Parenting Tips

There are many books about the importance of raising children to love and serve God.

Here are a few of them:

The Adventist Home
Child Guidance
Education

Here are three tips to win the hearts of our children, which will allow us to lead them to Jesus.

1. Spend time with them.

Worship

  7 Testimonies, 43.   “In every family there should be a fixed time for morning and evening worship. How appropriate it is for parents to gather their children about them before the fast is broken, to thank the heavenly Father for His protection during the night, and to ask Him for His help and guidance and watchcare during the day! How fitting, also, when evening comes, for parents and children to gather once more before Him and thank Him for the blessings of the day that is past!”

Play

  Counsels to Parents, Teachers, and Students, 76.   “There is danger that both parents and teachers will command and dictate too much, while they fail to come sufficiently into social relation with their children or scholars. They often hold themselves too much reserved, and exercise their authority in a cold, unsympathizing manner, which cannot win the hearts of their children and pupils. If they would gather the children close to them and show that they love them, and would manifest an interest in all their efforts and even in their sports, sometimes even being a child among them, they would make the children very happy and would gain their love and win their confidence. And the children would more quickly learn to respect and love the authority of their parents and teachers.”

Working

  Education 216.   “Since both men and women have a part in home-making, boys as well as girls should gain a knowledge of household duties. To make a bed and put a room in order, to wash dishes, to prepare a meal, to wash and repair his own clothing, is a training that need not make any boy less manly; it will make him happier and more useful. And if girls, in turn, could learn to harness and drive a horse, and to use the saw and the hammer, as well as the rake and the hoe, they would be better fitted to meet the emergencies of life.”

2. Learn their love language and do things that they will feel the most loved.

see https://5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language for an interesting quiz to help discover your child's love language.

3. Show interest in things they are interested in.

  Adventist Home, 220.   “Fathers should unbend from their false dignity, deny themselves some slight self-gratification in time and leisure, in order to mingle with the children, sympathizing with them in their little troubles, binding them to their hearts by the strong bonds of love, and establishing such an influence over their expanding minds that their counsel will be regarded as sacred.”

It is our prayer that in this age of discontent and disobedience we will allow God to "turn
the hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers..." (Malachi 4:6).