Parenting For Fruitfulness (Part 1)

Helping You Raise Faithful Children in a Post-Christian World

The hardest project I’ve ever started was being a parent.

There is simple no way to prepare yourself for your child or children. No book. No trick. No patterns. Yes, there are practices, postures, and principles that many people have found helpful, but because children are unique and you and your parter and your situation are also unique there are precious few universals.

Parenting starts all at once, and never ever ends.

Over the coming days I’m going to attempt to share the best wisdom I can about parenting. In the comments below, please leave your parenting and grand-parenting questions. All subscribers can leave questions, but paid subscriber’s questions go to the top of the queue. Rochelle and I will both be chiming in and offering the best practices we can from over 20-years of trying to be the best parents we possibly can be.

The floor is yours — though there are a few topics we know we’d like to cover. I am willing to address it all: sex and sex talks, money, discipline, support, mental health, failure, fights, apologizing, what a mistake a dog is, all of it.

But first a few caveats:

1. Rochelle and I Are Not Experts. Though she earned an MSW, and worked as an adolescent therapist and now works with middle-school children, and I studied adolescent development, we are not “parenting experts.” We are, however, relatively familiar with current thinking and some of the current trends and literature. We have also raised children and helped hundreds of others raise their children. Most importantly, we have made mistakes and have regrets. We don’t have a time machine, but we know what we would go back and change if we did.

2. Our Kids Are Wet Cement. We have 20-year-old and 17-year old daughters. We think they are both amazing and have surprised us in some beautiful ways, but they are not done growing up. That should not be a surprise since none of us are done growing up. All to say, we are on the parenting journey with every other parent. We can learn together and from one another.

3. I Am Of A Time. I grew up in the 80s and graduated high school and college in the 90s. That means there are experiences and values that are important to me and many of those experiences and values are different from contemporary thinking. Some of these are good, others are not. Because of my lifespan, I greatly believe in personal autonomy and agency for children. I was a father before I had a cell phone, and in my 30s before I owned a smart phones. I have biases against the zeitgeist. Some of those are being hardened by surveys science and research, others haven’t…yet. I parent from that perspective. Some of the struggles young parents have now I never had. Still, I believe there may be some parenting universals regardless.

So, let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments below. We are all in this together.