Homegrown: Cultivating Kids in the Fruit of the SpiritSample

You Won't Parent Perfectly 

One of my closest friends, who is both gifted at and loves starting businesses, regularly discussed micro- and macroeconomics with his son growing up. As the loving father that he is, he uses business projects to train his son for the real world.

Recently, while on a year-long mission trip to Costa Rica as a family, he decided to help his son, who was sixteen at the time, earn money with a microfinancing project using an incredible woodworker in a local village. Not only would this project teach his son how to earn money, it would help the woodworker and the local economy as well.

As he told me about it, I could hear in his voice the excitement for his son. The further involved they got, the more passionate my friend became.

About a week later, my friend called me sounding unusually depressed. He said, “Josh, you know this project we’ve been working on? Well, my son looked at me and said, ‘Dad, this is your project with my name on it. If you want me to learn, let me do something that I’m passionate about.’”

I asked my friend how he responded. He said they went for a walk along the beach, and after listening to his son’s point of view, he looked at his son and said, “You know, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

What my friend realized was that even though his intentions were so incredibly good-willed, he actually did his son a disservice by overstepping his bounds and quarterbacking the project for him.

If you’ve read the passage in 1 John 4, “perfect love drives out fear” (v. 18), and were left with the lingering thought in your mind, All of this perfect love and “parenting without fear” stuff is great, but I’m not God, that’s right where you need to be.

If we try to be perfect, then we’ll parent out of fear. If we think we should never make a mistake, we’ll make parenting choices out of fear. If we ebb and flow with the latest parenting technique and strategy, choosing to give time-outs this week and not give them the next, we’ll parent out of fear.

So let yourself off the hook now—you won’t parent perfectly.