What Does Intentional Fatherhood Look Like?
Part 1 in the intentional fatherhood series: Beyond the material provisions, too many parents are acting as nonparents.
God doesn't give many specific commands directly to parents in Scripture. The most foundational command to parents is in Deuteronomy 6:5-7, where God says, "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them upon your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up" (NIV).
Parents should love God with every part of their being, model that love for their children, and teach their children the commandments of God. But we don't do this by setting aside some special time of instruction cut off from the rest of life. Rather, we accomplish it as an intentionally integrated part of daily home life. Children should learn from their parents that God's commands mean something in real day-to-day life. Our children learn when they hear it and observe it, for the two reinforce one another.
Proverbs 22:6 exhorts parents to "train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" (NIV). Solomon tells us two things here. First, how we train a child today will affect the kind of adult he or she grows into. Second, there is a way a child should go. There's a path that's right for a child and another that's wrong. Parents should instruct their children in the path that is right. To do this, we need to be tuned in to how God made our children so we can know the way they should go. We shouldn't train up a child with a particular temperament and passion to be something God didn't make him or her to be.
Another command is for fathers not to "provoke your children to anger; but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4). Elsewhere, Paul warns fathers not to "exasperate your children, that they may not lose heart" (Colossians 3:21). While Paul doesn't address mothers in these verses, I don't think he's giving moms a pass on exasperating their kids; rather, he recognizes that moms don't seem to struggle as much with this tendency. Parents are to be gracious and patient in teaching their children the ways of God in all of life.
Do you think parents don't exasperate their kids? Tonight, while Jackie was out running some errands, I was giving the kids showers and baths. Jackie called to check on us, and while I had her on the phone, I was giving Sophie directions on finishing her shower. Jackie said, "Glenn, give the girl a break; a child can only process so many directions. Let her be." At the same time, Sophie had a look on her face that screamed, "Give me a break; I can only process so many directions. Let me be." Both were right. I was exasperating my child.
Be Intentional
Each of these commands—train our children and don't exasperate them--has something in common with the others that we don't always readily appreciate. The primary idea about parenting in Scripture is that parents should know where they're going in the job of parenting and how they'll get there. (Cheat sheet: This means raising kids who love God, love others, who seek His holiness, and who seek to expand Christ's kingdom in their lives and the world.) Simplified further, parents should be—in a word—intentional.
Fewer parents are doing this today.
These Children are a New Breed of Orphan
Several years ago, a television documentary and book came out looking at youth in America, drawing a frightening picture of parents in America. The documentary was done by the Public Broadcasting System, and it was called The Lost Children of Rockdale County. It began as a look at a syphilis outbreak in the spring of 1996 in Conyers, Georgia, an affluent suburb of Atlanta. As the crew's investigation unfolded, they found that the heart of the story wasn't the outbreak. It was how more than two hundred upper-middle-class teens contracted the disease.
These kids lived in beautiful homes and had all the material things teenagers could want. But their parents set almost no rules for them. The teens did drugs, drank, and had wild group-sex parties&emdash;all under the apathetic gaze of their parents. Some knew their kids were involved in such behavior and just couldn't muster the parental resolve to do anything, or they were just too busy making money for "stuff" to care. The cluelessness of these well-educated and professionally successful parents was stunning. They showed more intentionality in managing their retirement accounts than their children. The parents almost seemed like good actors playing bone-headed parents; you couldn't imagine real parents being this dense. But they were.
Another picture of parents was presented in a book by Patricia Hersch titled A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence. To research her book, Hersch entered the world of eight "average" middle-class adolescents in a Virginia town and lived among them for three years. She observed that these young people were "a tribe apart," not because they rebelled and separated themselves from the community, but because their parents neglected them--not materially, but parentally. Like the teens of Rockdale County, Georgia, these kids were adrift.
Most troubling is that these children seem to be the norm rather than the exception. More and more children live in urban and suburban versions of Lord of the Flies: stranded in their own neighborhoods, exiled from their parents, left to make up their own rules and to live by their self-created social codes. And the lives they're living aren't pretty.
These children are a new breed of orphan.
- They have biologically connected material-providers, but they don't have emotionally connected parents.
- They don't have mothers and fathers who make them feel like they matter.
- They don't have parents who set protective boundaries or ennobling expectations.
- They don't have parents who are emotionally nurturing or behaviorally directive.
- They don't have parents who strive to richly stock the wardrobe their moral imaginations or deliberately work to develop the architecture of their characters.
- They don't have parents who love them with time and intimacy, rather than merely with stuff.
- They don't have parents who parent, for these are the primary deeds of parents.
Excerpted from My Crazy Imperfect Christian Family by Glenn T. Stanton. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of NavPress. www.navpress.com. All rights reserved.
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