Advice to Parents: 1 Lifelong Commitment + 1,000 Interventions = 1 Healthy Child

I believe that one of the most important things for parents is to understand that being a parent is a lifelong commitment, but that it is also an intensive, demanding commitment that requires many, many continuous hours of our lives to be invested in shaping our children’s sensitivity.

If we want to raise children with solid spiritual values—hardworking, disciplined people, with a hunger for excellence and personal growth, submissive to authority, lovers of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, humble, merciful toward others, and capable of relating productively to other people.

To produce this kind of human being requires continual interventions, repeated every day, every week, every month, every year. Being a parent is a mission; it is a job that demands everything from us, and that job also brings great benefits and great rewards. We are blessed to have the privilege of watching that child grow before our eyes and knowing that we have played, in a sense and in a very limited way, a role similar to God’s.

We are instilling values in that life and determining what that life will be and what it will do in the future. That is why, to me, it is so important that, as we approach fatherhood or motherhood, we equip ourselves with the understanding that this is something tremendously serious. It is not a part-time, optional job that we do whenever we feel like it or whenever we have the desire; it is something that must be continually present as a discipline of life: sitting down with our children and sharing experiences, trying to find opportunities to have dinner together or give them a little kiss before they leave for school, or, if we have the opportunity to pick them up from school, spending time with the teachers so that they know us, see us, and know that there is a father or mother who cares about that child; taking them out, setting aside free time to be with them, asking them questions about their day, keeping a watchful eye on the friendships they have, inviting their friends to the house so that they feel free to be there with us and so that we can get to know them better, opening our hearts to our children, letting them see us living life so that they can learn, through the modeling of a life, how life is to be lived.

These are things that urban life has robbed parents of. In more rural, underdeveloped countries, children have many more opportunities to share farm chores with their parents, and at night there is not much to do, so the family is compelled to be together and spend time together, and they live as an extended family. Unfortunately, all of that has often been lost in the urban world, and so we have to create those opportunities artificially. Parents must have a prior vision that this is what is required. In other words, there must be a greater understanding of how to be a parent.

In many other countries and in many other societies, being a parent is something spontaneous and natural that has already entered the collective consciousness of the human race, and there are simply established mechanisms that make it easier to be an effective parent. But in the urban, modern, ultra-industrialized world, those opportunities do not arise so easily. We live in a much more atomized, more disconnected society, with great demands on our time and our emotions, and if we want to be effective as parents, those conditions must be created artificially and must be the result of a previously conceived vision, of an awareness of what is required to be an effective parent.

In fact, I know of no source better suited to instructing us in fatherhood or motherhood than the Word of God. God is the supreme model of fatherhood, and by observing how God treats us, how God disciples us, loves us, disciplines us, confronts us, and instructs us through the Holy Spirit and through His way of working with humanity, we too can learn to be effective fathers or mothers. So my foremost piece of advice, from a completely human perspective, is this: invest time, energy, love, and commitment in your children, and look to the Word of God for the means, the source, the standard, and the primary resource that will determine which qualities guide and govern your relationship and your interactions with your children.