Parenting: Day 12

Control

In this video, Paul David Tripp unpacks the idea that biblical parenting is not about controlling a child's behavior, but about heart and life change.

About the Book

What is your calling as a parent?

In the midst of folding laundry, coordinating carpool schedules, and breaking up fights, many parents get lost. Feeling pressure to do everything “right” and raise up “good” children, it’s easy to lose sight of our ultimate purpose as parents in the quest for practical tips and guaranteed formulas.

In Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family, Paul David Tripp offers parents much more than a to-do list. Instead, he presents us with a big-picture view of God’s plan for us as parents. Outlining fourteen foundational principles centered on the gospel, he shows that we need more than the latest parenting strategy or list of techniques. Rather, we need the rescuing grace of God—grace that has the power to shape how we view everything we do as parents.

Freed from the burden of trying to manufacture life-change in our children’s hearts, we can embrace a grand perspective of parenting overflowing with vision, purpose, and joy.

Video Transcript

The goal of parenting is not controlling behavior, but heart and life change. Think about this for a moment: if all you do as a parent is set up this neat, consistent system for controlling the behavior of your children, when your children leave your home, they have nothing.

Every year there are thousands of supposedly Christian young people who go off to residential universities and forsake the faith. I would argue that they're not forsaking the faith—they never had it in the first place. It was the faith of their parents, and they lived under this neat system of control that didn't address the deeper issue of the heart—the thoughts and motives and desires of the heart that actually control behavior.

One of my goals as a parent is to be used of God to help my children understand a very important but humbling thing: that my biggest, deepest problem in all of life doesn't exist outside of me, it exists inside of me. It's my heart. Because my heart wants what it shouldn't want. It thinks what it shouldn't think. It desires what it shouldn't desire. It believes what it shouldn't believe.

Lasting change in the behavior of a child always travels through the pathway of the heart. So I want to be a tool in the life of my child—of heart awareness, of heart understanding. I want to give my child eyes to see his heart. I want to lead my child to confession. Because it's only when the heart changes that the behavior will change in a lasting way.