Installment III. Growing as a Parent

                   A story about a transformation of a Pastor to a Parent overnight (In 15 years or so.)

Along the way, our church "split," and the people who stayed were much more tolerant of my failures -- at least in my own mind. I began actually to believe that I wasn't responsible to make people "do right." I was responsible to love and affirm, to give guidance and structure, but I could not play God and attempt to create people in my own image.

In short, I began to give up the need to control other people. I realized that I had to share the reasons why I thought the way that I did rather than simply "laying down the law." I began to work to establish friendships with my children, friendships that would eventually blossom into mutually respectful peer relationships.

Our two younger children are males, and did not enter into adolescence until after we had gone through that year of counseling, and my reflections helped motivate me to become involved in Boy Scouts. Of all the things that I have done as a parent, nothing had a profounder impact for good than this, especially the planning and execution of monthly camping trips.

I was the Scoutmaster, but the Boy Scouts of America provides very effective training in how to engage others in sharing responsibility for group decisions. In a sense, Scouting became a metaphor for my approach to parenting: I became more and more of a coach-counselor and less and less of a despot. I began to get rid of the burden of parenting, the mantel of sole responsibility for how my children turned out.

I gave this to God and expressed this by giving them responsibility for their own lives. I would still be there, of course, and I would be willing to help. But the responsibility for how they turned out was theirs, not mine. That transference of responsibility began to have a profound impact on my temper.

When I gave up the need to control others, I also gave up the basis for anger -- not that I never get angry or frustrated again -- just that it is far less frequently and far less intense.

With thirteen years between our oldest daughter and our youngest son, I think that they sometimes believe that they were raised by different fathers. They were.

Read How to be Me in My Family Tree to understood your family better from generation to generation.