Intentional Parenting

 Here are a few practical parenting ideas from Rick Holland's blog. [Rick is a pastor at Grace Community Church, a Director at The Master's Seminary & the father of 3 school-aged boys.]  It's helpful to consider various ways to apply the command to bring up our children "in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." (Eph.6:4)  Christian parents must be "intentional" about child rearing, thinking through ways to incorporate God's truth into the lives of their children. If you don't actively and purposefully teach your children, the world will do it for you!  But if you start when they are young, by the time they are teens you will not only have built biblical truth into their lives, you'll be pleased to discover you  have also established strong communication patterns with them.

Here are a few things Rick does with his boys ...

• I take each of the boys out for breakfast before school once a week. This is as simple as a muffin at Starbucks or an earlier morning at IHOP. I’m going through different things with each of them. They are in very different places in spiritual understanding because of their ages. We have read books together, gone over chapters of the Bible that address what they are working through in life ... I try to end with a verse I’ve isolated for them that we simply read and pray through.

• We try to talk about the biblical instruction they are receiving at church. Driving home from church on Sundays includes a debriefing of what they learned in their youth ministry groups and the regular service sermon... Kim and I try to create and follow as many rabbit trails as we can to see what is at the end of their thinking.

• Dinner times are great because they are magnetized to the table by their appetites. It’s fun to throw out a topic and see what they think. I’m not so interested in using this time for instruction as I am to simply see what and how they think.

• Then there is “Monday Man School.” On Monday nights we try to get together to talk through issues of masculinity. This can include things like how to tie a tie, how to iron a shirt, how to skin and cook a rabbit, how to treat a lady (this an ongoing lesson), what to do when you get embarrassed in front of others, how to admit you're wrong and why that’s important, how to match clothes, how to shave (better), and sometimes we just watch a football or basketball game together.

• An important footnote is that there are always interruptions and exceptions to these activities. We rarely have a perfect week where everything happens, but we’re trying to make those the exceptions rather than the norm.

Then there are always the informal discussions that come up when you have kids. You can never let the antenna down... look for opportunities to speak into their worldview to encourage or correct it."

[Related Post: "Dinner Table Devotions" (Ideas for conversation starters at the dinner table.)]