Raising a fear based child

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.. Isaiah 41:10

In one of earlier blogs I posted a you tube video about a woman who was experiencing emotional triggers for many years following the loss of her triplets.  In that video they discussed the danger of living in fear following a tragedy and indirectly raising a fear based child.  A family who experiences a loss of a child runs the risk of over protecting the remaining children and being overly cautious with the activities they engage in not realizing that doing so results in the child growing up to live in fear.  As parents we do not want to instill our life experiences on our children because they may not necessarily have those same experiences.  In other words we cannot assume that just because mom and dad experience the traumatic event of a loss of a child that their surviving children will be equally as traumatized by such an event.

I have read numerous articles on this subject and it seems that every one touches on how protective their parents were of them after the death of a sibling and how they tended to watch the activities they engaged in. As well meaning as this may be over protecting  the remaining children does more harm than it does good.  Which brings me to my point which  is if we are living in fear for the unknown tragedy that might take our remaining children's lives then it might be a good idea to get into a trusted therapeutic relationship where we are free to talk about our fears of losing our remaining children and our anger that this wasn't fair and it wasn't right for this child to have died.

As parents we owe it to our remaining children to see to it that they are raised in such a way where risks are encouraged so they can experience a normal life like their peer group around them are experiencing.

 Life doesn't have to be as bad as you envision it in your nightmares because in the overall scheme of things most of life is good. with an occasional blip in the road. As parents we can use the death of a child as a teaching point with our kids that no matter what happens in this life be it a loss of a child, death of a spouse, loss of a job that Christ Jesus is always there to walk with you and see you through the bumpy patches of life's journey.

My prayer for my son as he prepares for his band tour is that he is able to have an awesome time with his friends and he will store many good memories in his memory bank that will bring a smile to his face as life goes on.  This should be our prayer for all of our children who experienced the death of a sibling.

I encourage you to watch the  video I posted on my earlier blog about emotional emotional triggers. It does a great job highlighting the need to work through the fear based reactions to grief in order to not raise fear based children.  

I have posted a very brief 4 minute video that  talks about how not to raise a fear based child in a very humorous manner.