What Kind of Parents Do Children Need?

by Glenn T. Stanton

Part 2 of intentional fatherhood series: Taking parental inventory regarding the shape of my child.

Children need parents who are crazy about them, parents who get involved in their lives on a daily basis--when it's easy and when it's hard. Parents are participants with God in creating and maturing new human beings. They should be intentional about the kinds of human beings they're helping God produce.

Parents should have good answers to the following questions:

• What do I want my child to understand about God?
• What do I want my child to believe about himself or herself?
• What personal qualities do I want my child to value most highly?
• How does my child know I believe in and love him or her?
• Does my child get that message?
• Do I love my child by giving him or her my time?
• Do I teach my child by example what it means to love Christ in daily life?
• How do I want my child to view work? How am I teaching that and is he or she getting it?
• What kinds of books do I want to expose my child to (from the earliest ages)?
• What do I want my child to know about the purpose in life?
• Does my child know what does or does not disappoint me about his or her performance or behavior? (And parent, you must ask if these are fair and worthy expectations.)
• Does my child know what's most important to me?

Some parenting books try to provide answers to questions like these. But children aren't sugar cookies cut into perfect shapes with a mold. Each one is shaped by God's hand, and He makes you the assistant baker, so you have to answer these questions for yourself.

While books can be helpful, a great way to help develop your own answers to these questions is to talk with the parents around you whom you respect for the job they are doing with their children. Have your Sunday school class, Bible study, or book or play group discuss those questions sometime, and make notes on what you learn.

Which Parenting Style Do You Use?

Parenting isn't easy. Layered on your child's own break-the-mold individuality is your parenting style (and possibly your spouse's conflicting parenting style). For simplicity, we can break down parenting styles into four main types. Which one do you use in raising your child?

Authoritarian Parents

These parents are high on control and rules and low on warmth and emotional interaction with their children. Authoritarian parenting are likely to produce obedient children as long as parents are around. However, when these children are out of their parent's sight, they often engage in reckless behavior; they haven't been allowed to absorb a moral code from their parents, but have had one externally forced upon them. When the opportunity presents itself in later adolescence or early adulthood, they run from this oppression like mice from a cage. Too often, they run into danger.

Buddy Parents

These parents are high on warmth and low on control and rules. They're more like peers than parents. Adolescents from these homes often perceive themselves as equals who don't need to listen to adults. Rather than actually becoming buddies, these children grow to resent their parents for not being parents. Unfortunately, this pattern is represented by a growing number of parents, and their children are growing up with remarkable issues of insecurity, anger, lack of moral code, and lack of direction.

Laissez-Faire Parents

These parents--being low on warmth and low on control—are the extreme of nonparents. They let kids make their own rules and offer no correction in the face of troubling behavior and they show no real emotional concern for their children. Obviously, this is not good. Often these kids become very assertive because they realize they have to be. Their parents aren't going to make a way for them. But this assertiveness is typically very antisocial, expressed in gang violence for boys and in early child-bearing for girls. Their parents don't affirm them, so they have to tell the world they matter. Guns and babies are how they do it.

Authoritative Parents

High levels of both emotional warmth and disciplinary direction mark this style of parenting. A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that this parenting style is the most effective deterrent to adolescent risk behavior, even above the mere presence of a parent in the home at key times.¹ These kids develop two important things that they take with them into their later years. One is the security of knowing that they're loved and someone care about what they do. The other is that the children develop and internal moral compass that they carry with them at all times, because their parents haven't rigidly forced a long list of rules, but rather have consistently trained their children in some nonnegotiable general principles and helped them understand why these matter.

This last style most closely reflects the character of God, who expects that we live holy and obedient lives and extends endless and loving grace when we blow it.

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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