Parenting

Both specialist research and common experience tell us how complicated it is when children reach adolescence. Dr Bryan Craig helps us to understand the reasons for this and how to turn the crisis into an opportunity for growth.

As Christian parents, the most important legacy we want to leave our children is faith in God.

Education is essential for the survival of any social group, since a community ensures its existence and development only by passing on to the next generation the knowledge it has accumulated, the power it derives from it and its ideological aspirations.

Regular reading of the Bible in childhood is a strong predictor of spiritual health in adulthood. If instilling a love for the Bible is a crucial factor in religious education, parents need to develop methods to reinforce a habit that keeps children on the desired spiritual trajectory.

The refrain: “I’m booored…” is “the worst song on the parenting soundtrack,” says journalist Kat Patrick humorously. Chanted in the most inconvenient moments, this complaint often triggers the parent’s guilt or concern. But there’s nothing wrong with letting your child get bored sometimes.

I’m a walking contradiction when it comes to technology. I spend far too much time on the internet—some productive, such as paying bills, researching for my work and reading the news, but mostly wasted time on one-too-many funny cat videos—but I’m still using a Nokia E71 mobile phone bought in 2009. (Don’t laugh! It did win Mobile Choice’s phone of the year in...

In an ideal world, everything would be simple: you, as the father or mother, tell your child, the apple of your eye, to do something and, being perfectly obedient and submissive, they do as they’re told. However, we don’t know if such a world would really be ideal. Nevertheless, for many parents, this resembles a paradise to which they would love to escape...

The perspectives we acquire as children about ourselves as individuals, about the world, and even about God, become beliefs that filter and guide the choices we make as adults. Some of these beliefs are helpful. Others are not. In fact, many of the obstacles we encounter in adult life are caused by these filters.

One of the biggest challenges facing both parents and teachers is to help children stay motivated so that they can keep focus, persevere when they are struggling, move forward, and finish what they have begun.

Fathers are an important part of their children’s lives. Good dads can provide stability, protection and love in a child’s life.

I used to think I was a patient person. Then I became a dad.

The saying Spare the rod and spoil the child is deeply rooted in some cultures as saving discipline. Where does this idea come from and is it true that using the rod is next to godliness?

While the debate over the “ideal age” for fatherhood may go on endlessly, one fact is clear: the average age at which men in modern society become fathers has steadily increased in recent decades. Behind the polished statistics lie moving personal stories about what it means to embrace fatherhood at an age when youth is little more than a distant memory.

This article is the third and last in the "Parenting School" series. The first two parts were published in the May and June 2020 issues of Semnele Timpului, the Romanian version of the ST Network.

“When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window,” poet Ogden Nash once said, encapsulating one of the most common sources of intergenerational conflict—the role grandparents play in the upbringing of their grandchildren.