Parenting 101:#4 Commitment to God's design parenting
As you begin your parenting career, you will be bombarded with advice on how to care for your baby. All of your well-meaning friends and relatives are going to offer you thier personal how-tos of babycare. Even the advice you'll hear from doctors is based on personal opinion. Dear parents, bear in mind that be cause you love your baby so much, you will be vulnerable to any advice that may claim to make you a better parent or your baby a better child. Being able to evaluate advice is not easy for first-time parents when they have little or no experience with babies. In my parenting research, I have discovered a way you can know with confidence whether or not any advice is helpful.
Three goals for you as parents will form the basis for a relationship with your child: 1. knowing your child, 2. helping your child feel right and 3. enjoying your child. For Christian parents there is one more goal: 4. leading your child to faith in Jesus.
Helping your child feel right means that as parents you do whatever you can to establish a source of well-being in your body. That is your job description. As a parent you need to attend to all your baby's physical and emotional needs, and as he/she grows you need to attend to his mental and spiritual needs. When a baby and a child feels right he is more likely to want to act right, want to please his/her parents and be a joy to those around. Helping a child feel right incorporates such things as positive relationships, conscience, sensitivity and to name a few. As the child grows, he/she learns that feeling right is what adults mean by having inner peace and the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Luke 2:52 says this of Jesus at the age of twelve: "And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." When each of our children has his or her twelfth birthday, we gave him/her this verse as our way of acknowledging this important process in our child's life.
Therefore when we say "helping our child feel right", we do not mean that the emotions are a reliable measure of spiritual well-being. We don't mean that good feelings always produce right behavior. Behavior sometimes has to precede "feelings" just because something is the right thing to do, a concept children learn gradually with the patient help of their parents. Certainly do not intend this phrase "helping your child feel right" to mean making "the little angel" feel good at all cost.
As you care for your baby, you will develop your own parenting style. I like to think of parenting as a relationship that develops naturally with your baby. From this relationship the how-tos automatically unfold. A flurry of books and articles on quick and easy parenting methods has surfaced in the past few decades. They seem to convey that new parents can choose a system of child care that fits most conveniently into their own lifestyle. These options are designed to appeal to busy parents whose first concern is their own lifestyle and who expect their children to conform to it. We do not feel this style of convenience parenting is in accordance with God's design. This parenting style can actually interfere with those four goals (1. knowing your child, 2. helping your child feel right 3. enjoying your child 4. leading your child to faith in Jesus). Be mindful of the Father's advice "Train a child in the way God has planned for this child. Seek to determine God's way for your baby. Then help your child grow up in that way even though it may not be the most convenient way.
The catch phrases of convenience parenting: "Don't be so quick to pick up your baby every time he/she cries"; "Don't let your manipulate you"; "What? You're still nursing? You're making him/her too dependent"; Don't let your baby sleep with you, he/she may get into the habit"; You're going to spoil him/her"; You have to show who's in chrage"; "You've got to go away from that kid." These common admonitions from trusted advisors tell parents not to use their intuition, but rather to depend on arbitrary rules and schedules instead. Convenience parenting can keep you from knowing your child, can keep your child from feeling right, and ultimately can keep you from fully enjoying your child. I believe that convenience, or detachment, parenting is not in accordance with God's design.