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

One of the most important things 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.

We want to produce children with solid spiritual values—hardworking, disciplined people, hungry for excellence and personal growth, subject to authority, lovers of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, humble, merciful toward others, and capable of relating productively to other people.

Producing this kind of person requires continuous 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 creature grow before us and to know that we have played, in one sense and in a very small 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 it is so important to me that, as we approach fatherhood or motherhood, we equip ourselves with the idea 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 ongoing, like 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, being there with the teachers so they get to know us, see us, and know that there is a father or mother who is concerned about that child; taking them out; setting aside free time to be with them; asking them questions about their day; staying alert to the friendships they have; inviting their friends to the house so they feel free to be there with us and so we can get to know them better; opening our hearts to our children; and letting them see us living life so that, through the example of our lives, they can learn how life is lived.

These are things that urban life has stolen from parents. 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 share, and they live as an extended family. Unfortunately, all of that has often been lost in the urban world, so we have to create those opportunities artificially. The parent 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 many other societies, being a parent is something spontaneous and natural that has already become part of the collective sensibility of the human race, and there are simply established mechanisms that make it easier to be an effective parent. But in the modern, urban, ultra-industrialized world, those opportunities do not arise so easily. We live in a much more atomized, more divided society, with great demands on our time and our emotions, and if we want to be effective 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 seeing how God treats us and 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 great piece of advice—number one, from a completely human perspective—is this: invest time, energy, love, and commitment in your children, and seek in the word of God the means, the source, the standard, and the primary resource that determines which qualities will guide and govern your relationship and your interactions with your children.