I had breakfast this morning with Richard Beasley. He and Mike Willoughby are teaching a class at church called Passing the Baton. The class is designed to help parents realize their responsibility to their children in terms of spiritual matters. As a way of wrapping up the series Mike and Richard are interviewing grandparents in an effort to show how grandparents play a role in passing on the message of God to their extended family. I want to share with you a few of the points that I made to Richard this morning.

1.  Parents and Grandparents must live Christ not teach Him. Our example, our life, is what speaks of our faith, not simply our words.
2. Spending time with our children and grandchildren is more important than gifts.
3. Teach responsibility at an early age. Give your children a job, a responsibility and hold them accountable.
4. Teach your children and grandchildren to show respect, and honor to others.
5. Allow your little ones to fail in small areas of their lives. Allow them to experience the feeling of being wrong or mistaken so they will know how to handle the larger failures that life is sure to bring.
6. Realize that your child can do wrong, and never facilitate them in passing their faults on to someone else. Your child is not perfect, so it’s not always the teachers, bosses, coaches, or friends fault.
7. If you truly love your children, discipline them. Discipline, applied correctly, is absolutely necessary for the child’s wellbeing, and maturity.  It really is for their own good, and yes there is a time, and a place for spanking. To believe otherwise is to say that God is wrong.  

Till next time,

Grump

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Life Learned Lessons and Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.