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Parental fear is probably the most common struggle that caring parents have to deal with daily. It makes sense to me because I’m one of those parents. I want our children to have a great life. I also want them to love God with all their hearts, souls, and minds (Matthew 22:37-39).
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I’m aware of the faith-fear tension daily. Some days I worry, and other days, not so much. Typically, my “worry, don’t worry complex” is provoked by their behavior. If they are behaving well, I don’t worry. But if they are not acting well, it would not be a stretch to say that I can project their current failures into the rest of their lives.
To think about how my children can control me so quickly does not speak well about my faith in God. But it should lead me to a good self-analysis question about parental focus:
How you answer that question not only determines your “levels of worry and anxiousness” over your children, but it influences how you respond to them. This issue is especially acute when they are not meeting your expectations.
Why? Expectations Manage Responses.
If trusting God is your characterization during parental situational challenges—even though you may not have perfected your trust in God, you will parent with faith, grace, courage, and joy. If your unmet parental expectations manage your heart, there will be a temptation to succumb to a plethora of parenting traps. Here are six common ones:
One of the overarching expectations that hover over our parenting desires is to have the perfect 6-year-old, 10-year-old, or 15-year-old. Without keeping the end in mind, you could become a thorn in your child’s flesh as you micro-manage the contours of their fluctuating behaviors.
Some people call this helicopter parenting, which is an unfortunate term because it lacks biblical clarity–a clarity that makes it sound better than what it is.
Through a biblical lens, helicopter parenting could be more about selfishness, faithlessness, self-reliance, or fear-based parenting. It also shuns the “unthinkable possibility” that God could be engaging a child in spiritually beneficial ways that appear to fly in the face of your best life now theology. (Sometimes, God uses suffering to mature us.)
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26-27).
If your child becomes an adult who loves God more than he loves himself, or his wife, children, and anyone else, you can rest assured that regardless of what happens to him, he will be okay.
A micro-managing parent will never understand this because their thinking is myopic (2 Peter 1:9). They center their focus on the moment: what is going on with the child right now. There could be several reasons for that kind of heart-motivated parenting.
A gospelized parent is less tense, less stressed, and less angry while more restful in God’s sovereign control of all matters big and small. Rather than trying to iron out all present-day wrinkles in the child’s life, he uses those wrinkles to equip the child for the future.
This kind of worldview reminds me of a long list of parents who have come to me seeking help for their children who were bouncing off the walls at that time. Today, many of those children are God-loving adults.
During the season of parental uncertainty, the parents were in a tizzy. I typically tell a parent like this how God saved me when I was 25 years old. Ten years earlier, I was in jail. What you are seeing in your child should not derail your faith in what God can do.
I’m not saying God will save your child because He does not regenerate every person. Some children do reject God, live a life of rebellion, die, and go to eternal hell. Then other children experience conversion as adults, like me.
Though it’s more pleasant not to consider these truths, we must not bury our collective heads in the sand and play pretend. We live in a fallen world. Some people choose to stay in their fallenness, a truth that does not diminish the goodness of God at all, though it should motivate all parents to reassess their reasons for loving God.
Trying to manage the future outcomes of your children will always backfire. If the temptation to control, smother, dictate, or overly legislate your children’s lives, I appeal to you to reconsider. If you are separating them from the culture where they will spend their adult lives, I also call to you to rethink your parenting methodology.
The little people in your home will only be in your home for a nano-second. They will possibly spend ninety percent of their lives outside of your parental jurisdiction. Equipping them is one of the most useful things you could do as a parent to help them live well in the world that will make up nearly all of their earthly existence.
My friend Willy came from Cameroon a few years ago. He had never been to America, and as a 19-year-old young man, it was overwhelming in many ways. Willy had no preparation for what our Americanized world was offering him. Though he is doing well today, it was a struggle for him to adjust to a country where he was not equipped to live. He was a foreigner in our culture.
The best-case scenario for Willy would have been a season of American culture indoctrination while he was still living in his home country, Cameroon. The good news was how God led him to a good local church that befriended, served, helped, and equipped him with all things about being a Christian in our culture.
Everyone is not as fortunate as Willy. Some parents rear their children in fear-based contexts that perpetuate fear. They identify the taboos in the culture around them, and isolate their children from them without realizing the importance of incrementally (and biblically) introducing them to the culture they will inhabit.
These children grow up socially awkward, culturally disengaged, and evangelistically hindered because of their “sheltered in Cameroon while living in America” childhood. They live with inordinate fears about the culture, borne out of ignorance, poor parenting, and bad theology. Rarely do these adults have unsaved friends.
How sad is that?
Jesus had scores of unsaved friends. Wait a minute! All of His friends were unsaved. Jesus came to an unsaved world to live in it, engage it, and serve it, to convert it (Philippians 2:5-11). His missionary efforts in our culture are a legend. There have been books written about how He lived in the world while not overcome by the world.
