Raising good children - the toughest role for parents

My husband and I are blessed with two wonderful kids, a girl and a boy.  Our eldest, a girl is now 8 years old and our youngest is a boy, now 3 years old.  Like just any other parents, we wanted the best for our children and we want them to be a godly and responsible individuals someday.  Someone we can be proud of, something we can claim as our greatest achievement as parents.

Raising good children nowadays is a very huge challenge for parents.  One factor in raising good children is discipline but with all the outside influences our children are exposed to, it's really hard to instill in them the discipline that we wanted them to have.

Very young children just like ours can be easily influenced by television (it may be advertisement or shows) and by people surrounding them.  They are just like sponges that absorbs everything that is being fed to them.  What they see, they always tend to believe in.

Knowing these factors influencing our children, somehow, we now have an idea on how to effectively discipline our children.

Regarding television, we try to limit our children's viewing time to two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening and we screen whatever shows they are watching.  But this television rule is effective only whenever we are at home.  During weekdays, they are left to the care of our stay-in house helper and we can't really be 100% sure that she follows what we are instructing her...we just hope she does and from time to time we check on them through telephone.

For the people surrounding our children, for now the most influential is our house helper who takes care of them while we're at work, my daughter's classmates, my children's playmates and of course me and my husband.  Aside from ourselves, we have no total control on the people surrounding our children.  So this is where the real challenge is.

As parents, we are the role model of our children so whatever behavior we are showing them, good or bad,  will always be imitated by them.  It is really hard for us because as we all know, nobody is perfect and that we always have our own flaws.  We know what is right and what is wrong but sometimes we still tend to do what is wrong...human nature?

When we were still single, we may have gotten away with some of our bad behaviors but now that we have children we have to be conscious of what we are doing.  If we want to effectively discipline our kids we should discipline first ourselves.  How can I tell my kids not to bad mouth if what they hear from me are mostly trash...how can I tell them to listen if I don't know how to listen to them...how can I.....how can I...

It's really tough....accepting that our behavior is wrong and try to modify it....it's really tough but for our children's sake, we need to do it.  It's our responsibility not only to our children but to our community and to God.