Parenting Principles Learned the Hard Way

I’ve run my parenting race. My children are grown now, with families of their own, and I’ve made many mistakes raising them. These 9 principles are simply advice from an old man who has walked down many dead-end roads. I’ve turned back, I’m waving my arms and calling out, “Don’t go down that road! It doesn’t go anywhere you want to go.” I hope these principles will keep you from going down those same dead-ends I did.

Say “I love you” with obnoxious frequency.

We are to be like our heavenly Father, and what is He like with His Son? He says, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17)

My father used to call me over all the time and say things like, “I love you and I want you to know that I am very glad you are my son.” I grew up assuming that was normal. As an adult, I’ve met many people who told me their father lived and died and they never once heard him say, “I love you.” They will say, “I know he did love me, he provided for me, he was always there for me, I just never heard him say it.” I’ll ask them if they think it would have made a difference and they usually respond, “It would have made a tremendous difference, I would have loved to hear him say he loved me.”

Use creative actions with spontaneity to create memories.

This world is not our home, heaven is our home, and heaven is a place of joy. It is a delightful place. Why wouldn’t we want to model that here and now? Make the house as fun as it possibly can be.

My granddaughter is an insomniac. They have a hard time getting her to sleep. One evening, after putting her to bed, she woke up. My son told her, ‘Mable, go back to bed.’ After some time, she came back, and they repeated, ‘Mable, go back to bed.’ By midnight, she was out of bed again, and my son said, ‘You have two choices: go back to bed, or put on your coat and we’ll go get pizza right now.'” She is never going to forget that. We can’t do that all the time, but having those surprising moments creates wonderful memories that stay with them. We can make time for that, it is worth prioritizing.

Use fervent prayer with tenacious persistence to convey humility.

Humble people pray and proud people don’t. Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing.” You don’t want your kids to see you as someone who pretends to pray or only ever talks about praying. You can’t fake it for that long.

We did family devotions in our living room every day, we prayed and read the Bible together as a family. When my son left home for college, he went to our red armchair and told me, “I’ve learned more about the Bible sitting in this chair than anywhere else in the world. I’m going to miss my home.”

Use precious time with strategic urgency to minimize regret.

It was just yesterday that I brought my son home from the hospital, but that was 32 and a half years ago. The Bible describes our lives as a vapor. If the entirety of your life is a vapor, how much shorter is your time with your children! Please do what you can to spend time with your children, right now.

My son would often ask, ‘Do you want to play GI Joe with me?’ I would reply, ‘I do, but not right now. I have…’ Eventually, when I had some free time, I decided to play GI Joe with him. He pulled out the bin from under his bed, it had maybe a quarter inch of dust on it. I asked him, “How do you play GI Joe?” He said, “Well, I don’t know Dad, I don’t play GI Joe anymore.” The time for that was over, and I missed it. Was whatever I did every time I said, “not right now” really so important that I couldn’t have taken 20 minutes to play with him?

Use sincere thanksgiving with contentment to teach providence.

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble” (Job 14:1). That’s life. I see some men who believe God is in control, but they don’t live like that. When you get stuck in traffic, don’t get the promotion, don’t make the team, how are you responding? When kids watch their dad respond to disappointment with disgust, they don’t grow up to have thankful hearts. When something bad happens, don’t blame someone else, don’t call it bad luck. You can say, “This is what God has for us, and we are thankful.” Don’t go through life blaming the referee.

One of the best things I did for my children was raising them as Mets fans. They are the worst organization in professional sports. You learn how to suffer when you live and die with the Mets. Teach your kids how to lose.

Listen to your children talk and see if they talk like you.

It’s the most painful thing in the world to hear your children talking to each other with a mean tone or attitude and realize that they learned it from you. When that happens, repent to your children. You can say you recognize they learned it from you, and that you will try to do better. We need to be honest with our kids about where we fall short.

The only thing that helped me in this area was the gospel. In 2005 I read a little orange book called“The Cross Centered Life” by C. J. Mahaney.It helped me see that every aspect of the Christian life is tied to the gospel. It’s almost as if someone took my Bible in the middle of the night and planted gospel verses everywhere. I began to see that the gospel is everything. My children can tell you there was a marked difference after that. Growing deeper in my understanding of the glories of Calvary made all the difference in how I spoke to my children.

 Use joyful hospitality without petty grumbling to demonstrate selflessness.

I get this from 1 Peter 4:9. We love having people at our house, most nights we had someone over when the kids were growing up. Everyone knows where our key is hidden. It’s all fun and games until someone breaks something or doesn’t know when to go home. However, that’s an opportunity to teach your kids a couple of truths. First, this is just stuff. It’s not our stuff. It belongs to the Lord. Second, if our heavenly Father has welcomed us, how can we not then welcome all people?

Hospitality is hard, it requires selflessness. You can tell your children to be selfless, but unless you model it, they won’t listen.

Discipline with faithful consistency to eradicate foolishness.

Tedd Tripp’s book “Shepherding a Child’s Heart” is a classic for Christian parenting. It certainly helped us. We can’t correct our children in anger, “the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). My greatest regret in parenting is disciplining my children while angry. It was without the gospel.

 Particularly with our older children, we tried lots of things that did not work. One thing that did work was when one of my kids spoke to my wife disrespectfully. I had them go to their room and told them they could not go to bed until they wrote a 3-page essay that used scripture about why what they did was unacceptable. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation all counted. It was effective. Their minds had to slow down enough to reflect, “My mother is kind to me, she loves me, and I had no reason to speak to her like that. The Word of God says honor your father and mother…”

Use the practical gospel with application to produce disciples.

We teach our children everything in life. We teach them how to tie their shoes, how to ride a bike, how to drive a car. We need to teach them about the application of the gospel.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). If you never admit to your children that you have sinned, and you never show them your personal need for the blood of Jesus Christ, you won’t show them how the gospel applies in real life. When you sin against your family, and you will, you need to call a family meeting. What if you stopped everything and admitted, “Everybody heard what I just said to your mother. The Bible says that love is not rude. I spoke to her in a rude way. I have sinned against God. I have sinned against your mother. I’ve asked God to forgive me, and I believe He has because there is a promise in the Bible that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us. But, I want to ask for your forgiveness and I want to ask for your mother’s forgiveness. I am going to do my very best, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to never speak to her that way again. Your father needs Jesus. Your father needs the gospel.”

If we never repent in front of our children, we are raising them to be hypocrites. If we want them to be disciples, they need to see us as weak, frail sinners in need of the blood of Jesus Christ.

Before I end, I want to acknowledge that my wife is the best parent in our family. She is the best parent I know. If anything here was helpful, whatever she would have to say would be so much more profound. I admire her more than I admire anyone else on planet Earth. I would be remiss without saying I love her and how thankful I am for her.

This article was adapted from a parenting talk by Ed Moore, used with his permission. Ed Moore is the senior pastor at North Shore Baptist Church in Bayside, New York. He and his wife, Anna, have four children and eight grandchildren.