Inspired by this post, I wanted to reflect on things I’ve learned over the years about parenting so far.

1. Your marriage is most important. What inspired me to write this was ultimately Bryan Caplan’s statement that “you can’t be a good parent and a bad spouse.” Yes and amen. Marriage is God’s design for human flourishing and the context into which children should be born. A good marriage will do more for your kids than any other parenting interventions combined.
2. Be faithful and don’t worry about the rest. All Christian parents yearn for their kids to embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ. But I have found that needlessly worrying about my kids’ eternal destiny to be fruitless because my wife and I are doing everything God has called to do to be faithful parents. The rest is up to Him. If you bring your kids to church every week, if you spend time talking to them about God, if you have a good marriage, if you try your best to live out your Christian faith, if you repent and ask forgiveness when you wrong them…what else can you do?
3. Want to influence your kids? Set the example. How do you influence your co-workers? How do you influence your employees? How do you influence those in your ministry areas? The primary way is by setting the example. Why would influencing our kids be any different? Yes, God does indeed call us to instruct our children (Ephesians 6:1; Deuteronomy 6:4-5). But isn’t instruction without example a ripe environment to turn them off to the faith because of our hypocrisy?
4. Kids just want married parents and to be around them. The only thing kids really want is for their parents to love each other and stay married. Next, they just want to be around them. “What about teenagers? They never want to spend time with me,” you may ask. Well, teenagers are teenagers. Most children 0-11 will still tolerate (nay, desire) their parents being around and doing stuff with them.
5. You’re the parent. Kids shouldn’t run the household. I’m the parent. I set the agenda. Sure, you don’t need to be angry jerk about it and take it out on your kids, but I have never understood parents who don’t insist on their kids obeying them. God commands children to obey (Ephesians 6:1). Moreover, everyone in the family is miserable when beholden to the tantrums, demands, and coercion of their children.
6. Support your kids’ interests. It’s so easy as a parent to try to make your kids conform to your interests or your pre-conceived notion of what is fun, or what they should do with their lives. And there is certainly something to be said about the fact that you will influence their interest (see point #3 above). But sometimes our kids like things we don’t find particularly interesting. Support them any way. It’s a way of showing love and not being selfish ourselves.
7. Anger is hardly ever productive. I can’t really think of a time that was good for my relationship with my kids when I allow anger to take over. Sometimes raising your voice as a parent is appropriate. Raising your voice can shock them out of their disobedience and bring their attention to you. But that’s totally different than disciplining them or yelling at your kids out of anger.
8. Purposefully make their life harder at times. Don’t coddle. Don’t do everything for them. A principle that is helpful here: don’t do for your kids what they can do for themselves. Living in an affluent society, which is obsessed with comfort and convenience, can make our kids soft, lazy, and irresponsible. “Protecting” them from too much discomfort fragilizes them.
9. Don’t do Santa. We told our kids straight up (like when they were 2 or 3) that Santa wasn’t real. It was a nice story, but he wasn’t real. Why? Because I always wanted my kids to know that we would tell them the truth. Our kids should know that if they come to us with a problem or a question, they will always get the truth from us. Not only is lying wrong, but refusing to tell our kids hard truths will not prepare them well for life.
10. Don’t freak out. Have conversations. I’ve found that if you build a solid relationship with your kids, you can just have conversations about stuff and tell them not to do it (if its contrary to our faith or family values). Most of the time, a conversation is sufficient. For example, we watched a movie the other and I told our kids, “There are curse words in this movie. You will hear them: [Insert explitive here]. These are not words that we use in our family because God wants us to honor him and other in our speech. Do not use them.” And most of the time, they don’t. Ok, so there has been an occasional slip-up.