Grace Based Approach
Legacy Dad follows a number of different teachings and parenting styles but the one I rely on most is Tim Kimmel’s Grace Based Parenting Approach. I know Tim personally and have seen first hand that he is authentic.
Here is a quick synapses of what Grace Based Parenting is about:
Author Tim Kimmel has written a book that helps parents navigate the
dangers of two extremes in parenting—legalism and permissiveness. He
clearly describes a style of parenting that preserves the need for
boundaries, obedience, respect, and discipline but which also
appropriately considers “the three driving needs” of children—a need
for security, a need for significance, and a need for strength. He does
this by focusing in on the climate in the home. He accurately observes
that there is a place for rules and strictness in the home, but how they are presented makes “all the difference on how they are received.”
Kimmel
observes that much of the parenting of Christians is based on fear—fear
of the world and the deteriorating culture, fear of other parents, and
fear of the opinions of the church. This in turn encourages parents to
focus on behavior rather than on the heart of their children. Kimmel
instead encourages parents to parent their children as God parents His
children—with grace. “Grace-based parenting mirrors God’s love,
reflects His forgiveness, and displaces fear as a motivator for the
choices we make.”
Grace-Based Parenting
points out the fallacy of basing our parenting on the desire to raise
“safe Christian children” by depending on the control of the
environment around our children in order to shape them. He calls this a
“disaster in the making” and warns that this effort “will produce
shallow faith and wimpy believers.” Instead, Kimmel urges us to raise
strong children and to move beyond outer problems and address the inner
problems of our children.
One of the most critical strengths of
this book is the atmosphere of grace in the home that Kimmel portrays
as well as the matter-of-fact, yet gracious manner in which he notes
that parents and children are sinners and must be dealt with as
sinners. Consider these comments from the chapter, “The Freedom to Make
Mistakes”:
“Legalistic parents maintain a
relationship with God through obedience to a standard. The goal of this
when it comes to their children is to keep sin from getting into their
home. They do their best to create an environment that controls as many
of the avenues as possible that sin could use to work its way into the
inner sanctum…. It’s as though the power to sin or not to sin was
somehow connected to their personal will power and resolve…. These
families are preoccupied with keeping sin out by putting a fence
between them and the world.The difference with grace-based
families is that they don’t bother spending much time putting fences up
because they know full well that sin is already present and accounted
for inside their family. To these types of parents, sin is not an
action or an object that penetrates their defenses; it is a preexisting
condition that permeates their being. The graceless home requires kids
to be good and gets angry and punishes them when they are bad. The
grace-based home assumes kids will struggle with sin and helps them
learn how to tap into God’s power to help them get stronger.It’s
not that grace-based homes don’t take their children’s sin seriously.
Nor is it that grace-based homes circumvent consequences. It isn’t even
that grace-based homes do nothing to protect their children from
attacks and temptations that threaten them from the outside. They do
all these things, but not for the same reasons. Grace-based homes
aren’t trusting in the moral safety of their home or the spiritual
environment they’ve created to empower their children to resist sin….
They assume that sin is an ongoing dilemma that their children must
constantly contend with.[Children in a grace-based family]
are accepted as sinners who desire to become more like Christ rather
than be seen as nice Christian kids trying to maintain a good moral
code. Grace is committed to bringing children up from their sin;
legalism puts them on a high standard and works overtime to keep them
from falling down.Grace understands that the only real
solution for our children’s sin is the work of Christ on their behalf….
Legalism uses outside forces to help children maintain their moral
walk. Their strength is based on the environment they live in. Grace,
on the other hand, sees the strength of children by what is inside
them—more specifically, Who is inside them.”
