With this month’s focus on Family, I’d like to offer a look at parenting. A few years ago, I read Paul David Tripp’s Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family.
Tripp wrote the book as a reorienting book. It is meant to give you a new way of thinking about and responding to everything that will be on your plate as a parent. His book is meant to give you vision, motivation, renewed strength, and the rest of heart that every parent needs. It is written to give you the big gospel picture of the task to which your Savior has called you.
Many parents believe, “These children belong to me, so I can parent them in the way I see fit.” Ownership parenting is motivated and shaped by what parents want for their children and from their children.
Ownership parenting is not overtly selfish, abusive, or destructive; it involves a subtle shift in thinking and motivation that puts us on a trajectory that leads our parenting far away from God’s design.
Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God’s possession for his purpose.
Click here for more from Paul David Tripp.