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MUST-READ: Guest post: Purposeful parenting today

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The following post is a guest post from my friend Andrew.

Purposeful Parenting in Today’s World

Bob drives his bright red sports car 140 kilometres per hour on the highway and is pulled over by a police officer.  The officer gives Bob a:

  1. friendly greeting
  2. cookie
  3. speeding ticket

Susan prefers sleeping late to showing up at work on time.  After arriving at the office two to three hours late for two weeks in a row, Susan’s boss tells her to:

  1. get to bed a little earlier
  2. take some vacation time to rest up
  3. look for another job

This reality check comes from an article on parenting by Dr. Bill Maier from Focus on the Family.  It shows in a humorous way how real life consequences will catch up with your child sooner or later (the answer to both questions is number 3, of course).

Now here are a couple of my own:

Your son starts university and soon realizes that one of his professors is a hostile feminist.  The feminist professor:

  1. immediately concedes her radical feminist views and offers to help your son with his studies
  2. tells the class what an asset conservatism and/or Christianity is to our society
  3. publicly humiliates your son when he voices an objection, and makes every effort to fail him

Your daughter enters the workforce.  Her colleagues say things like:

  1. how I can become a Christian just like you?
  2. maybe we could start a Bible study together
  3. are you for real – do you actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead

Are your children going to be able to handle this?

Let me start off with some general principles that I think you will find useful for parenting in general.  Then in the second half of this post I want to share some more ideas that will help you be more purposeful in the formation of your child and help them prepare for what life will throw at them – ideas that I hope will help you to address the last two scenarios above.

Your children need you to be their parent, not their friend

Children need and want their parents to lay down the rules, to set boundaries, and to give them guidance.  They really need to know where they stand.  While they have friends elsewhere, they don’t get parenting from anywhere else.  Your children don’t have to like you, but they have to respect and obey you.  When you make the rules clear and consistent and your children choose to disobey them, then the punishment is their choice rather than your infliction.  This should really be a separate point, but don’t be afraid to discipline your children.  This will help them in the long run.

Your children respect your authority and guidance more than you think

Parents tend to underestimate the influence that they have on their children and overestimate the influence that friends have.  Don’t be afraid to teach your children, give them your opinion and set boundaries.

Follow through or your children won’t take you seriously

Children learn quickly, so if you state a consequence you have to be willing to follow through with it.  If you don’t, your words will be empty to them and they will not respect you or listen to you.  If you tell your child that if they hit their sibling one more time you will call off the big trip to the zoo then you have to be willing to do this, so choose your words carefully!

Short term pain, long term gain

This was our motto when our children were infants, and it still is.  Addressing problems immediately will be painful, but they will only become a habit or worse problems down the road if you don’t.  We learned pretty quickly that running to our crying baby every hour during the night would quiet them down and give us instant gratification at a time when we were sleep-deprived, but we also learned that if we suffered the short term pain of letting them cry it out a bit then our baby would learn how to settle themselves and sleep better.

Let boys be boys and girls be girls

Don’t let feminist ideology creep into the way you parent.  It’s healthy for girls to play ‘house’, nurture their dolls, and play dress-up.  And it’s okay for boys to try ‘dangerous’ things, be rambunctious, and open doors for ladies.  Boys and girls are innately different, and that’s okay.

Okay, these are some great general guidelines that have helped us with our parenting so far.  Now for some deeper principles that I hope will prepare your child for life:

Be purposeful with your parenting…have a plan and an end goal in mind

You can’t guarantee how your children will turn out, but if you are purposeful with your parenting and have an end goal rather than just hoping they will turn out okay, there is a good chance you will be successful.  For my wife and I, the end goal is to train our children so that when they come of age we will be able to launch them into life with them being capable of standing on their own two feet (e.g., capable of dealing effectively with the third and fourth situations at the start of this post).  This is our conscious plan.  Children need to be gradually given more and more freedom and responsibility as they demonstrate that they can handle it.  Don’t wait until they are about to leave the nest to give them their freedom because it may be more than they can handle.  You have a relatively small window of opportunity to train your children.  This window decreases with time, so don’t waste it.

Allow your children to fail under controlled circumstances

Failure is a great teacher, so allow your children to fail when they are young.  For example, let them spend some of their hard earned chore money on a cheap toy that will fall apart after the first use.  This will teach them the value of money and give them discretion in spending.  You don’t want them to learn this lesson the hard way later on when they are buying their first house.  Let them go to their math test in grade 10 without having studied because they really wanted to play.  Better to have them learn this lesson now than in univer$ity.

