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<p>According to Deuteronomy 6, it's the father's #1 duty to build the Word of God into his children's hearts. That's number one... it's more important than serving breakfast, or supper! God says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and teach these commandments to your children... teach them when you rise up, teach them when you lay down, teach them when you're walking by the way, write them on the portals of your gates, write them on your doorposts." In others words, Dad, every waking moment that you're home - every waking moment! - you should be importing the truths of God's Word to your kids through relational teachings.
How important is it for the father - if he's present - to be the main driver of the spiritual development of his kids? Ted Haggard, pastor and author
It's very, very important. As you know, there's a lot of literature written about what happens to people when they are fatherless. It's fatherlessness that's driving the importance of things like the Promise Keepers movement and things like dads connecting with their sons and their daughters and the importance of youth pastors really doing a good job connecting with the young men and young women in their churches so that people have that connectivity as they grow up. Without a doubt, the kids that have fathers that are involved with their lives don't have the drug problems, the academic problems,and the social problems that the others do.
What are some ways that dads can become more "proactive" in parenting their teens?Gary Newton, Dir. of Educational Ministries Program at Huntington College Graduate School
Well, I think the primary area is to model a lifestyle that you want your teens to follow. I think one of the things we've tried to do in our family is to think through, "what kind of family traditions do we want to continue?", like mealtimes together. We expect our children to be there at mealtime when they've been at home. In our family - all the way through the teen years - we had meals together. One of our boys wanted to do a paper route that would've taken up that whole dinner time. We talked about it and looked at the values and we came to the decision as a group, as a team, as a family, that it would interfere with our family time. Family tradition was intentional, having dinner together was a major thing we did.
The same was true for things like Sunday attendance at church, especially Sunday morning. We feel that is a very very important and always have been. That's a structure we intentionally talked about and planned. Other things include service opportunities that we do as a family. Since the kids have been real young, they've gone with me to nursing homes. For instance, I play the violin, and when the kids learned instruments they went along with us. We do projects together as a family for other families that are needy. We try to plan work days together. Every family has their own structure, but it is so important to have family traditions or family structures that intentionally not only model, but instruct children in the way that you want them to go.
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