Good and Bad Parenting

I do not want to put too much emphasis on anything. I do, however, want to put enough emphasis on those things that have been deemphasized. In the last 50 years parenting has had a deemphasis and it has been detrimental. Countless numbers of children have been lost to the world; they have been raised in "catholic" homes and yet they have been poorly catechized, weakly disciplined, and largely misled into compromising the faith. There have always been parents who fail to raise their children in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord" and their children have ended up denying the faith and going to Hell. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is the truth.

Parenting needs to be properly emphasized in the Church and not treated as though God says, "just do your best and maybe it will work out". The importance of the responsibility of parents is not on the same level as trying out a new recipe in the kitchen. It is not like you can just get rid of it and try it a different way the next time. The spread of abortion in our land has done more than murder children; it has made numerous parents think lightly of their responsibility as parents (even large numbers of Catholic parents). As a parent, myself, I fully understand the duties, challenges, and heartaches of parenting. I thank God and His mercy that He helped me learn each of those things, and enabled me to see all five of my children practicing the Catholic faith.

Yes, the world sends numerous things against families today and is trying to destroy every soul. No, there is not guarantee of the faithfulness of children. Yet, with the enormous amount of admonitions in the Scriptures to parents to make sure that they raise their children correctly, we cannot imagine that parenting has no influence on a child's salvation. If parents do not do their job correctly, everything afterward is just triage. Vast numbers of young adults were lied to about parenting in the 60s and 70s, and the children they raised in the 80s and 90s have now grown up without the fulness of the faith. Many of these misled parents have no idea at what went wrong because they only did what they were told; what they were told was gravely wrong.

Few things can make people more upset than to be told that they are parenting wrong (and, chances are, I am probably making someone angry at me for what I have said above--here comes the hate mail), but would it not be better to be able to correct a mistake and get back on the right track? The biblical books of Proverbs, Wisdom and Sirach are filled with warnings about bad parenting, and also promises about good parenting. They tell us what the wrong ways are to parent; they tell us what the right ways are to parent; they tell us that errors can be corrected; they tell us that God cares for the children of His people and is willing to do miracles to keep them in the faith. We just need to humble ourselves and seek His help.