Parenting on Purpose.  The parents, because of the guilt they feel, are often unwilling to discipline their children for fear the children will resent or even hate them.  They will therefore placate the child for the sake of peace and quiet.  Further, many baby boomers, raised in the “Me” generation, have learned permissiveness and passivity, as a response to the rebellion against previous generations. Unfortunately, this passivity and permissiveness has created insecurity in parents, to the place where the action is absent when required for the proper care of children. In rejecting the parenting models of previous generations (some of which were not healthy, and deserved rejection!) where parents were authoritarian and ruled as benevolent (hopefully) dictators, parents of today have limited experience in parenting with effectiveness, seemingly lost as to what to do when Johnny says “NO!”  Adding insult to injury, parents are depicted in the media as the brunt of adolescent jokes, having no clue as to what their children are doing or how to manage their impulsive and self-absorbed behaviour.  Setting limits on children’s behaviour has become a lost art form.  Setting limits is one of the most important parenting tasks.

The author suggests (based upon Love & Limits by Crary) five major limits for healthy child-rearing.  They are: avoid problems when possible, by controlling the environment in advance of a potential problem, rewarding cooperation, acknowledging feelings, setting limits, and teaching new skills.  Further, Gosman's Spoiled Rotten: Today’s Children and How to Change Them (Villard, 1992) provides different insights, including communicating love, following through with reasonable consequences, modelling self-esteem, devoting lots of time to the child, and remembering that the child who has everything appreciates nothing.  Very good advice for today’s forlorned parents.

Indeed, parenting in the modern world of today is an increasingly difficult task.  Even within the church parents experience difficulty in knowing what is right to do in disciplining a child, and who to listen to for advice.  The proliferation of experts on what should be a fairly delightful process (parenting) has not provided greater clarity but has helped to muddy the waters.

A Biblical Perspective

Before beginning to study so vital a subject as parenting, it is important to review the writer’s perspective and purpose.  Everyone has a bias that must be taken into account to fully understand his or her viewpoint.  It is my hope that many will share or at least withhold judgment on my perspective until a thorough reading of this book is completed.

This book is now also available as an ebook from Smashwords Parenting On Purpose - Ebook version