Expose them to scenarios that they will experience later and teach them how to deal with them

Again, in a controlled setting you need to carefully expose your children to what they will encounter in life.  Take them to a university debate between a Christian and an atheist.  Let them hear the arguments, see how the audience reacts, and allow them to feel uncomfortable.  Show them a news article about schoolchildren who were told that they had to send a letter to their government representative with a certain view.  Let your child hear a homosexual activist on the radio.  Supervise them and discuss with them what they have just experienced.  Teach them how to respond in these scenarios.  You won’t be able to shelter them for life, so gradually expose them under controlled conditions and teach them how to deal and respond to what they encounter.

Train yourself, and do it well

Listen, training up your children is your responsibility and no one else’s.  Not only that, but you are the only one that is going to prepare them properly – you can no longer rely on school, church, friend’s parents, etc.  In order to train them to respond to life circumstances and defend their beliefs you are going to have to learn this stuff yourself.  Take the time to read books, listen to lectures/debates, etc.  As a parent I know it is really tough to find the time to do this when you are working full time or are busy with life, but you have to do it.  Don’t let your life get too busy with distractions because otherwise your purposeful parenting plan won’t happen, it requires purposeful daily decisions. What is the point of having children only to lose them to militant atheist, leftist, feminist, homosexual, etc. ideology because you didn’t prepare them properly.

Train your children well

I know I’ve touched on this already, but let me expand a bit.  This is really, really important!  A lot of people around your children are going to teach them bad ideas that are opposite to your own – their school, their friends and the government will all do this.  You need to be purposeful in teaching them moral values and virtues, otherwise they probably won’t learn them.  Training your children is your responsibility.  Be purposeful in teaching your children virtues like loyalty, bravery, chivalry, respect, modesty (especially for girls), and discipline.  Teach them about freedom of speech, religious liberty, chastity, capitalism, free markets, the sanctity of life, post-modern culture, traditional marriage, and abstinence.  Also give them books with characters who portray these things and discuss these things with your children on every occasion (as an aside, don’t let your children rot in front of the trash that is shown on television…rather teach them to love to read books).

Most importantly, as a Christian who believes that Christianity is objectively true, I can’t stress enough how important it is to teach your children about Christianity.  All religions are testable, and our Christian faith can hold its own and can compete well in the marketplace of ideas.  The evidence is very much on our side and we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us.  Having said this, we live in a world that is very hostile to Christianity and you need to teach your children the evidence for their faith.  They need to know the Bible inside-out and backwards, but they also need to know how to defend their faith using other evidence (hint: Christian apologetics; see the Resources section below).  Teaching them how to do this will give them the courage to defend what they believe to be true.  You also need to teach your children about different worldviews and religions, and why they don’t make sense.

I know, this all sounds like a tremendous amount of work, but your child is relying on you and no one else to prepare them for life.  It’s actually easier than you think.  Just start off with a few books.  This is so much more important than teaching them how to be on time, how to drive a car, how to take a math test, how to swim, and all of the other things that you will obviously teach them.  As I said above, you have a relatively small window of opportunity to train your children.  This window decreases with time, so don’t waste it.  For a first step please look at the Resources section below.

And lastly:

Put your marriage first

Make sure that you put your marriage ahead of your parenting.  I am convinced that one of the best things that you can do for your children is to give them the security of a stable family life and to model what a good marriage looks like.  Let them witness husband and wife roles, let them see that you love each other, and let them see you apologize to each other when you get angry or make a mistake.  Don’t get so involved in your children’s life that you neglect your spouse.  If you do this then once your children are out of the house (if your marriage survives that long), you and your spouse won’t know each other anymore.  Parenting in today’s world requires a parenting team, so you need to make sure your team is strong.

UPDATE: This is Wintery Knight. I wanted to include this bit of wisdom from commenter Shalini:

One other important thing is when one parent is disciplining the child, the other parent MUST NOT talk in defense of the child. Parents should always agree on disciplining, ’cause if one of the parents try taking sides with the kid, chances are the kid is going to assume that one parent is good and the other is bad. It doesn’t help the case in anyway!

Andrew liked this comment,  so I thought I would add it to the post.

A few resources:

Parenting

Christian Apologetics

Related posts

Commentary

Does the academic left use rational arguments or intimidation in debates?

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Muddling Towards Maturity has found yet another interesting post for us. This post is by David French, who writes at the National Review.

The full post:

Late yesterday afternoon, I happened to catch a short-but-insightful lecture by one of my favorite Christian apologists, Ravi Zacharias. In the midst of an interesting discussion about the allure of Eastern mysticism in Western culture, he made a fascinating statement (I’m paraphrasing): In the battle of ideas, stigma always beats dogma. In other words, through stigmatization, one can defeat a set of ideas or principles without ever “winning” an argument on the merits.

