Parenting is A Life Sentence!

It has been said that “parenthood is a life sentence.”  The question that many parents can not seem to resolve is, “How far do I go with my children?”  Some will say, “All the way!”  I echo this response with a simple qualification, “I will go all the way with my children in the right and healthy direction.” 

You love your child!  Loving your child is not difficult because no matter how well or poorly he or she lives; you will likely have a passion for them.  They are part of us, and we can see ourselves in their faces.  They walk like us and talk like us and in many ways our children are the best of us and the worst of us. 

Do I love my child is not be the question you must answer. The real question we must answer is do I respect my children? You see love is my decision; it is an act of my will as the parent. You demonstrate your Love for your children by the life of sacrifice you live that enhances and empowers their lives.  We love our children by creating space for them to grow and develop into adults who are responsible and honest. 

The highest calling of parenthood is to rear our children with an eye toward their future and a clear awareness of their present frailty and need.  I attempted to convey this truth to my children by explaining our role as their parents to them as soon as they were old enough to make sense of the words. 

We said, “We are not your friends, we are your parents.  We love you because we choose to love you.  God gives children to serve the family, not the other way around. You will be under our direct guidance for 18 to 21 years and then you will have to you’re your own decisions and handle the consequences on your own for the next 60 years.  Our job is not to make you happy; it’s to get you ready.” 

I am confident that should more parents think forward about the quality of their children’s life as adults, then their quality of adult life would improve.  I have worked hard to avoid the temptation of fantasizing about the career my children would have, how much money they would make and so on.  I instead have been fixated upon the kind of people they would grow to become, regardless of their chosen career.  Would my children be honest, hard working, sincere, trustworthy, respectable, respectful, learners and ambitious people?

In effect, would my children become people whom I could and will “RESPECT”!  Will my kids make and continue to make healthy, loving and life-giving decisions about how they spend their time, engage relationships and grow?  You see while I control whether or not I love my children, but I have no control over whether or not I respect my children.  Respect is my response to a person who shows himself or herself respectable.

Parents have a relatively short time to prepare children for life as adults. Typically w have about 20 years to get the job done.  Consequently, they have 60 years on their own to live as respect-able adults. Parents who have poured their lives into their children only to see it squandered by bad decisions and even worse associations should feel no shame.  You love your child, and have loved them conspicuously by your investment in them through the years since their birth.

Yet there must be a point of “TFNF”.  You must say to your child, “Thus far and no farther!” The TFNF is not a termination of support; it is the transformation of support.  We must allow our children to grow beyond their need to cling to our pant-legs and skirt-tales.  We still Love our children.  In time we will grow to respect our children’s life.  While this is true, the type of help and support and help must change so that our posterity might find their strength in what Nicolas Berdyaev calls the “Greatest Mystery of Life.” 

In his book, The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev says,

“The greatest mystery of life is that satisfaction is felt not by those who take and make demands, but by those who give and make sacrifices.  In them alone the energy of life does not fail, and this is precisely what is meant my creativeness. Therefore the positive mystery of life is to found in love, in sacrificial, giving, creative love.”  

We must never fail in our love for our children, for in it is the mystery of Life.  Should your child choose to participate in the same legacy, then he or she will experience and perpetuate the Great Mystery of Life with their own children.  Ultimately, rearing children we respect is the greatest gift we can give our grand-children.

Rearing Children The Right Way!

Empowering Parents, Empower Their Children

As a parent of twins soon to be 18, the age of majority, I have learned a few things that have empowered us in the parent-child relationship. 

Leadership and parenting are so closely related to one another that it is only natural to address them together. The truth is that parenting like leadership is rooted in nurture. Nurture is the process of caring for someone or something with purpose and intent to see the one being nurtured develop into self-sufficiency and independence.

Teach children to choose the right path, and when they are older, they will remain upon it. Proverbs 22:6 NLT

There are a couple of important ideas that are submerged in this often quoted passage of scripture.

The first idea is: There is (a) right path.
The challenge with much of the parenting that we do today is we allow our children to make to many important decisions too early in their life: about their friends, how they spend their time, how they gather information and what that source of the information will be. The power of the “path” is found in the simple reality; not all paths lead to the same destination.

It has been suggested that if you liked the way that you were raised (after and honest evaluation) then get your children around your parents. The secret to parenting is to know where it is that you want your children to end up, in other words have a destination in mind. What do you want for you children? The path we choose for them has a destination.

The second idea is: Prepare them for independence
The reality of parenting is that it is a life sentence, a life of joy or some mixture of the two. We must remember as the scripture instructs us that we are preparing our children for the multitude of difficult decisions that they will have to make after as they explore their independence and after they have left our primary care.

In actuality, our children will be under our direct and primary care for some 18-25 years. We hope and pray that they will live to at least 70 years of age, meaning that our children will live more years independent of our care than they did under our care, some 52-45 years. Our primary challenge as parents is to help our children, by training them to make right path choices now in preparation for the time when we will no longer shoulder primary responsibility for them.

Knowing that our challenge is to get them ready to assume the weight of responsibility for their own lives, rather than make them into perfect little people, helps us to discipline our behavior toward them.  Ask yourself, in what ways will my style of parenting prepare my child to make healthy and life-enriching decisions when I am no longer their primary decision maker. 

One essential to remember is that children should serve the interests of larger family, rather than become liabilities. We empower our children by teaching them that they have a key role to play in helping the family be successful.  I remember asking my mother once, "Moma, do you have some money, I want to go to the corner store and get some candy?"  She said, "No!"  I replied, "But, I saw some money on your dresser."  To which she said, "I do have money for groceries, but not for candy."  Her response did not make me happy as a child of 9 or 10 but it made sense to me, because she was teaching me that we have to prioritize how we spend our resources: Time, Talent, Relationships and our Money.

Next Week: Rearing The Adults You Want!