Mon
Dec
31
2007
Lessons from Parenting
A popular contemporary Christian song goes like this:
Lord I want to be just like you
‘cause he wants to be just like me
I want to be a holy example for his
innocent eyes to see (learning from the father)
Help me be a living Bible,
Lord that my little boy can read
I wanna be just like you
‘cause he wants to be like me
This perfectly encapsulates the responsibility I feel as a parent to show my boys the love of Christ. I cannot help but wonder what kind of meaning I am infusing into the word “father” by my example. What mental image is being poured into that all important vocabulary word by my actions? Oh, the power of godly father upon his kids. Lord I beg of you now to break into my life and reveal areas of weakness in my life. Cause me to be the godly man that I must be to show my kids the beauty and joy of following You. I want my kids to know how attractive and wholy other You are. Help me to be the kind of dad that sacrificially, intentionally loves his kids, and cause my kids to love me despite my weakness and sinfulness.
Below are parenting principles as God impresses them on my heart.
- Don’t appeal to pride for obedience. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity – that is, by Pride.
- Don’t let selfishness dictate discipline. Inconvenience to self is not a reason to discipline. Is the heart sinful when your child is inconveniencing you? Is your anger in proportion to the degree to which you are inconvenienced?
- Create an attitude of dependency and receiving. The opposite of appealing to pride is appealing to our sense of dependency. The best way to practically do this is to pray and ask Jesus to help us in our weakness.
- Punish with consistent forms: Don’t capitalize on bad behavior to punish with unlikable tasks. Examples of this might be, Caleb doesn’t like to get ready for bed. It is getting late and parents are dreading putting him to bed because it means fighting the will. Caleb acts up and disobeys. Mom and Dad’s punishment is you now have to “go to bed.” The root problem with this kind of parenting is confusing consequences for sin with lame things in life. The child may reason (and rightly so because he is being trained this way), If I am bad, the consequence I will receive is exactly what is going to happen anyway, even if I am good. Caleb will eventually deduce that me sending him to bed is my laziness in discipline trying to take shortcuts by killing two birds with one stone.
- Monitor with dependent vigilance what parental techniques are reaching the heart (i.e. when does it look like my kids are really listening). Monitor the environments that these rare opportunities present themselves and then work like crazy to reproduce them.
- Anger is a sure fire way of closing down communication channels and addressing the heart. Anger can be effective at modifying behavior, which is why it is so dangerous as a parent. It is so important to monitor the heart.
- Children are not impressed with daddy’s accomplishments. Children are impressed when daddy cares for his kids. It is so refreshing that my kids don’t care what I do. They only care that I love them. Incredible. I wish I were more like them.
- Monitoring friends is a crucial role as a parent. Intervention seems to be most important when my kids look up to and respect someone with ungodly character. Interaction with ungodliness is inevitable and necessary. However, when my kids begin respecting someone who is ungodly, that is when I must ring the alarm!
