Think about parenting....

I think about parenting all the time and I am not even a parent. Though I don’t have my own children, I do have three incredible nephews and a very unique little niece. I have access to some children who scrape away some of the ache of that maternal longing. As I consider each one of them I list out to anyone a handful of reasons why I love this one or that one. It is frankly really easy to do so. My sister and brother have done such an amazing job parenting with their spouses and it is so encouraging to me, as a counselor of high school students, to see such proactive decisions on their parts to go against the current of the rest of the free world. In many ways, it gives me hope. In many other ways, it gives me tangible and practical ways to help other parents who seem to simply react to life, never really thinking, just responding to every wave of life that comes barreling over them. In other words, the most dangerous thing I witness today are parents who stop thinking and instead are swept into the whirlpool of culture and move with the changes that soon become “the norm” of living. Walking blindly forward, they rarely stop to consider what is best, what is healthy, why they do what they do, why they don’t do what they do, and what goals they would want for their kids in the first place. Scary…really, really scary.
I guess part of the problem is that it takes time, energy, self-reflection, a willingness to admit wrong and a commitment to work hard to redirect. All of it requires humility, and a lot of prayer. In the end, most parents fail to really consider how the present day impacts the future day. In other words, the way a child lives now, is most assuredly what a child will become. Think about work ethic for example. My sister told me what a parent said the other day when talking about her son having to work…”He will have to work the rest of his life, so for now I don’t want him to have to worry about that.” There is a raw, fundamental problem here that seems to slip through the minds of so many parents. The question that must be addressed here is this: how does an adult develop a strong work ethic? The truth is, only kids who learn a strong work ethic have a strong work ethic when they are older. The skills a child learns, and then continues to strengthen in his adolescence will carry into adulthood. This is precisely why we will often witness 40 year old men who are lazy, selfish and subconsciously expect others to do everything for them. That didn’t happen one random day in his thirties. Therefore, for a parent to think that a child will grow up and “have to work the rest of his life” is a true statement. And with that being said, a parent should consider how to help her child become a young man and an adult, who has a work ethic that will carry his family and career and his relationships to a level of loyalty, commitment and depth. Very few aspects of life will thrive without a solid work ethic. That cannot be explained, it must be developed. It must be learned and practiced. It must be incorporated into the fabric of every day growing up.