Homegrown: Cultivating Kids in the Fruit of the SpiritSample

Experiencing Joy

Laugh with your kids. I (Christi) don’t know about you, but if I’m not intentional about it, my time spent with the kids can look more like nagging and telling them no, instead of laughing and celebrating the yes. If your kids ask you to do something, instead of immediately saying, “No,” ask yourself, “Why not?” If you can’t come up with a legitimate reason, let the memory unfold. 

Practice turning your home into a laugh factory, to borrow a phrase from Monsters, Inc., If we don’t create room for our kids to laugh, they’ll learn not to laugh. 

As adults, we tend to suppress joy in our kids for various reasons. Getting our kids ready for bed one night, Christi took our daughter’s soiled diaper (no, it wasn’t a number two) and hit me in the head with it from across the room. It ended in the playroom with me covering my head in fear of it actually coming unwrapped. The laughter filled our house. For the next week, every night we tucked our kids into bed to discover their favorite part of the day was “when mommy hit you with the diaper.” 

The daily grind is real. But let’s be honest—if we’re not laughing, we’re not living. 

Many of us miss joy because we wait for something extraordinary to happen. However, one study looked at people who had experienced unfathomable loss. Without exception, every participant mentioned the mundane moments they remembered most about their loved ones.

Even when you’re frustrated, stressed, and tired, embrace the small moments. Your child’s belly laugh. The way your spouse expresses excitement. Seeing your children embrace in a hug or look out for one another.

Picture yourself sitting around the dinner table twenty-five to thirty years from now with your kids’ family, your grandchildren begging for stories. What you won’t hear from your own kids is how well you kept the kitchen clean, how you successfully had them in bed by 7:30 p.m. every night, or how you taught them never to splash the water out of the bathtub. 

Instead, you’ll hear about Mom and Dad’s diaper fight through the house, the time the whole family got caught in the rain out on a walk and decided to just dance, the time you stayed up past bedtime to play games as a family, the camping trip, the pancake dates, and the leaf piles in the fall.