I was instantly reminded of not just my own experiences in secular higher education, but also the experiences I see and hear every day while defending the rights of students and professors. Why convince when you can browbeat? Why dialogue when you can read entire philosophies out of polite society? That’s not to say there aren’t intense debates on matters of public policy, but all too often we see social conservatism not so much engaged as assaulted.

I fear that we like to comfort ourselves by saying something like, “kids see through this heavy-handed nonsense.” This is simply wishful thinking. Most people don’t like to be labeled as “bigots,” and they often assume that such overwhelming ideological consensus is the product of considered thought. If “everyone” seems to believe something (especially when “everyone” includes all of your professors and other academic authorities), then mustn’t it be true?

Here’s a question for conservative parents and teachers: Are we really equipping young people to face the challenges of college if we teach them arguments? Or should we instead be primarily preparing them to face scorn and hate with inner toughness and good cheer? After all, when a professor calls you a “fascist bastard” for defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, what is he doing if not trying to defeat dogma with stigma?

Below, I’ll give my thoughts on this.

My thoughts on the academic left

First of all, from a practical point of view, never take anything except math, engineering or computer science at the university, unless you are really passionate about some other field. Everything else is so politicized that you may be forced to assent to things you do not believe in order to pass. There is not a shred of open-mindedness or tolerance for other viewpoints in today’s leftist campuses. It’s just fascism all the way.

Secondly, young conservatives and Christians need to get used to staying calm while ideas that they don’t agree with are shouted in their faced in the typical vulgar, abusive manner that secular leftists seem to find so fetching these days. The best way to do that is to watch as many debates as possible in advance and get used to sitting still and disagreeing while someone else explains their point of view.

Thirdly, other points of view are only annoying if you have lousy reasons for your own point of view. If you put the time in learning your arguments and evidence, and the best that could be argued against you from the other side, then there should be no problem. Just repeat what Jay Richards said after his debate with atheistic journalist Christopher Hitchens: “a sneer is not an argument, an insult is not evidence”. Richards has a Ph.D from Princeton University… Hitchens does not.

Fourthly, we need to start making it common knowledge that atheism does not ground morality and that is a worldview that is responsible for at least a hundred million deaths in the last 100 years alone. That point must be made over and over – when someone claims to be an atheist it should be immediately put to them that meaningful morality is not rationally grounded by their worldview. Don’t let them make any moral judgments without challenging them on the foundations of morality.

Example of what students can expect from left-wing fascists on campus

Don Feder has a list of campus violence incidents against conservative speakers in a OneNewsNow article.

Here are a couple of the incidents in his list:

When she attempted to speak at Penn State in 1999, black conservative Star Parker was forced from the stage. Parker described the experience as “very frightening” and said she “feared for my life.” Parker’s hatefulness was her contention that single mothers are better off with jobs than on welfare, based on her own experience.

At Emory University in 2006, David Horowitz gave a lecture as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. To show their outrage at the comparison of radical Islam to fascism, protestors behaved like fascists. A mob of over 300, from groups like Amnesty International, Veterans for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine, waved signs and shouted, “Does George Bush respect anybody’s rights?” and “Why don’t you talk about fascism in America?” mixed with chants of “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, David Horowitz go away!” (They can’t reason. But they sure can rhyme.) “Are we going to talk about who killed JFK?” one protestor demanded. (The Zionist-CIA-Karl Rove-AIG Executives cabal?). Horowitz (who had to be escorted off stage) observed, “This is exactly what the fascists did in Germany in the 1930s.” True, but at least they weren’t hypocrites claiming they were motivated by concern for minority rights.

This is the tolerant, open-minded left. The same tolerant left that brought secular-socialist mass-murdering regimes into power in Russia, Italy and Germany. And they kill millions in many ways. You will never find right-wing advocates of free market capitalism and human rights treating their opponents like this. We don’t take positions based solely on emotions, so there is no need for us to use violence to win an argument.

News

American university gender gap: 57% female, 43% male

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Story here in the Gainesville Sun.(H/T Why Boys Fail)

They focus mostly on the gender gaps in Florida universities, but I think these schools reflect the national situation. Boys are falling behind girls in schools, and in life.

Excerpt:

Women make up 57 percent of college enrollment nationally, according to the most recent federal statistics. In Florida, five of the 11 state universities have female enrollments topping 60 percent.

…Graduation rates support the thought. More than 63 percent of women graduate from UF in four years, compared with 42 percent of men.

I agree with this statement from Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education:

He calls for changing the way in which boys are educated. Boys learn through a more active, hands-on learning style than girls, he said. Mischief-making boys are treated as criminals or sent to special education classes, he said.

“Boys aren’t allowed to be boys today,” he said. “They’re treated as defective girls.”

Does anyone care enough to ask men why they are not motivated? Are there proper schools, teachers and incentives in place to prod men towards responsible manhood?