I know you've had those days... The ones were no one napped or decided to rest so you all just trudged along hoping no one pushed too hard or spoke too harshly so as to set anyone off.

We had gotten home from our only school day of the week, and after a lively back-and-forth at the table between my sons, my eldest hit his little brother. There were tears from both parties and as I navigated the fall out, big sister also tried inputting her thoughts too.

Whew! Thankfully I was able to keep myself peaceful and proceeded to offer sympathy to the littlest while sending the other to his room.

Parenting takes effort.

It also takes a knowledge of purpose and outcome. This is something I have to remind myself often. The purpose of my husband's and I's parenting is to mold our children into the likeness of Christ—and at the same time it's to remove attitudes and actions from our lives that doesn't reflect Christ. It's both and. Not either or. In parenting our children, we also realize that we have to allow God to parent us too.

So.

Back to the arguing and to the tears and to the timeout. The littlest got over his injury quickly and so my task moved to big brother. I inquired why he felt the need to hit him (Lately, I feel like my main communication is to tell my children to talk to one another instead of screaming or hitting.)

He explained that he hadn't wanted to but just felt like he had to. In that moment I remembered an earlier conversation with my daughter about the same thing! How they wanted to do the right thing but couldn't help themselves. In the past I had just quoted Paul in Romans and tried to relay the same sentiment, and although I had been proud about that in the moment, I'm not sure it actually communicated well.

Virtues on recall.

With Biblical Family Virtues floating around in my head I quoted Virtue E: We exercise self-control in our words and actions, even when faced with temptation.

I was able to present it at an easier level (our kids are 6 and under) and talk about temptation and how that leads to sin. And since sister had joined us by then, we talked about ways out of temptation. We discussed how they could tell someone what they were feeling tempted to do, or how they could leave the room.

To be honest, they've seen me leave the room on occasion—when I need to take a breather before approaching a situation or when I just need to get my thoughts together on what is happening in the next room. I had never communicated to them why I did that—but I finally had a tool and a reason to do that.

Astronomical benefits.

That's why we have written Biblical Family Virtues. We saw the need in our family for an easy redirection back to God's Word to deal with attitudes and actions. And although we're currently working on the finishing touches of our course, we have a podcast to communicate the big ideas of each individual virtue.

In closing—you're not in this alone. Parenting with a biblical worldview is hard (especially like days I described above) but the benefits will be astronomical.