Responsible Father

From John Piper:

An unhappy family is a bad advertisement for the greatness of Jesus. Dads, pray and work for their joy. (2 Cor. 1:24)

Dads, if necessary, look for ways to get your children to like each other. Be a peacemaker.

If you have a toddler who is just starting to talk, but is not yet able to count, make sure you count lots of things out loud while you are with him. It helps for him/her to hear the numbers in order. Repetition works.

Dads, be careful. Most children at times learn things very quickly. Assuming that he/she is a genius is setting yourself up (an potentially your child) for disappointment.

Still – by all means praise your children for anything they accomplish, large and small.

Dads, give yourself permission to not be bothered when your kids are better than you (more skilled or gifted) in some arena.

Every family with children experiences situations where a child or two is having a meltdown. Perhaps its a result of chronic pain, or the child won’t go to sleep or is just upset for an unknown reason. And the child cries for what seems like hours, but really is only minutes . . .

Dads, be aware that a crying child situation is like a headwind against godly parenting behavior. It will cause you to trend towards being cranky or less patient with your wife or children. Be on guard against this.

Dads, here’s a nightmare scenario that I fear happens too often.

1. Young Child works really hard on a project, hoping to please Dad.

2. Young Child approaches Dad with finished project, but (because of an honest lack of understanding of timing) comes at a time when Dad is (legitimately or illegitimately) really really focused on something else.

3. Dad (because of an honest lack of understanding of the work put into the project) does not give proper attention, amazement or Kudos to Young Child for what they have accomplished.

4. Young Child goes away sad, not understanding why Dad didn’t care about what he/she had done.

Isn’t this one of the worst situations you can imagine? Choose to give good attention to your child’s project even if you’re not sure how important it is. Also – Ask your wife to give you a heads-up when the child has been working hard on something.

Dads – The Bible indicates in many places that Children Are A Blessing (i.e. You should want the kids you have and more).  There are steps you can take to make this promise more true. Determine what these steps are in your situation.

I have previously written about keeping a journal for each of your kids.

One aspect of your child’s life that I recommend documenting is their early vocabulary. This can be done in two ways:

1. Every week, write down the new words they are using. We have tried to do this for the first one hundred words used by each of our children. Write down the dates. This has been helpful in comparing how verbal our kids are.

2. For one day, write down every word they say. We tried this for the first time last week with 26 month old Foster. Foster isn’t the most verbal child, but it really was impressive to see the full list. And our older kids had fun trying to keep track of them.

Try it. You’ll be glad you did.

Dads, do your kids ever get bored while driving around town as you run errands? Try this fun game:

Turn on the radio and go to either your town’s most popular light music station OR its most popular Christian music station. Then ask them to see how fast they can figure out if the song they hear is from the Light Station or the Christian Station.

Yes, this only works if they aren’t really familiar with either.