Parenting can make you question things you were sure you knew.
One minute, you’re wondering why your child keeps doing the thing you’ve asked them seventeen times not to do.
Why does this child fall apart every time plans change? Why can she remember every lyric to a song but not the three things you just asked her to do? Why does one child need you close when they’re upset while another wants you to please, for the love, stop talking to them?
And then there are the bigger questions that don’t fit neatly into a parenting book:
What happens to children when there’s conflict in the home?
What if a marriage ends?
What about single parenthood or blended families?
What happens when addiction, abuse, chronic illness or grief enter the home?
And what about the ordinary seasons when life doesn’t look anything like we hoped it would?
The advice comes quickly, and it’s often conflicting, depending on the worldview.
It forced me to ask a different question:
Where is this advice actually coming from?
I wanted better answers. Not another list of parenting rules, but an understanding of what was actually happening in our children, what psychology could teach us about it, and where biblical wisdom fit.
Because when we understand what’s happening underneath the behavior, it changes more than how we respond to our children.
It can change how we parent, and what God reveals in us along the way.
That search became personal for me.
Sometimes it was ordinary child behavior that left me scratching my head. But then life threw our family some curveballs that were much bigger than ordinary parenting moments. And suddenly, the advice got complicated.
At one point, I heard versions of: Leave this marriage, and you’ll ruin your child’s childhood.
And later: Stay in this marriage, and you’ll ruin your child’s adulthood.
I remember thinking: Which one is the actual truth?
Sure, I wanted to know what the literature in child psychology and development had to say about children experiencing marital conflict? Divorce? Single parenthood? Blended families? Addiction? Abuse? Chronic illness? Stress?
I also wanted to know what actually helps children thrive when life doesn’t follow the script we had imagined for them.
But as a Christian, there was another question I couldn’t separate from the rest:
Where was God in all of this?
So I started looking. Reading. Studying. Researching. Asking deeper questions.
And the Lord began inviting me into some pretty remarkable places; places I’m now passionate about sharing with other families.
That’s the heart behind Heart Shapers · Legacy Makers.
And it begins with one question.
What’s happening behind the behavior?
Before we decide what to do about a behavior, it helps to understand what’s producing it. Because development holds a lot of answers about emotions, temperament, executive function, relationships, environment, physical needs, and the skills a child needs to develop. But also, the limitations in front of them when they just aren’t there yet (queue music of the Israelites wandering in the desert)
Sometimes the behavior we’re correcting makes considerably more sense when we understand the child producing it.
So here, we don’t begin with: How do I make this stop?
We begin with: What am I actually seeing?
That’s Behind the Behavior.
What do I do with what I’m seeing?
Understanding behavior doesn’t mean excusing everything our children do. We still have to parent. Set boundaries. Teach skills. Correct unhealthy habits. Encourage perspective taking. Prepare them for adulthood. Help them learn how to live alongside other human beings. But I didn’t want to build those decisions entirely on whatever parenting philosophy happens to be popular at the moment.
I wanted to understand what psychology and child development can teach us, and then bring that understanding alongside biblical wisdom.
How does God graciously respond to us as His children?
How did Jesus respond to the actual people standing in front of Him: their fear, grief, impulsivity, anger, pride, confusion, doubt, and failure?
What might the Spirit of Truth be helping us see?
That’s Parenting With Purpose.
It’s also where you’ll see my signature framework: Notice It · Name It · Nurture It.
Notice what’s happening.
Name what may be underneath it.
Then nurture the skill, relationship, character, or growth that needs to come next.
And then there’s another child’s story in the room.
Ours.
Every parent was once a child. We learned what love felt like. We learned what happened when people disagreed. How emotions were handled. What happened when we failed. Whether achievement earned attention. Whether boundaries were respected. Whether apologies happened. How people found their way back to one another after someone got hurt.
Some of what we learned was beautiful. That’s part of our legacy, too.
It’s the Sunday dinners we want our children to remember. The parent who always showed up. The faith handed down to us. The silly traditions, the security, the sacrifices we didn’t fully appreciate until we became parents ourselves. Those are things worth carrying forward.
And then there may be other things we begin to notice in ourselves. Perfectionism. Anger. Anxiety. Performance pressure. Difficulty with boundaries. Approval seeking. Conflict avoidance. Not because everyone had a terrible childhood.
Because everyone had a childhood. And childhood is messy. It’s never perfect.
We all entered adulthood having been shaped by something. And now we’re raising children from everything we’ve experienced, learned, believed, and become. That’s Generational Legacy Work.
It’s the space where we can notice what we want to carry forward, what we might want to do differently, and where God may still be growing, healing, refining, and redeeming us.
That’s what you’ll find here.
I’ve come to believe parenting has this strange way of doing three things at once.
It invites us to understand the child in front of us. That’s Behind the Behavior.
It challenges us to parent that child with wisdom and purpose. That’s Parenting With Purpose.
It draws us back to the Father, who is still shaping us while we shape them. That’s Generational Legacy Work.
You don’t have to start at the beginning. Start with the question you’re asking today.
Why is my child doing this?
What am I supposed to do about it?
Why is this particular part of parenting so hard for me?
We’ll look underneath the behavior. We’ll ask what psychology and development can teach us. We’ll bring it back to biblical wisdom. And we’ll leave room for the possibility that while we’re busy raising our children, God may be doing something in us, too.
Because we’re shaping hearts. We’re building legacies. We’re raising them while He’s still redeeming our stories.
