Parenting 101

Last night, I attended a parenting course being run by my church. It was really helpful and interesting. I was most struck by the need for consistency - and most impressed by my mother's extraordinary faithfulness and ability to keep her promises.

In parenting, I'm discovering, we lurch from crisis to crisis - being too harsh, or too lenient, one then the other and then back again; then we try to get our way with bribery. Then threats.

Think of the child's perspective. What do they make of this? What messages are we giving them? The problem is that consistency is time-consuming, costly and painful. Before we issue a threat of discipline, we need to be sure that we can execute that discipline. So that when we have to, we do. This will mean changing our own plans, putting our own lives on hold, in order to demonstrate faithfulness and consistency to our children. And that is, I think, why it's so hard. And yet my mother was faithful. She never made a promise she couldn't keep. She never issued a threatened she was not prepared to carry out. And I'm very grateful for that. I've seen that it is possible.

The other thought that occurred about parenting is that the effects are so slow and gradual that it's always easiest to cut corners - because most of us know that many children seem to turn out fine regardless. If our children are spoilt when they're five or six, they'll learn when they're older that they can't get their own way, we think. And yet we know that's a lie. How we raise our children does matter - not just because we do it in the sight of our children, but in the sight of God. And it matters to him a great deal.