reading

“Parenting isn’t for the faint of heart. Seaborn presents a fresh, honest, and helpful parenting book built on the sure foundation of grace and truth. It is anchored in the clear understanding that every kid needs someone in life who is crazy about them, especially when life can get a little rocky. Parenting with Grace and Truth is a gift to help raise godly, healthy kids in a balanced and loving home.”

—Dr. Tim Clinton, American Association of Christian Counselors
President, Co-host Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk

“I’m a husband and daddy of two little children. From the moment I met my wife, Dan Seaborn has been a mentor to me, supporting my own marriage. He loves me with grace, but he loves me enough to not leave me that way. Patterns I’ve set in my own family are because he speaks truth to me. What I love most about this book is that Dan applies unbelievably practical helps even with the seemingly little time and energy you feel like you have as a mom or dad. Let Dan’s parenting experience speak into your life. He gets it.”

—Joshua Straub, PhD, Marriage & Family Strategist,
LifeWay Christian Resources, Author of Safe House

“Grace and truth, along with the capacity and spiritual maturity to rightly employ them, are what set apart Christian mothers and fathers. They allow us to become the eyes and ears, the hands and feet, and ultimately, the love of God, to our sons and daughters. There are many ‘voices’ in the world today when it comes to parenting. Dan Seaborn brings an uncompromising and biblical approach to the subject, and incorporates humor, wisdom, deep insight, and balance to one of the most challenging roles in life. Parenting with Grace and Truth offers practical help with callouts, sidebar illustrations, case studies, questions to consider, and the use of story to bring home the principles he shares. This book is a must-read, and every parent will discover him or herself in its pages.”

—Dr. Eric T. Scalise, PhD, LPC, LMFT, President of LIV Enterprises
& Consulting, LLC, former Vice President of the American
Association of Christian Counselors and former Dept. Chair for
Counseling Programs at Regent University

“Few books have challenged my thinking and captured my heart like this present work by Dan Seaborn. His transparency compels the reader to go beyond the shallow waters of traditional parenting and venture into the deep and unfamiliar seas where God awaits to teach about grace and truth.”

—Rick Rigsby, PhD, Pastor, Motivational Speaker,
Author of Lessons from a Third-Grade Dropout

“It’s time for a reality check: There is no perfect parent except God. Anyone struggling with the balancing act of life and raising kids needs grace and truth. Blending biblical principles with practical steps, Dan Seaborn shows parents the path for equipping Christ-centered children in today’s culture. This book will not only affect your child’s life; it will impact yours!”

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to God that I have been allowed to experience pain in parenting. It has made me more like Jesus. I would not have made it through that pain, or anything in my life, without the support of my wife, Jane. She has been my dearest friend throughout all of my life. I am dedicating this book to her and her faithful love to me.

I also thank my children who have prayed and stood by me over all these years! Alan and Annaliese, Josh and Amy, Cristina and Jonathan. I especially want to thank my youngest daughter, Anna, for her willingness to talk about our story together. As I write this book she is growing in Christ, and we celebrate all God is teaching her. We pray her life will have a mighty impact for Christ.

Also, thank you to Sue Lewis for partnering with me in writing this book. I appreciate the effort you put into it to make it exceptional!

Introduction

Jesus forever changed parenting! When He came on the scene more than two thousand years ago, He brought a fresh approach of balancing grace and truth. He took some tired and well-worn laws and added joy! He was the first to say, “Let the little children come to me” (Matthew 19:14). His invitation assigned a value to children, who had never before been acknowledged. This gives us hope as parents that we can raise our children with the freedom that comes from grace and the love that is derived from truth. Jesus recognized the wisdom of God. He understood that whether there were to be one billion or seven billion people on earth, they would need a standard for living together in love and harmony. Jesus showed us by His example how to love—not force—God’s principles into someone’s life. While He endorsed and supported God’s truth, such as that embodied in the Ten Commandments, He administered it with a gentleness to which people were likely to respond positively. By following His example, we will find hope and a future for ourselves and for our children.

CHAPTER 1

The Truth about Developing
Good Character in Your Children

Christians are called to emulate Christ’s character. Therefore we are going to take a look at Jesus’ life and how He loved and then learn how to practice that same philosophy in developing good character in our children. The first thing we should notice is that our parenting style has to move from being authority driven to love driven. Wouldn’t you want to be compelled to action by love instead of authority? As a father of four children, I learned how to shift from an authoritarian-truth style of parenting to a godlier and more grace-filled approach without ever compromising the godly standards I believed in. I will share the ways in which this has worked for me—as well as some of the ways it has not. We will analyze together why it is more effective to parent with truth and grace than with truth alone. For me, this shift in approach took away the burden of parenting as an obligation and turned parenting into an opportunity. It moved me from being intrusive to being inclusive.

To understand Jesus’ character, we have to look at the Word of God and see the ways in which Christ’s character models truth and grace. Many parents today struggle to understand the delicate balance between the facts—truth—and the Christlike manner in which we can enforce those facts—grace. Most kids don’t like the facts. If you spend your time reeling off fact after fact to your children, eventually they are going to stop listening. That broken-record approach has not proven successful in most situations. But if you learn how to parent the same way Jesus parents us on this earth, with a pivotal combination of truth and grace, the paradigm will shift and character will begin to emerge.

