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It was early on a Tuesday morning and my coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. I rubbed my eyes and tried to tune into what one of the dads was saying at our weekly men’s breakfast, Family Man. Rick, one of the guys in my group said, “My friend lets his son have a TV in his room. Recently, he bought him a laptop and he has WIFI so the kid can cruise the web. This weekend, his son had a friend over who is a few years older than his son. When the dad went to check on them he found them perusing porn sites, and the kid’s only nine years old! What should he do?” Sometimes our kids can throw us a curve as we try to raise them with moral guidelines. As Christian parents, we want to pass on lasting values to our kids. To do this, we need a perspective that is transcultural and not simply a product of our culture. We need a perspective that has a long-term view and is not obsessed with a short-term payoff. We need a biblical model, one based on principles that outlast the trendy voices of our current culture. Biblical parenting is more than modifying our children’s behavior. It’s much deeper than that. It’s more than raising compliant, well-mannered kids to be nice. As Christian parents, we are not to simply socialize our children into civil human beings; we are to train them to advance the kingdom of God. It’s not simply about manners and proper decorum in public; it’s about training our children to be conditioned and prepared to take on life’s challenges. Raising moral and prepared kids takes careful, intentional work. It takes more than punishment. It’s more than correcting their behavior. In fact, it’s more than discipline - which introduces the ideas of personal responsibility and choices through consequences as a means of training. To raise moral kids in the new millennium, we need to grow beyond a punishment or discipline orientation. We need to move beyond punishment and discipline to discipleship. That’s right, we are to disciple our kids like Christ discipled His followers. Have you ever thought of parenting as discipleship? I didn’t say discipline, I said discipleship. Don’t worry - you don’t have to wear itchy, baggy, cotton tunics and leather sandals (unless you want to!) Discipleship isn’t just for the first-century Christians walking around the Middle East. Discipleship is for modern, high-tech families who have never seen a camel. Discipleship is an intimate, personal relationship designed for growth and learning through imitation, dialogue and observation. If we are to understand parenting as discipleship, the primary goal of parenting isn’t teaching, it’s modeling. Children are the disciples of their parents, for better or worse. Parents teach by word or example through every interaction they have with their children. Seeing parenting as discipleship helps us get a broader view of our role. Parents who only use punishment or discipline to solve an immediate problem may be teaching their children the wrong lesson. That is, “Change your behavior and I’ll leave you alone.” Discipleship focuses on the mentoring relationship between parent and child. It focuses on what the child learns, not simply changing his or her behavior. The motive of discipline is to have the child obey. The motive of discipleship is to nurture the child toward maturity. Compliance isn’t enough in our culture that chews up and destroys teens and young adults who are not mature. Discipleship is a close relationship that provides a personal example for the child. It concentrates on maturing the child from the inside – out. A focus on discipline generally creates compliant kids, but it rarely produces courageous ones. I am not advocating a permissive style of parenting when I challenge the discipline approach. I am calling us to a more demanding style of parenting – one that requires us to change and grow and provide the example. Discipleship calls on us to set the pace, knowing that our children are most likely to pick up on the values they see lived out in our lives. We can teach them skills, but we need to “show, not tell” when it comes to what we say is important. Consider the contrasts between discipline and discipleship in the following chart: Discipline versus Discipleship
The main point here is: External-focused parenting produces kids who look nice on the outside. If our emphasis as parents has been on the outside, then we should expect to have kids with an external focus. They will have learned from us how to act. They will have picked up from us that doing is more important the being. Note that under the Discipleship column the child AND the parent mature. It’s not all about the growth and behavior of the child. Discipleship considers the moral and spiritual development of every family member, beginning with the parent. If a child, particularly a teenager, sees his parent growing and working on the same issues she is trying to develop in her son (or daughter), he or she will be more open to “values transfer” and less likely to rebel. Why? Because growth is something we do as a family, rather than “growth is changing the kids’ behavior. Some of the most difficult teens I’ve worked with over the years are the ones who play the compliance game and are a product of the Discipline column on the left side of the chart. They look nice on the outside, but it masks an interior that is morally weak and two-faced. They’ve learned how to play the game, but they aren’t prepared for life. They may have their parents faked-out, because they have been studying them for years and know how to work them, but they are also in danger of lying to themselves. They really aren’t prepared to take on life’s challenges, and their parents think they are. We have to be there. We have to show up on the job. If a parent is not available or is emotionally tuned out, or burnt out, that parent is actually contributing to the emergence of an immoral child. A parent may feed and clothe his child, buy her expensive toys, enroll her in lessons and sports, but if he fails to pass on a sense of right and wrong, he is guilty of moral neglect. It’s our job to provide a role model, not a perfect one, but a real one. It’s our job to disciple our kids. Recently, Tim was a guest on our radio broadcast, HomeWord with Jim Burns, where he and Jim discussed, Moving Your Family from Chaos to Connection. To order the audio CD of this two-part discussion, click here. Tim Smith is also a member of HomeWord’s Understanding Your Teenager event speaking team. To find out more about bringing this event to you church, click here.
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