Candace Cameron Bure Shares Relatable Parenting Mistake
By Movieguide® Contributor
On a recent episode of the “Candace Cameron Bure Podcast,” Bure shared her own parenting mistake, and family coaches Dr. Josh and Christi Straub explained the proper response to create “emotional safety” for children’s healthy development.
“When Natasha was young…I would say she probably was 4, and she had eaten chocolate. She had it all over her face,” Bure recalled about her oldest child. “So I said, ‘Natasha, did you eat chocolate?’ and she said, ‘No,’ and so I said Natasha, ‘Did you eat chocolate?’ ‘No,’ and this was kind of like cute at the start and then became defiant because she was just flat out lying to me.”
“That got me upset because she would not admit to eating the chocolate when there was clear evidence on her face,” the Teddy Bear Award winner® and Movieguide® presenter continued. “So here I am, still a very young mom, and we got into this battle and I was like how — I’m an adult, and I cannot win this argument with a 4-year-old who’s flat out lying to my face. That made me so angry and then I started going what am I supposed to do?”
Bure mentally flipped through all the parenting books she read, trying to find out what she should do.
“I got so overwhelmed like thinking of all the things that I’m supposed to do, all the advice I’d been given over the years, because whatever I was doing for the last 10 minutes arguing with my 4-year-old wasn’t working,” Bure said. “I got so flustered. I got so angry, and I remember like I flipped my lid, and it became that point of regretful parenting when it was like my face got so in her face with my pointed finger and angry, and it was like, ‘Why won’t you listen to me?”
“Like why won’t you tell Mommy the truth?” Bure continued. “I see it on your face…and when I can step back and look at that, the broad view of it, I’m like you know, how awful is that to have this angry mean mommy face in your face? Like of course, she’s not going to admit it at that point, when I’m pointing and yelling at her because I probably not making her feel safe in that moment but still frustrated that she lied in the first place.”
Dr. Josh pointed out that it’s important to interact with kids on a level in tune with their emotions. He relates a child’s willingness to obey a parent to Christians’ willingness to obey God.
“I think it’s just really important that obedience flows out of feeling loved, and when we feel loved, we want to obey Him…because he first loved us,” he explained. “…and I think we need to remind ourselves of that. I need to remind myself of that.”
“Literally every day…I’m sitting with Him and experiencing his [love]. Because if I don’t experience his love and I don’t get my identity out of his love, I go other places searching for my identity, and I think it’s important as parents. And a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll wrap our identity around how well we think we’re doing as a parent, and so we need to experience that love from the Father first,” he said.
All of the things parents want for their children — a stable mindset, a healthy marriage, a career, faith and other things — are all connected to the “emotional safety” that parents create for their kids.
“I think that…when we see our children emotional[ly] overwhelmed, our ability to help bring them down to a place where they’re thinking straight is what leads to all,” Dr. Josh explained to Bure. “Because then Natasha’s going to come to a place where she realizes, ‘I don’t want to lie to my mom, ‘cause my mom loves me so much and I also know that lying isn’t going get me very far in life,’ right?”
Movieguide® reported on a previous episode with Dr. Josh and Christi Straub:
“If we don’t pay attention to the environment of the home, the world will define that environment for us,” Dr. Josh emphasized.
To do this better, the couple implemented weekly Sunday meetings for their family.
“It felt like as we’ve gotten older and like the pace of life has picked up and people are going different directions, and it was this like weekly check-in, and the question we just ask [our kids] is, ‘What do you need from us this week?’ And that seems really simple, but I think it’s often — that’s the thing that “we all need, like what do you need? And I think, for one, it taught our kids that it’s okay to have needs,” Christi said.
As Bure has now raised three children through high school, she noted there were times that it seemed impossible for her and her teen children to resolve their disagreements.
She said in a clip from her podcast Instagram, “Raise your hand if you’re a parent and you have uttered the words ‘I don’t think we will get through this’ when it comes to your kids 🙈😜…if you’ve said it recently, we are here to tell you, you WILL get through this.”
Bure previously spoke with the Christian Post about how she raised her kids with Biblical values: “The Bible tells us to ‘train up a child in the way they should go and when they are old, they won’t depart from it.’ I believe in intentional parenting. We taught out of the Bible, and I’m grateful to see that I have adult children today who are all following that road and that path, loving the Lord.”
