop and think about it before reading on.)
In preparing last week’s talk, I discovered a blog on the New York Times website that stated,
“The goal of parenting is simple — to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids.”

That really made me stop and think — I had just been praying protection for our daughter’s health as she studies for 9 weeks in India. Of course I want happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids.
But then I realized that with four children on any given day, one of them will be unhappy, one of them might be unhealthy, and another may feel ill-adjusted. What does “well-adjusted” mean anyway? At least for me, I can’t use that goal of parenting because I would feel like a failure everyday.

Your mission also must fit your unique family story. So what is your family like? If you have four children, it’s probably not very useful to try to do everything just the way your next-door neighbor with one child does it, even if you wish you could. A single-parent home will raise children differently than a two-parent home, needing others from the community to help more. A two-parent home where both parents work 10-hour jobs is going to look different than one where one stays home. So PLEASE, parents, can we stop comparing and contrasting ourselves favorably or unfavorably with others and join together in our God-created mission?

Here are a few other thoughts about how to create a vision statement, mission statement, and goals.
The vision statement is usually a description of what you see, so it’s stated with nouns and adjectives:
“happy, healthy, well-adjusted children” is a vision.
“wise, compassionate, kingdom servants” is another example.
What’s yours?

The mission statement tells how you will accomplish the vision. This is where your unique family story comes in.
“by educating them in the best private schools, by being involved in the local church, by teaching them Scripture, having family meals, playing sports etc etc…those are just a few of the many ways we accomplish the mission statement.

One last thought — the most important thing we must know as parents is our own mission. What do you see as your life calling and purpose? What do you value? What story forms the center of your life? How do you view yourself? How do you view God? The answers to these questions are what our children are most likely to ‘catch’ and live.

Want to do some specific work on your mission statement? Check out the Simple Mom blog that will guide you through it.