How can we help our sons become loving husbands?
No, let me rephrase that: As mothers, how can we help our sons become loving husbands?
The responsibility of turning these little people into functional big people is the heaviest weight I’ve experienced on my own soul. I am not raising three little boys. I am helping to shape three grown men.
Somehow in the day-in-and-day-out chaos of life and love and loss I’m expected to churn out someone’s loving, patient, hard-working husband.
Why don’t you just sign me up for the Olympics while you’re at it?
To make matters worse, I believe that fathers have the greatest influence on who their sons become. So where does that leave us, as mothers? What power do we really have to help our sons become loving husbands?
“The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
I have seen this quote flitting around the internet for years. I don’t know who said it but I know it hits me in the pit of my stomach like only truth can.
And as I have thought long and hard on how I affect who my boys become, I have decided that the best thing I can do for them is along the same lines.
The greatest thing a mother can do for her children is to love their father.
Our sons are likely to model the behavior of their fathers one day. So what can we do? How do we make good husbands of our sons? Heck, how do we make good husbands of our husbands? We fight for a healthy marriage.
Instead of fighting against our spouse we fight for them. We fight to understand ourselves better, to understand our husbands better, to understand what it means to be a help-mate and best friend to these imperfect men that we have been blessed to receive.
We study love languages, we get counseling, or we drop pride at our feet because nothing is more important than the ministry of parenthood and the adults we’re creating under our own roof.
When we breed discord into the DNA of daily living we infect the futures of our children.
Our children, and the world, deserve better.
Like the famous quote by Frederick Douglass says, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Let’s build strong men.
Let’s fight for healthy and loving marriages.
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Jessica (Bohemian) Bowman is a jack of all internets and a mother of four. Grace is her middle name (not really) and she’s been married for fourteen years to a guy she really super likes (since she was seventeen!). In 2015 her family is moving to a sensitive country in South Asia to do good work. Because Jesus.
Love this!!! This is so right on and contains so much truth. And it gives me hope because I supercalifragilistically love my husband. 🙂
This actually breaks my heart for my boys. How do we build strong men, husbands and fathers when we are a single mom or if the father is just not there for them?
Heather,You do the best you can with what you got. And you pray, pray, pray!! If there are men in your church that are willing to be an influence in your boy’s lives then you embrace it and let God do the rest. Pray, pray, pray!
This is awesome! Thank you. And yes–had to agree with signing up for the Olympics because i can feel so overwhelmed. But fabulous truths here. Thank you! xo