Biblical Wisdom for Modern Parenting (Prov. 22:6): Keep the Long-Term Goals in View

Raise Them Right: Biblical Wisdom for Modern Parenting
“Keep the Long-Term Goal in View"
Proverbs 22:6

INTRODUCTION:
We begin in Proverbs 22:6. Begin with the end in mind. A parent should hold in the forefront of his and her mind a clear vision of the kind of person they want their child to be when the child is thirty years old.

AIM AT THE GOAL:
Instead of parenting with the long range goal in mind of responsible adults, people in secure possession of character, and the like, all too many of today’s parents are focused on short-range goals that lie no more than several months to a year down the road. These short-range goals in question are usually academic in nature - helping their children make perfect scores on weekly spelling tests, and helping them make good grades on their next report cards. So we have to have them in after-school activities so as to increase their extracurricular aptitudes.

We want our three-year old to know his alphabet and basic number facts before his next birthday. Now, does making straight As “train up a child in the way he should go?”

Describe the person you want your child to be when he or she is thirty-years old…

Do you agree with this goal: “We want him to be a member of MENSA, celebrated as one of the most intelligent people in the country; we want him to have already risen to national prominence in his field, to be married to the daughter of the wealthiest couple in town, to be living in a five-thousand square-foot mansion in a gated country-club community, to be the envy of all who meet him and a close friend of and confidant to influential politicians.”

I doubt any of us, any Christian parent, would suggest that’s their aim for the children. Likely, we would say something like this:

“We want her to be a responsible, loving, honest, reliable and compassionate citizen, a devoted wife and mother, and to possess a steadfast love of the Lord.”

Notice that we would probably define our child’s future in terms of character rather than accomplishments. But, does our day-to-day parenting reflect that goal? Is our parenting focused on training up an adult of character? We get caught up in our culture and fail to realize that many of the day-to-day things on which we are spending our parenting energies are actually counterproductive to raising the adult we say we want to raise.

For example, we want our child to be a self-starter, to take the initiative. Yet our day-to-day efforts are teaching the child to depend on our initiative, to stand on our two feet rather than their own two feet. We hate to see our children fail but failure is necessary to eventual success, to be motivated by failure rather than discouraged by it! Too often, our daily efforts prevent our children from experiencing failure. How is he or she to develop a positive attitude in the face of disappointment if we parents always protect him or her from any and all forms of failure?

THE GOAL IS BIBLICAL VALUES:
Proverbs 22:6 - The way referred to in Proverbs 22:6 has nothing to do with worldly achievement - academic, financial, professional, or otherwise. It refers to our children’s walk in life, the manner in which he or she conducts themselves, especially when the chips are down.

We’re talking about values and character - not athletic or academic accomplishments.

Let me ask another question: “Would you rather that your child obtain a degree from a prestigious university but be untrustworthy, deceitful, and/or sexually promiscuous as an adult or that he or she not even go to college but be an adult of impeccable character?”

We would almost assuredly choose the latter, but again, do our daily decisions and parenting behavior reflect that aim, that goal?

These parents that are near-sighted focus on the here and now and they invariably become micro-managers. Because they are afraid their child is going to fail, they either do their child’s homework for them or hover over them until it is done right. Micro-managers are always frantic and exhausted. They tend to zig-zag all over the parenting “map” like a ship without a compass. But how does God “parent”?

I’ve been studying the book of Exodus in-depth lately and I want to share something with you. Let’s read Exodus 4:22-23. This is God’s message to Moses to take to Pharaoh with God’s people, Israel, being in slavery in Egypt:

“Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Israel is My son, My firstborn. “So I said to you, ‘Let My son go that he may serve Me’; but you have refused to let him go. Behold, I will kill your son, your firstborn.” ’ ”

Notice that God gave Pharaoh: 1) His expectants: “Let My People go.” 2) The reason: “Israel is My firstborn.” Then 3) The consequences: “If you don’t, I will kill your firstborn son.” Then, God stepped back and allowed Pharaoh to exercise his free will, to submit his will to God’s will and do what God expected him to do.

When Moses first appears before Pharaoh in chapter 5, notice Moses’ message to Pharaoh in 5:1: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let My people go…”

We all know the account… Pharaoh refuses. Moses gets discouraged and goes back to God, in 5:23 complaining that God has not delivered His people at all!”

If you study chapter 6, you will see that God does not change one single thing about His expectations of either Moses or Pharaoh. In other words, discouragement on Moses’ part does not change God’s command and disobedience on Pharaoh’s part does not change God’s command.

When I was in graduate school studying education, I was introduced to a method of classroom discipline by Lee Canter called Assertive Discipline. In his “assertive discipline” method, he encourages teachers to give their commands, their instructions, their expectations, and keep repeating themselves every time the student wants to fuss and to argue. Repeat yourself: “I said to do such and such.” Well, before Lee Canter wrote his book on Assertive Discipline, God gave us His behavior as a pattern.

Notice in 6:11: “Go, tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the sons of Israel go out of his land.”

7:2: “You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall speak to Pharaoh that he let the sons of Israel go out of his land.”

7:16: “You shall say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let My people go…”

8:1: “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Let My people go…”

8:20: “Now the Lord said to Moses, “Rise early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh, as he comes out to the water, and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Let My people go…”

9:1: “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and speak to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, “Let My people go…”

9:13: “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Rise up early in the morning and stand before Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, “Let My people go…”

10:3: “Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me? Let My people go…”

I have counted nine times that God repeated Himself to Pharaoh: “Let My people go…” Now, God had already told Moses to tell Pharaoh that if he did not obey, the consequences were going to be severe: the death of his firstborn son. God did not tell Pharaoh when he would take his first born son’s life. In fact, God did not tell Moses that he would bring nine plagues on Egypt before he took the life of his first born son. Pharaoh had ample opportunity to humble his heart, change his behavior, quit thinking that he was his own master, and submit to the powerful God of heaven. But he refused to obey ten times before God finally brought the law down on him.

