Christian parents today are afraid. They’re afraid that the pressures of the culture will overwhelm their kids and cause them to walk away from the values and the faith that they’re desperately trying to pass on to them. Because of this, many parents are parenting out of fear.  Fear of losing their kids to the culture, and fear of what other Christian parents may think.  I used to parent this way, but with some pretty painful parenting days under my belt (and lots of good ones too), I’m trying to change that.

Dr. Tim Kimmel’s Grace-Based Parenting is one of the most influential books I’ve read on parenting.  His premise is that parents need to create a grace-based home environment and parent their children the same way God parents them.  Since first picking the book up 5 years ago, I’ve read it twice, taught a class on it, and interviewed him for a radio show I used to host.

Here’s a small portion of that interview.  I found his words to be most helpful in my parenting, and hopefully you will too.

When I generalize a lot of parenting models, one thing that I often see in Christian homes is fear. I see a lot of fear-based parenting. The average parent that is steeped in fear-based parenting would be the last one to admit it, but fear is exactly what drives the decisions they make. They see the world system and how wicked it is, and they see Satan and how sinister he is, and then they see their kids and how vulnerable they are. Based on those three factors, they make their strategy for parenting based on fear.

However, there’s one thing that trumps all three of those fears and that is the fact that God is mighty. God is awesome, and when our focus is on Him and we let Him set the agenda, it often changes the way we go about what we do. We don’t hide as much. There is also evangelical behavior modification and I see this a lot; it’s where we’re trying to get the kids to act a certain way, know certain things, and look a certain way.

Our job isn’t to get our kids to behave right, our job is to get their character right. In fact, we don’t need to worry about their behavior so much; when you get their character right, the right behavior will follow. You can get a kid behaving right, but their heart may not be where it needs to be.

There is a lot of image-control parenting where parents are basically trying to meet a standard set by the people around them. Parents want their kids to do certain things, say certain things, and act a certain way so that they look good.

Then there’s also high-control parenting where parents leverage the strength of their personalities against their children’s weaknesses in order to get them to meet their selfish agendas, which is often the parents’ own insecurities.

The balance between throwing our kids to the wolves and hiding them from the world is grace-based parenting. The problem is that many of the systems that we have created to protect our children actually substitute for the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. They actually negate the kid’s need for the Bible. It doesn’t mean they don’t learn the Bible and know it, they just don’t need the Bible. This creates a spiritual anemia; it’s what happens when you preoccupy yourself with raising a safe kid. I think a lot of parents have that as their main goal; they want to raise a safe Christian kid.