The Risk of Raising Children

There are so many ways to mess up kids, it’s a wonder any decent adults are ever produced. My wife and I raised three children, and I am grateful to God that I was unable to ruin them completely by my awkward efforts. I had only the best intentions, but there was a weakness built into me by my parents that had a negative effect on my parenting skills. There were things hidden in my character that worked against perfect parenting.

I have to admit that arrogance was one of my failings as a parent. (For more on this see Confidence versus Arrogance.) So sure was I that I knew how to bring up kids that I wrote an outline for a course I planned to sell called “Raising Perfect Children” or something like that. Understand that my young children were doing quite well at the time, and I was sure it was my stellar parenting that brought them to their well-behaved state. As a high school teacher, I was in daily contact with children who were not as lucky as mine to have such wonderful, talented parents.

I was also an unconscious narcissist. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was that guy who stared with pride at his image in a pool until he got so enamored that he fell in and drowned. Today the term narcissist is applied to people who think they are not just “all that;” we think we are all there is. I was well into my thirties and my children nearly full-grown before my narcissism became known to me. When I discovered it (or it was revealed to me), I realized that it had caused me to live as if I were the only person on earth who mattered. My desires, my feelings, my opinions were the only thing I cared about. It’s not that I ignored other people’s needs; I simply didn’t realize other people had needs or that I was somehow responsible for how my behavior might affect them.

To say I lacked compassion would be an understatement. Couple this with the fact that I had been brought up in a house where it was imperative to be right about everything – not just to be right but to insist that others acknowledged your right-ness. To establish our right-ness, we would engage in verbal battles over everything. I learned from my wife some years later that this was called arguing; I thought of it as surviving. I can barely imagine what this toxic character that was me looked like to my children. Remember, I had no clue that I was messed up as long as I got my way. My wife and kids soon learned to let me. Voila: perfect marriage and children.

After our house became the empty nest, my wife screwed up the courage to tell me what she really thought of me. Ouch! My adult children began to reveal how difficult it was to live in our home and to survive to become decent people. Ouch again! My mother confessed to me about that time that she wanted forgiveness for being such a bad mother. She explained that she never had a caring parent, so she was ill equipped to be one herself. I am not blaming my parents for anything. I am simply trying to demonstrate how it is we become the type of parents we become.

As I said in the opening, my children have turned out quite well; not perfect but way better than they might have given my failures as a parent. This is God’s grace in action. My exposure to thousands of other children teaches me that not all are so fortunate. I have seen the unfortunate results of the doting parent/spoiled child situation. I have witnessed too many children run off the rails in rebellion against parents who were too restrictive. I have seen what happens to a needy boy or girl who goes looking for the love and affirmation that was not available from a neglectful parent. There are just so many ways to get it wrong.

I was about to say there should be some training and a license required to raise offspring, but I don’t really want the government getting into the business of raising kids; the efforts the state has made by default are mostly disastrous. There are many books written about child-rearing, the best of which are founded on the principles found in the One Book you can trust. The difficulty is that good parenting comes from good parenting; it is generational. Parents must raise their children to honor God and His Word so that the children can become good parents.

If you are raising children right now and doubt your ability to be perfect, mid-course correction is possible. The damage done by less-than-perfect parenting might be undone by repentance and recalibration by parents who learn (sooner than I did) how messed up they are. There is one key: parents must love their children as God loves their children. Not doting on them and spoiling them; not over-protecting and over-restricting them; not letting them run free to become whatever disaster they stumble into. (For more on the freedom parents must allow see “The Perfect Father.”)

God’s love is both binding and freeing. We are bound by love to keep His commandments; we are free to do whatever we like within the bounds of those commandments. When we step outside those bounds, He disciplines us – lovingly bringing us back into line with His will. This is perfect parenting; this is very difficult for messed up people – the only kind of people that exists as far as I know. This can be done. Read your Bible and pray with your kids, tell them you love them, then go out and play with them. It’s still risky, but with God’s help, you can give your kids a fighting chance to be what God wants them to be: perfect.