Fathers

Love your wife. Your children watch how you treat your partner. They watch and they are learning and forming their concept of marriage from you. You are creating a pattern, imprinting attitudes about family relationships on their lives and they will use this blueprint when it comes to their own marriages.

Enjoy your children. Children are given to us to enjoy, not to be a burden, not to ignore, but to enjoy! In order to enjoy them, you've got to be with them, have fun with them, share your life with them.

Don't expect perfect children. Like their parents there are no perfect children. Accept your children for who they are – whether they are clumsy or athletic, scatterbrained, or brainy and shy, or a motor-mouth, goofy, or sophisticated.

Listen to your children. Give them your undivided attention. When they have a problem, when they are worried, when they are sad, when they are lonely, they need you. If you listen to them when they're small and their problems are small, then they'll come to you when they're bigger, and their problems are bigger.

Provide for your children. I don't mean that you have to give them everything they want – that's one of the worst things we can do. What I mean is that parents should give to their children in a balanced and sensible way. Poor and rich parents alike can teach their children the blessings of wanting, working, saving, and waiting for material things.

Train you children. We must teach and train our children to respect authority in the home or they won't respect authority at school or in the world.

Pray for your children. You can't be with your children all the time but God can. You can't protect them wherever they go; God can. You can teach them right from wrong, but you can't always be there when it's put to the test; God can.

Be a positive role model. You are a role model for your children, like it or not, good or bad, they will, to one degree or another, model their lives after you. You are modeling what it means to be Christian in today's world.

Believe me it's not easy being a good parent – but it's not impossible either. It takes hard work, hard praying, and making hard decisions. We can't do it alone. God doesn't expect us to. If we believe that God is our Father then we must also believe that He is ready to give us the help we need as a parent and willing to forgive us our failures.

– Anonymous

June 25 , 2006