This post was brought to you by Jefferson Dental. All opinions are mine.

Parenting small children in the summer is tough! But there are moments when you feel like you're winning. And I love it when those moments happen! My favorite parenting win moments are when you see a child adopt a routine that you've been trying to get them to take on. When your child does something you remind them to do every day, without you haven't to remind them, you just swell up with pride. One of the hardest routines to get a child to do, is to establish a back-to-school routine after summer. Eating breakfast, is one of those routines.  Sleeping 9 hours a night is another one. But those routines pay immediate dividends in the mind of a child, beacuse they can feel the results, from good food, and good sleep.

One thing kids don't typically do daily without reminders, is brushing their teeth. Why? Because it's can be a boring task, that doesn't give immediate results. In fact, sometimes the results can be temporary discomfort if your gums aren't healthy, or you're brushing too hard. But, brushing teeth twice daily offers incredible long term results! Unfortunately kids won't acknowledge these results until they start feeling tooth pain, or see the dentist for reasons they could have avoided. I remember the pains of tooth cavities as a kid. But now, we do our best to try and instill in our kids a daily routine of teeth-brushing. My friends over at Jefferson Dental put together this great info. graphic that helps parents realize just how easy and crucial establishing a back-to-school routine is:

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Have you ever been told that parenting a child, “takes a village” to raise them? Stop and think…who is in your village? Do you want your village raising your child? Are you willing to take the bad with the good? I struggle with this regularly.

We raise our young boys, 3 of them, in a bedroom community full of other young families.  I work in a church full of young families, with many children. I would be hard pressed to count how many times I’ve heard the phrase “it takes a village” when referring to raising a child. The old adage “it takes a village” assumes your child is being raised by a large number of people, that have your child’s best interest in mind.  I’m fortunate to have neighbors in their 70’s who raised kids 45 years ago. They look out for our kids when they are playing outside, and they even watch out for my wife and chickens when I’m not around. I hear story after story, from my Vietnam veteran neighbor, of the days of old, when kids acted right, because everyone held everyone else’s kids accountable. I can see where the village-raising mentality came from.  It’s a nice theory. With the “it takes a village approach” raising another child is just as important as raising your own. “Things have changed,” he says.

He’s right. Things have changed. Even in my community, a pretty close-knit one, I have a hard time relying on anyone else to help raise my children. My generation of parents really confuses me. It seems that the overwhelming majority are very protective of their child’s spirit, which is a good thing. But that comes with a heavy price-tag; the spirit of the other children they are around.  I’ve noticed that I’m living in a dog-eat-dog world of competitive child-rearing. This type of parenting isn’t conducive to the “it takes a village” approach. The conflict takes place when there’s an incident between two kids from two different families, and both sets of parents don’t witness it first hand. Since they aren’t both there to witness the “incident” all they have to go by is a one-sided, 2nd hand account, from their own child and maybe a sibling. Most parents aren’t interested in getting an unbiased, neutral witnesses’ version of the story, so they take their child’s account as a flawless one. This is why it’s so common to see disagreements break out between kids, parents, and other authorities.

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