If you want to learn how to parent biblically, look at God’s method of parenting: God gave Pharaoh: 1) His expectants. 2) The reason / motivation. Then 3) The consequences. That’s how you parent biblically.

We ought to give our primary consideration in parenting to this long-range vision. Parenting is not complicated. It’s not supposed to be complicated. Look at the people God has given the ability to, to have children. He has given everyone the ability to have children. God did not design parenting to be complicated. It gets complicated when we quit following God’s pattern - life gets more complicated when we quit following His pattern.

Think about the stock market. Are you invested in the stock market? If so, do you look at the stock market every day? Every week? Every month? If you do, you’ll go crazy. You invest in the long-term.

The same principle is true with parenting. You are far-sighted because you have in mind the end game. You don’t sweat the small stuff, the daily stuff if it doesn’t impact the long-term goal. In that way, parenting is more relaxed and your feathers are rarely ruffled. Micromanaging parents are constantly busy to the point of frenetic, and they are tense, anxious, and uptight.

MCPARENTING AND THE APOCALYPSE:
Let’s talk about helping with homework… The homework micro-manger is convinced that if he or she doesn’t help the child do his homework or at least hover over him while he does it, making sure it is done right, then: it won’t get done or it won’t get done right. These parents are short-term oriented and easily misled by short-term gratification. This is “McParenting” - like fast food, it has no value beyond the satisfaction of meeting immediate needs, a short-range goal. But it will lead to major problems down the road.

All of this “helping” does not result in children who take responsibility for their homework and do it independently.

“What’s more important to you: that you grow a child who is responsible and self-starting adult, irrespective of the grades he received in school, or that you grow a child whose grades in school were always good (because you made sure of that), but who, as an adult, tends to be intimidated by challenge and has difficulty with initiative?”

Apocalyptic thinking in parenting is the imagination that if you don’t properly attend to some small parenting problem today, it will rapidly spiral out of control and eventually ruin your child’s chances for success in life. Yes, if you don’t hover over your son’s homework, things might get worse in the short run. After all, what happens when you don’t drink coffee for a day or two? You get a caffeine headache, right? Because you have been artificially stimulating your brain. You get off the artificial stimulation and your body reacts negatively. When something is propped up artificially, there is bound to be some degree of collapse when the support is removed.

But a failing grade on a project which your child did by himself or herself will teach them how to stand on their own two feet and experience the intrinsic reward of doing something for himself or herself. Those kids do better in school. The Pharaoh never knew what it would be like to obey Jehovah God because he wasn’t thinking “long-term.” All he could see was that he was losing his slave force. That is short-term thinking that is endemic to the modern parent.

To put this simply, we need to hold our children almost completely responsible for doing their own homework and doing it properly. To reach that goal, we should put conservative limits on how much time we’re going to help our children with their homework on any given night. We can even get to the point where we don’t have to ask our children if they have homework. They’ve learned responsibility.

Children are prone to dramatic thinking and dramatic acting, especially if they think life is overwhelming them - Proverbs 22:15: “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.” There aren’t too many children who are not going to whine about having to do something that isn’t fun. That’s when the adult in the room is supposed to say: “Life is not about fun. Life is about preparing yourself to serve others and to serve God.” Isn’t that what the two greatest commands are?

AFTER-SCHOOL FRENZY:
One of the contributing factors to burnout is being overly busy. I really believe that being overly busy and over-commitment is harming our physical lives, our emotional lives, our sexual lives, our parenting lives, our spiritual lives. I’m not going to bash sports / athletics - there is good that comes from it.

But the best environment in which to teach our children to work as a team is in the home, in your own family. You see, team work on a sport is not a daily activity for adults. It’s not a daily activity that your 30-year-old is going to be doing. Unless they enter a professional sport. But daily chores at home? Yes, that’s something they will be doing when they are 30 years old. Obeying rules from authority - mom and dad - or a part-time job - learning to obey rules set by someone else in a work environment. Carrying out instructions properly; getting along / sharing with siblings - that’s realistic. That’s 30-year-old stuff. That’s team work. That’s parenting with the end in mind.

My opinion is that children should be involved in the youth group and no more than one activity per season per child. I don’t believe that children should be kept out late on a school night nor on Saturday and I don’t believe after school activities should interfere with the family meal.

Parents today are rushed. They are exhausted. And too often, they have nothing to show for it but a child who has learned how to play football. If you have kept them out of church activities, even Bible class, which will develop character based on Jesus Christ then we might really have set them up for eternal failure. I have been impressed with certain families in this congregation who have seem to strike the balance between having kids involved in after-school activities and have been faithful to Christ at the same time. If you ask me how to do that, I’ll say go talk to them. See what they did.

Question: “Do you want your child, when he is thirty, to be a materialist? Do you want him to believe that the acquisition of material things is essential to a sense of well-being, of personal satisfaction?”

We’ll say “no,” but then our behavior buys the children too much, most of what they want. We have good intentions, but we have lost sight of the long-range vision of growing 30-year-old Christians.

When parenting, do you frequently check-in mentally with the vision you have of your child and ask yourself if your decision is influencing that direction?

Here’s something you and your spouse might try: Write down 10 descriptions of what your child should be when he / she is 30 years old. Ask yourself if your day-to-day parenting efforts and energies are properly aimed at producing that adult that fits your vision.

Take home message: Parent with the end or long-term goal in mind and don’t get distracted with the immediate hassles in life.

Start an evangelistic conversation: “Can I share with you some of the basic beliefs of the church of Christ?”