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Parental fear is the most common struggle that caring parents have to deal with daily when it comes to their children. 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). I’m aware of my faith-fear tension daily. Some days, I worry, and other days, not so much. Typically, it’s their behavior that manipulates my worry, don’t worry tension. 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 our children can control me so quickly does not speak well about my orthodoxy—faith in God—or my orthopraxy: how I live out my faith in God. However, my weakness does lead me to ponder my parental focus, usually with two incisive diagnostic questions: Am I more aware of God’s goodness and faithfulness to me when my child is behaving poorly? Am I more controlled by my unmet expectations for our child? How I answer these questions not only determines my levels of worry and anxiousness over our children but also influences how I respond to them. This issue is especially acute when they are not meeting my expectations. What about you? How would you answer those two questions?
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 regarding your child manage your heart, you will be tempted to succumb to a plethora of parenting traps. Here are six of the more common ones, which I do have some experience with regarding our children.
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 throughout the years. 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 is 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.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his 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 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, his wife, children, or anyone else, you can rest assured that he will be okay regardless of what happens to him. 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 fear-motivated parenting.
The parent is fearful of what the child may become, so he implements authoritarian, smothering control. The parent is lazy and disdains inconveniences, so he legislates behavior. The parent is concerned about his reputation, so he demands unquestioned obedience. 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. 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, 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 isolating them from the culture—where they will spend their adult lives—I call on you to rethink your parenting methodology. The little people in your home will only be in your home for a nano-second. They may spend ninety percent of their lives outside of your parental jurisdiction. Equipping them for the future is one of the most useful things you could do as a parent to help them live well in the world, which will make up nearly all of their earthly existence.
My friend Willy came from Cameroon when he was 19 years old. It was overwhelming in many ways. Willy had no preparation for what our Americanized world was offering him. It was a struggle for him to adjust to a country where he was not equipped to live. He was a foreigner. 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 that God led him to a good local church that befriended, served, helped, and equipped him to live well as a Christian in our American culture.
Everyone is not as fortunate as Willy. Some parents rear their children in fear-based contexts that perpetuate dysfunction. 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 inhabit. These children grow up socially awkward, culturally disengaged, and evangelistically hindered because of their sheltered childhood. They live with inordinate fears about the culture, borne out of ignorance, poor parenting, and bad theology.
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. 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. He’s afraid to, and his parents never equipped him to live in the world.
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. 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 surprised, repulsed, or 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, the culture will burn his hand. The thing you meticulously kept from him will hurt him.
Your home is a laboratory. You should continually stretch and challenge your children so you can understand them better while teaching 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, as he treats alcohol like a plague, your next child may not be so motivated. Children need loving instruction, not fear-laced tactics.
Each child needs your time, nurturing, instruction, and biblical clarity. You do this by talking to them, asking them diverse 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 that will lead them to the cross and 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). You want to do similarly: engage, envision, and equip them to enter the mission field.
If you are not already, I appeal to you to think from an eschatological perspective. 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 emulate Christ. If your child succeeds, you want to discern any self-righteous or self-reliant tendencies. Success is an excellent opportunity to identify, isolate, and affirm humility. It’s the test of prosperity. 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 the heart issues that typically accompany failure, i.e., fear, self-reliance, or perfectionism.
Failure and success are pictures of their future lives. They will win; they will lose. You have a fantastic opportunity to walk them through these outcomes today while equipping them to live well in the future. Sheltering is an essential part of parenting. Parents understand this, but sheltering and fear-based protection should never be the totality of a 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 prudent and convenient to shelter your children. But if you do, beware: You’ll be hard-pressed to know them the way you need to because you never set them up for success or failure. You will learn about your children when the testing comes. It’s better to create those contexts while they are with you rather than waiting for them to leave you, and they will flounder in their culture.
One way we equipped our children for the future was by connecting them with adults. They have always socialized with adults ever since they could walk and talk. We understood that we had less than two decades to instruct them and that they would likely have 70+ years in an adult world, so we strategically and appropriately gave them a few adults to interact with while they were young. Like all children, they naturally gravitated to their kind: other kids. Thus, we had to be intentional by connecting them with older, bigger, and wiser people. Small groups in the local church were good and safe places for this kind of adult training. Hospitality was also an excellent context.
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 their future lives. 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 a few things we did with our children. They are merely suggestive. You must ask the Spirit and a few competent leaders for advice; they know you and your children and should have wise input for things you can do to introduce your children to the world.
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).
