6 lessons learned from raising 6 kids

My baby turned 18 today!

I woke up this morning and my first thought was “I don’t have any more minor children.” This was both sad and also a huge relief. One of my biggest concerns when my kids were little was who would take care of them if Mark and I both died. Well, thank goodness that never happened, and now I can cross that off my list of worries in my life. 

My next thought was that I wanted to write a blog post about some of the lessons I’ve learned from raising 6 kids that I think might resonate with other parents. Other than the first one, these are in no particular order. This was just me being slightly sentimental and writing down the first ideas that came to mind. Grammarly says some of it is incorrect, but I believe done is better than perfect so here goes…

 One – God is never more than a prayer away. 

I learned this one about my third or fourth day of parenthood when I was a hot mess. I’ve always been at good praying, but when I became I mom I needed help in a way that I never had before. I was really clueless about what it meant to be a mom. 

I think my first prayer as a mom was about nursing my baby. I thought nursing was going to be so easy and natural. As I soon found out, it’s natural but it sure isn’t easy, at least it never was for me! Even by the time I got to number 6 I had mind-altering levels of pain for about the first 5 to 7 weeks of nursing, but I was determined to keep at it. 

With my first,  I didn’t know my breastmilk wouldn’t come in for about four days and my baby was crying all the time. I remember saying that first prayer, and then my mom and sister showing up on my doorstep. To their surprise, I immediately broke down in tears. Their arrival didn’t help my milk come in, but it was a huge relief to see them there and know that I was going to have some help for the next few days. At that moment they were the answer to my prayer for help, like living angels sent straight from Heaven. The next day my milk came in and my contented baby slept for seven hours. And I just let him in spite of all advice to the contrary.

I’ve said an untold number of mom prayers since then and I still say them every day for my kids and for me as their mom. Help always comes from those prayers, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in small ways. I’ve had help and reassurance come in many forms. Whether it was my mom and sister showing up on my doorstep when I desperately needed them, or the lyrics to a Hilary Duff song playing on the radio at the exact right moment. Here are the lyrics I heard one day when my mom heart was weighed down with worry…

… So I won't give up, no I won't break down

Sooner than it seems life turns around

And I will be strong even if it all goes wrong

When I'm standing in the dark I'll still believe

Someone's watching over me…

Hilary Duff someone’s Watching Over Me

I could go on with many examples of answered prayers and tender mercies, but for now I’ll just say that belief that I formed in my first week of parenting has served me now for 30 years. I know that not everyone believes in prayer or feels that they receive clear answers to prayer, but I think all moms have a mother’s instinct that they can follow. A friend told me early on that if you think something is wrong it probably is. That thought has also served me well with kids of all ages.

Two- Maintain the relationship with your kids at all costs. 

I’ve always felt it is so important to maintain the relationship and connection with my kids no matter what. If you lose the relationship you lose the opportunity to influence them, and you teach them that love is conditional on good behavior. 

There will come a time when they can do whatever they want, but our role up until then is to teach them while they grow and be patient with the process. The truth is we are both growing and learning and I’m not perfect by any means either. 

Choosing to love and try to understand them no matter what will keep the relationship intact until your kids are grown, and then they will become some of your best friends.

That leads me to number 3…

Three -Expect the unexpected. 

No matter how well you’ve raised your kids and taught them, they are their own people and they are going to make mistakes and bad choices and just do stuff you don’t expect sometimes. Literally no one gets through life without learning from their own experiences, and sometimes we learn through making unwise choices.

It’s been said that good judgment depends mostly on experience, and experience usually comes from poor judgment. 

So, for example, when the police call you and say that your son strapped himself to an office chair with duct tape and rolled down the side of a big hill in your neighborhood, just try to stay calm and know that you’ll laugh about it later. 😳😂😊 Or as Marie Osmond says, Might as well laugh about it now.

Not all mistakes and bad choices are things you can laugh about, but I do know that criticizing, condeming and coming down too hard on kids doesn’t usually solve problems or help them change their behavior. Patience, prayer and loving communication are the best ways I’ve found to help kids overcome their problems. Trust me, I only know this because there were far too many times I freaked out when the unexpected happened along the way of raising our kids.

