For the new year: some questions for parents

H/T: St. Paul Orthodox Church in Emmaus, PA

The following article is from St. John Chrysostom Orthodox Church in York, PA, which was commended to all the parents, teachers and youth workers in our diocese by His Grace, Bishop THOMAS. It is a penetrating and direct set of questions regarding parenting and the spiritual life.

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The Beginning of the New Church Year: Some Questions for Parents

Christian Parents need to be concerned about their children’s spiritual and moral lives, and their relationship to the Church. Below are ten reflection questions. Take time to read each question and answer it honestly. Since September is not only the beginning of Sunday Church School, but also the ‘New Year” of the Church, perhaps some of these could be “New Year’s Resolutions” for your family if you discover a need for some growth.

1) Are you as conscientious about bringing your son or daughter to Church and Sunday Church School as you are in taking them to public school activities or sporting events? Or, as I have seen, do you drop your children off for Sunday School and pick them up afterward, having never gone to Liturgy? On the flip-side I can say the school teachers were not happy this morning to discover some rather tired children filing into their classrooms as last night we drove all the way to Holy Apostles Mission in Mechanicsburg, PA to the the myrrh-streaming Hawaiian Iveron icon last night. I'm willing to take a little guff from teachers on homework and sleepiness if the cause is something Church-related. You have to expect the annoyance of the teachers as their now thoroughly secularized weekday mentality will not conform to your religious beliefs. Smile and know that you're doing the right thing.

2) Are you as concerned about your child’s spiritual nourishment as you are with his/her physical nourishment? Do you care as much about whether they did their morning/evening prayers as you do if they had a "balanced" meal?

3) Do you let your child get away with contrived excuses for not attending the services of the Church? Do you look for such excuses yourself? See this list.

4) Do you show your child by your own example that other activities, such as sporting events or recreation, do not take precedence church attendance? You might like this excerpt.

5) Do you encourage your child to be generous by being generous yourself? Does your giving to the Church reflect generosity or selfishness? See the Cheerful Giver.

6) If you have a teenage child, do you challenge them to keep their purity because it is God’s will to do so? When you talk to your teenager about sexual matters, do you teach what the Word of God says about fornication, or are you afraid to call sexual promiscuity sinful? Don't let the world teach your child about when and how to date. Look up the numbers on how early and how often children are engaging in some rather shocking sexual behavior. After looking up the statistics, fight the urge to deadbolt their bedroom doors and put bars on the windows.

7) Are you concerned enough about your child’s morals to monitor the TV shows, movies and video games they watch? Watch an evening of the "ABC Family" channel then try and figure out what sort of family they're writing for. 

8) Do you expect your child to be polite and respectful toward older people, or do you encourage them to treat adults as their equal? Do you encourage your child to address adults as Mr., Mrs. etc. or do you tell them it is OK to address an adult by their Christian name? Does it matter to you when your child either refuses to speak to an adult, or answers with a curt “yup” or “nope”? In our house I pretend I don't understand what those informal words mean. "Yeah"gets a blank stare.

9) Do you defend your child in front of other people when he has clearly done or said something wrong? Are you afraid to admit to other adults that your child is capable of wrong doing? Are you afraid to correct your child and set appropriate consequences when it is warranted? Discipline is not being mean. What's mean is not equipping your children to be responsible for their actions.

10) Do you allow your child to use bad language? Has he learned these words at home? Soap, people. It works almost immediately.

There are parents today who do not believe being a Christian obliges them and their children to be different. If we want to bring our children up in the Orthodox Christian Faith, we need to understand that we and they will indeed be different, and that it’s a good and Godly difference! Are we so afraid that our observance of Christian standards of behavior will make us, or our children, odd and strange, that we fail to do our duty as Christian parents? As the author of The Book of Proverbs observed long ago: “Even a child makes himself known by his acts, whether what he does is pure and right” (Proverbs 20:11).

Therefore as Christian parents we must: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).