Parenting & Children: Responsible Adulthood

Be confident of your rightful authority as a parent, and insist that your children respect it. Your responsibility as a parent is enormous, and you must exercise a self-confident loving authority to carry it out. Your children's confidence in your leadership will derive from your own confident sense of divine mission.
Remind yourself often that you're raising adults, not children. When you think of your children's futures, picture their character, not just their careers. Your job as a parent is not to keep your children relentlessly busy and amused. It is, rather, to lead them to become competent, responsible, considerate, and generous men and women who are committed to live by Christian principles all their lives, no matter what the cost. Think of what your children will be, not just what they will do.
Teach the great character strengths: the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. In today's terms, these are called by other names: sound judgment, a sense of responsibility, courageous perseverance, and self-mastery. You teach these virtues in three ways: by your personal example, your direction of your children's behavior, and your verbal explanations of right and wrong. But you teach right living mostly by example.
Teach your children the four great pillars of civilized dealing with others: "please," "thank you," "I'm sorry," and "I give my word". Using these habitually in speech leads children to recognize and respect the rights of others. Remember, your children will not grow up when they can take care of themselves; they will only grow up when they can take care of others, and want to.
Teach your children the meaning of the word "integrity." Integrity means unity of intention, word, and action - that we mean what we say, we say what we mean, and we keep our word. Insist that your children always tell the truth and keep their promises.
Realize that "no" is also a loving word, and your children must hear it from time to time in order to acquire self-control. Children who never experience their parents? loving denial cannot form the concept of self-denial, and this can later lead to disaster.
Make your children wait for something they want, and if possible make them earn it. Waiting and earning are part of responsible adult life, which is what you are after. Let the children see that ?everybody else has one? and ?everybody else is doing it? are, at best, lame reasons for any course of action. Sound judgment and conscience are guides for life, and these should never give way to conformity.
Raise your children to be producers, not consumers. Let them put their powers up against problems to solve them and thus grow in self-confidence. Lead them to take schoolwork and home chores seriously so they will learn the meaning of responsible service. We humans are born to serve, not to shop.
Show them how to recognize materialism when they see it, and to shun it. Materialism is not merely the pursuit of things. It is seeing and treating other people as things. Materialism views man as just a thing, a mere object, a clever beast, and it has corollary beliefs: that life ends with death, conscience is mere sentiment, morality is only social convention, people have value only for their use or amusement, and life?s sole purpose is the headlong pursuit of pleasure and power. This life-outlook is directly opposed to Christian truth and life. A Christian family will have no part of it.
Keep the electronic media under your discerning control. Permit nothing in your home that offends God, undermines your lessons of right and wrong, and treats other people as mere objects. This means no pornography, no gratuitous violence, no glamorous portrayals of sin and disrespect for others. Teach discernment in use of the media: to accept what is good, reject what is wrong, and know the difference.
Practice "affectionate assertiveness" in disciplining your children. Correct the fault, not the person; hate the sin, love the sinner. Show your children you love them too much to let them grow up with their faults uncorrected.
Lead them to practice Christian charity. Charity does not mean giving away old clothes; it means mostly compassionate understanding. In family life, insist on apologies and forgiveness. Make them let others off the hook, forgive and forget - for we do not really forgive unless we also forget. Allow no gossip or backbiting. Lead them to help the needy and lonely with their prayers, alms, and time. Teach them to pray, as Jesus and the apostles taught us, for our President and other civic leaders - for they, too, have souls and their rightful authority comes from God. We may find their policies repugnant and may act to remove them from office, but as Christians we bear them no personal ill will.
Listen to your children. That's listen, not obey. When you keep the media under your discerning control, you will have much more time to dialogue with your children. Learn what is going on in their developing minds and guide them with your own responsible judgment. Live as a responsible adult who?s on top of life, and let them learn what this means.
Teach them that beer is not a kind of soft drink with a buzz. Alcohol is a drug, drunkenness is a grave sin, and intemperance often leads to other grave sins, even tragedies—crippling or fatal accidents, pregnancies, abortions, desperate struggle with alcoholism. Every year these scourges afflict many college students, even well intentioned your people from good homes—youths who grew up with every advantage except the ones that count most: sound judgment, Christian conscience, and the power of self-control.
Adopt a policy in your household: A driver's license is not an automatic entitlement at age sixteen; it is, rather, a serious sign of having really grown up. Maturity means, most of all, a sense of responsibility. Immature young people - who retain a childish "me-first" attitude and see life as mostly play - will treat the automobile as a toy, and this can lead to disaster. Therefore, no teenager in our family will get a driver's license or drive our car unless he or she shows habitual, ongoing adult-level attitudes of responsibility, concern for others, and self-control.
Remember that your children may forget most of the details of what you teach them, but they will remember what was important to you. For most of us, the lifelong voice of conscience is the voice of our parents—God speaking to us through the memory of what our parents lovingly taught us.
When your children leave home for college, tell them: Do not forget that God is watching over you with love, and He has since your childhood. Do not offend Him, and do nothing that would betray what you learned in our family. We will pray for you every day. Remember that God commands all of us, "Honor your father and mother." And the way we honor our parents is this: we adopt their values as our own, live by them all our lives, and then pass them on to our own children whole and intact.