P roper parenting is godly parenting. God has a purpose and plan for the family. God is sovereign in that the book of Genesis, the record of the beginnings, has it that "In the beginning God..." We read this in Genesis 1:1. This speaks to the fact that life is all about God. It is clear that apart from God there is nothing else. No God, no beginning; no creation. It is that simple. We must understand this as it also speaks to the fact that God assumes sole ownership - patent right over all creation. Hence, God dictates and decrees the way. We read in Genesis 18:17-19, the demands of God as he apparently boasted about his friend Abraham. That he was fully aware that Abraham would unfailingly direct his children and household after him to follow God's way by obeying all his commands. God was confident that Abraham would be a role model in children's proper upbringing. We thus realise that God's purpose and plan for the family is that the name of God should be trans
Child Growth and Development fall into a specialist area of psychology and one of the family life education books referred to in my course of preparatory studies for marriage, by Allan Petersen J., The Marriage Affair, devoted a voluminous chapter to the issue of how the child develops with respect to age and necessary character traits and behavioral patterns to expect and hence properly manage in order to achieve positive behaviors and characters in contrast to the natural bent based on proven research and informed experience. Natural bent refers to the tendency of the individual to do things the wrong way unless a corrective or disciplinary measure is applied to stop or minimize the unapproved behavior, character or action. Parents who allow their children to grow with such traits with the hope that they will drop them later in life when they become conscious of what is good or bad live to regret their failures or develop defense mechanisms to cover their ignorance of this very impo