Four-Teach your kids to be best friends. 

Something I noticed early on in my adult life was that more and more of our social time was spent with my husband and his siblings and less with friends. We had friends, and we still do, but our sibling relationships have been a constant throughout our lives. Friends come and go, but sibling relationships are forever and they can be one of the biggest sources of support when kids are grown.

One main ways we encouraged our kid’s friendships was by telling them that we wanted them to always include their siblings when friends came over to play. If they didn’t want to play with their siblings when friends came over, then the friends couldn’t come over. We’d always say that friends were not more important than siblings and their feelings. We also pointed out to them that most of the time we spend time with our siblings and not friends as grown-ups.

Of course there are going to be some sibling relationships that are closer than others, but doing your best to help them nurture their relationships while they are young will be a blessing to them when they are grown.

In our family we have a family group chat that never seems to stop, and it brings me so much joy to see my kids sharing their lives and laughing together as grown-ups.

Five - I probably needed all those timeouts more than my kids did. 

Oh man, if I could go back in time and start giving myself a time-out when things got out of control around the house, I totally think that’s what I would’ve done to give me a few minutes to calm down and think things through.

Usually when I was putting my kids in timeout, it was from a sense that I was losing my cool with them as much as anything. I thought it was the kids being crazy that was making me crazy, but I’ve come to learn that it was my job as a mom to stay calm and teach them. Kids really don’t know how to stay calm and solve problems, so anytime we can model that for them it will probably help more than sending them to a timeout where they are probably not going to sit and think about what they did wrong.

Going back to number one on this list, there were definitely times that while the kids were in timeout I was in my room praying for guidance and help to be calm.

If I make being a mom sound like it was crazy stressful for me, the truth is that sometimes it was. Now I know that was because of how I was thinking about the kids and their behaviors, but back then I thought it was just the kids driving me crazy. (See my previous post about this here.)

Six - Look for the good and emphasize the positive. 

The crazy moments and behaviors of growing kids can really push our buttons and get our attention, but the truth is that kids spend the majority of the day on track and being good.

I feel like I did OK with this, but if I had it to do all over again, I would look for even more ways to praise the good things my kids did and all their many efforts to learn and grow. The encouragement and support we give our kids as parents throughout their lives will do more to build character and happy kids than any form of discipline, no matter how good it may be. If that makes you feel a little bad that you haven’t done well with this, remember that it is never too early and never too late to improve and become more of the parent you want to be.

It has been and still is, the joy and honor of my life, and my biggest learning experience, to be a mom to a big family. I heard once that if you have six kids you are in the top 1% of parents in the United States. Sometimes I used that as an excuse for not doing my best parenting because I figured I was in uncharted territory lol. But I also used that information to let me know that I needed to give myself and my kids a whole lot of grace while we were all growing and learning through it all. As my dad would say, we all need to cut each other maximum slack while we are sharing this earth life together.

No matter how many kids you have, parenting is the best school of life and teaches you how to love and serve like nothing else can. And you are always their parent no matter how old they get, so it is never too late to get better and improve your parenting and your parent-child relationships. If there are things you never said or did that you wanted to, I encourage you to do and say them now if at all possible. And if you have a parent that you’d like to improve your relationship with, don’t wait. You can always choose to show up in a loving way even if your parents have let you down in some way.

Oh and by the way, if you’re worried that when they grow up you’ll never see them, take it from my mother-in-law who is a mother to nine kids…

They never leave, they just come back and bring more with them! (As evidenced by the picture below. There is less than 10 years between the picture at the top and this one.)

On a lighter note, I want you all to know that every one of our kids eventually learned to use the bathroom, drive safely, and even do their own laundry!

And finally in the words of Kenny Chesney from the song Don’t Blink…

Don’t blink, you just might miss your babies growing like mine did…life goes faster than you think…so don’t blink…

I won’t write the rest of the lyrics because you will all cry, seriously you will. If you don’t believe me you’ll just have to listen to the song. ;)

Please comment below if you want to share some of your parenting lessons so we can all learn from each other. And if you liked this post I’d love it if you’d share it using the sharing links and/or subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss an update.

Hang in there, mommas, you’re doing great!

XOXO

Rachel