Is training for parents needed? My parents didn’t get any training and I turned out alright!
More times than not, this is the case. Many individuals who are about to be parents do not pursue biblical parenting education training before they become parents. There is a laissez-faire or whatever type of approach/attitude in which individuals believe that good parenting will “just happen”. Hughes and Hughes states:
Parents, like archers, launch their children into the future, aiming toward a distant target. Some parents take clear aim, and their arrows are well directed toward their future mark. But other child arrows are fired from unsteady bows, parents who are, at best, ambivalent about where they came from and unsure of their aim. Their arrows waver and falter, then finally succumb to gravity with no mark in sight. They tragically prove the adage,
‘If you aim at nothing, you’ll surely hit it.’[1]
Half-aimed searches for parenting advice by a random book or an anecdotal comment by a friend or parent is the typical modus operandi. Typical advice received usually focuses on tips in raising children and the skills needed. But that is not the focus for this study.
It is highly valuable to look at the needs of parents before the actual parenting process begins: to train a parent in the way they should go.
If Proverbs 22:6 is true that we should train our children in the way they should go regarding godliness, wisdom, truth, fear of the Lord, and sanctification, then these patterns of godliness will not depart from them even when they are old. It would also then be true that if we do not train them, or if we train them wrong, these habitual sins will follow them to the next generation. Proper parenting training is the hinge for this process to be set in motion correctly.
[1] Kent Hughes and Barbara Hughes, Common Sense Parenting (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995), 4.