Parenting Priorities Vol. #2 Essay 17

Despite what career-oriented, radical, second-wave feminism has led you to believe, bringing up your children is NOT a part-time job.

When your first child is born, you, as a new Christian mother, have committed yourself to an 18 year-long, full-time career. Your level of involvement with your child’s life will foretell his or her future.

If you chose correctly, and prioritize your role as mother, your caring, nurturing, teaching, loving and hugging of that boy or girl will enable them to go out into a treacherous world armed with your reassurance that they can make a positive difference in the world.

As a father, your job is less hands-on but crucially important to the successful results of raising a child awash with integrity, morality and character. If this job description does not suit you, or your wife, do yourself, and the world, a favor and don’t have children.

Raising a child today requires constant vigilance by their mothers, as children are exposed to more violence, evil and madness than at any time in recent memory. Temptations and risks abound. And statistics show that most kids get into trouble between 3 pm and 5 pm when families, with two working parents, are not at home.

All little children need the constant loving, hugging and kissing only a mother can provide, especially before they turn seven. No one else can take her place. Her constant regard and attentive affection teaches her children to trust and to love, based on her priorities. And although the father is important during his children’s younger years, his role is primarily a supportive one.

Children are very observant and watching a father who loves their mother is a lesson well learned. Supporting his family financially in order to allow his wife to stay home with their children is another lesson learned. As a responsible man, children will learn by his example that both his children and their mother are his priority. As father and husband, he will keep them all safe and secure.

Father becomes a more active participant in the children’s lives when they begin to turn seven. Discipline becomes an issue at this age, especially for little boys, and instinctually children know that father is the parent whose decisions they must respect because he’s the biggest guy in the room.

For boys, growing from seven to ten, is the start of the shift from mother to father. Father’s must diligently make an effort to spend as much time as they can with their sons during those three years, as this is their son’s only route to true manhood.

The Spartan fathers of ancient Greece actually physically removed their little boys from their mother’s care at the age of seven so as to assure that outcome.

Many men will tell you that they knew what they wanted to do for a living at the age of ten.

Those three years, spent watching, and emulating, their adored father, are not only critical to the development of a good father/son relationship, but more importantly, they will set the tone for the remainder of the boy’s life.

Will he be a success or failure in life? Those three years, immersed in his father’s guidance, attention and love will determine the outcome. If the boy is both fortified with his Christian mother’s love and faith and his Christian father’s priorities and sound judgement, he will be prepared to face the challenges, and temptations, which are presented to all 12-year-olds by our secular culture.

From this point forward, there is little parents can do to change their child’s path in life. It is virtually set in stone and this is why prioritizing both motherhood and fatherhood is critically important for new parents. Someone needs to care for their children full-time, and it should NEVER be left to paid caretakers, because too much is at risk.

Dr. Morris Massey, a former University of Colorado professor who specialized in sociology and human behavior, explains why those first 10-12 years of a child’s life are SO critical and why the parent’s role in their child’s continuing development subsides beyond those years.

Massey clearly states in his book , “What You Are Is Where You Were When” , that parents have until their children are ten to instill their values and priorities within their children, both religious and temporal. According to Massey, 90% of a child’s value system is in place by the age of ten and the remaining 10% is locked into place, by the age of 20.

So, as parents, you don’t have much time!

Unless you are deliberately looking for trouble, you, as attentive, loving parents, should be the only source of this value system – not friends, day-care workers, neighbors, baby-sitters, teachers, nannies or coaches.

Fathers have no choice but to work to support their families. Their crucial role to protect and provide was delegated to them by God. Mothers also have a crucial role delegated by God and it is to care for your children fulltime!

Unfortunately, over the last 50 years, millions of women have been brainwashed by radical, second-wave feminism to disregard this God-given responsibility.

But just be warned! As mothers, if you renege on your parental obligations to your children by placing “career” at the top of your priority list, rather than your children, you will NOT recognise your child as your own by the time they reach the age of 20. And this will be because they will have spent those first, precious ten years of their lives being imprinted by other people’s priorities, and NOT your own.

Remember, especially with your children, you will reap what you sow – Galatians 6:7-8.