The socially-awkward, ill-prepared child cannot be like Jesus that way. He will have to create a holy huddle that is sequestered from the culture while dropping Bible tracts like bread crumbs that hopefully will lead those outside his camp to their church doors. What he can’t do is penetrate his culture with the gospel of Christ.
When I say “introducing your child to the world,” I am not talking about teaching them how to curse, drink beer, watch porn, smoke cigarettes, and do other sin-festive things like what our culture does.
Stay Focused.
I am talking about familiarizing your child with the ways of the world while teaching him how not to imbibe it. Some of the future adult goals for children are not to be (1) surprised, (2) repulsed, or (3) tempted by the culture that they will step into as young adults.
If you don’t teach them how to do this, like a child reaching up to touch the hot stove because he did not know it was hot, your child will be burned by the culture that you so meticulously kept away from him.
Your home is a laboratory. You should be continually stretching (challenging) your children so you can understand them better to teach them more effectively. If you have more than one child, you know very well about their uniqueness, which is why you cannot do cookie-cutter parenting.
For example, to say that alcohol is evil and you’ll go to hell if you drink it is fear-motivated parental ignorance. While you may bind the conscience of one child, and he treats alcohol like a plague all of his life, your next child may not be so motivated. Children need loving instruction, not fear tactics.
Each child needs your time, nurturing, instruction, and biblical clarity. You do this by talking to them, asking them all kinds of questions, while motivating them according to how God has made them (Proverbs 22:6). You discern where each child is spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. You seek to determine their theological awareness and their intuition to pick up on scriptural truths.
With these kinds of assessments, you begin plotting a trajectory (in your mind) that will (1) lead them to the cross and (2) into the culture. Christ came to where we were. He converted us to His way of thinking and told us to go into all the world (Matthew 28:19-20; Luke 24:49).
If you are not already, I appeal to you to think big (future) picture. Stretch your children. Give them opportunities to succeed and fail. Your home is a laboratory where it’s not about passing or failing. It’s a training ground where both passing and failing are opportunities to put on Christ.
If your child succeeds, you will want to discern any self-righteous or arrogant issues. Success is an excellent opportunity to identify, isolate, and affirm humility. The test of prosperity is a beautiful opportunity to parent.
If your child fails, you can encourage him by showing him what went wrong and why it went wrong. You can teach him how to discern and address the heart issues that typically accompany failure, i.e., fear of man, discouragement, or anger.
Failure and success are a picture of their future life. They will win; they will lose. You have a fantastic opportunity to walk them through these things right now while equipping them to live well in the future, in God’s world.
Sheltering is an essential part of parenting. Parents understand this but sheltering, and fear-based protection should never be the beginning and the end of your child’s life. If it is, your children will be culturally confused and spiritually tempted when their time comes to stand without your guidance.
It may seem wise (and convenient) to shelter your children. But if you do, beware: You’ll be hard-pressed to know them the way you need to know them and while you have the opportunity to train them. You will learn your children when the testing comes. It’s better to create those tests while they are with you rather than waiting for them to leave you and they are floundering in their culture.
Bringing the Future Home
One of the ways we have equipped our children for the future is by connecting them with adults. They have been socializing with adults ever since they could socialize. We understood how we had less than two decades to instruct them and how they would possibly have 70+ plus years in an adult world, so we strategically and appropriately gave them a few adults to play with while they were young.
Like all children, they naturally gravitated to their kind: other kids. Like fish to water, they have always loved other children. This characteristic with children is where we had to be intentional by connecting them with older, bigger, and wiser people. Small groups in the local church have always been a good and safe place for this kind of adult training. Hospitality in the home is also an excellent context.
Getting “adult reps” while they are young is a good idea.
I hope that you will ask the Spirit to illuminate your mind with some practical ways you can prepare your child to live well in his future life. Parenting is hard work. Duh! This challenge is why your first call to action is to ask God how to proceed. Each situation, family, and child are different.
Though I do not believe what we did is best for you, here are some of the things we have done with our children. These things have worked for us as we’ve tried to live in the grace, wisdom, and courage of preparing our children for the future.
Systematic Theology (ST) – We began teaching our children ST by the time they were four and five years old. Specific theological concepts like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, anthropomorphic expressions, hypostatic union, etc.
Bank Accounts – We set up bank accounts for each of them around five years old. They loved getting the suckers from the bank tellers.
TV Show, Cops – Around eight years old, we watched the TV show Cops with them for a while, teaching them about drugs, alcohol, and other cultural problems, while teaching them the importance of the law and respect for police officers.
Cultural Language – Around eleven/twelve years of age, I began teaching them a theology of language, while introducing them to the culture’s version of the language (cursing). This training also included motivations of the heart.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).