Our children develop character in their lives by emulating our behaviors and by responding to how we discipline or encourage their behavior. Developing good character in your children is not easy, but it can be done. The goal is to help your children establish character traits that will assist them in the process of maturing into strong, capable adults who can successfully manage their lives with Jesus Christ at the center. While there is no patented formula that will produce the character you desire for your children, you can start by instilling the character traits that represent the values you want your children to emulate—honesty, gratitude, forgiveness, respect, and generosity, to name a few.

Character is about how your children behave or, more specifically, about how they react or respond to situations. It is a personal code of conduct that develops as your children grow and mature. Instructing children to be honest and then expecting that outcome isn’t enough. You have to show them. A child won’t know how to treat people with respect until you have modeled this approach. No child will be naturally inclined to forgive, but a child can learn how to forgive by watching you. Before people live by the truth, they have to see the truth in action and recognize its value.

The first step in establishing character in children is for their parents to agree together about which values are important. This might include sitting down with your spouse on more than one occasion and mapping out a list of character traits that you jointly believe are essential to infusing positive moral fiber within your children’s psyches. To begin this process, think about your own childhood and the traits that were or were not encouraged in you. What example did your parents give you? How did you learn to distinguish right from wrong?

The Word of God already provides a foundation for the kind of character we should all seek to develop. Even though adults still struggle with abiding by these commandments, if you begin to teach them while your children are young, they will have a much stronger likelihood of not straying from them.

TRUTH

Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.

PROVERBS 22:6

While agreement on values may sound like a simple objective, you may find a significant contrast between what you and your spouse were taught in your respective childhoods. You might be surprised by the different ideas your spouse brings to the table. One parent may have come from a household in which generosity, respect, and gratitude were regularly exemplified, while the other may have been taught that little white lies are permissible, gratefulness is expressed for the most part on birthdays and holidays, and respect is optional, depending on the circumstance.

That first step toward agreeing on what is important to teach your children can be complicated, but with perseverance the goal can be reached. This list of values will be critical because it will be the baseline you use to educate your children over the next twenty years and beyond. Agreement is imperative; otherwise even the best attempts at training won’t work. Truth will be compromised and grace misconstrued. The parent who doesn’t agree that a particular value is important will overlook behaviors and won’t fight for what is vital.

My wife, Jane, and I refer to our list of values as “rules to die for.” We chose to call them that because we cherish these standards of excellence so highly that we would risk our lives to impart them. We went so far as to list them on a plaque that hangs on the wall just inside our front door. Anyone who comes into our house can clearly see what is important to us as a family—the truth we strive to live by.

In developing this list of “rules to die for” we did more than just sit down and discuss potential additions as a couple. We actually sought out and brainstormed with mentors or other adults who in our opinion were doing—or had done—a great job of raising their children. Why reinvent the wheel? During that time I was a youth pastor, so I was in a position to meet a lot of kids, as well as their parents. I observed these kids in an environment where their true character was displayed—without their parents watching. When I interacted with a teen whose character I admired, I sought out his or her parents for advice. Jane and I would treat the couple to a meal and then just sit back and pick their brains about what they were doing to inspire such great character in their children. Then we began to incorporate those nuggets into our own family life. It isn’t that we took verbatim everything they said to us and incorporated their practices as our own, but we took all of the information given to us by all the couples with whom we met and decided together which approaches fit the values we wanted our family to embrace.

You don’t have to be a youth pastor to encounter kids who exemplify the character traits you admire. Seek out friends or family members and gather their ideas for possible rules to die for. Then enlist the help of those closest to their kids to reinforce or model those ideals. For single parents in particular, this process could be extremely beneficial, though I would highly recommend this approach for all parents. This practice will help you avoid the extremes of being narrow-minded or what I will call “loose-minded”—which carries in my mind a connotation slightly different from “broad-minded.” If you do find yourself solo parenting, this practice may also help to relieve the pressure of raising children alone. “It takes a village to raise a child” is true of children of single and married parents alike.

Each family’s list of rules to die for will be unique. What might rise to the top in your household may not be as big a deal to someone else. For example, one family might allow their teens to watch PG-13-rated movies at a younger age than another, while still another might forbid them at any time. Regardless of what list of family values you end up with, the most important consideration is that you have developed them together and are mutually committed to standing behind them. Consistently presenting a united front to your children and not hedging on rules you have already labeled nonnegotiable is critical. Children will walk all over and manipulate parents who are inconsistent or who disagree with each other. For you as Christian parents, that unswerving united front should itself be one of your rules to die for!

STEPS TO DEVELOPING RULES TO DIE FOR

1. Identify a family or families you admire.

2. Write down two or three nuggets of wisdom they share.

3. With that information as a foundation, create your own list of rules.

Your rules to die for are not meant to be kept a secret. Once you have agreed on and established truths that will build character in your children, they need to be communicated clearly and in age-appropriate language. The most obvious way to communicate your values is to speak them verbally to your children. Certainly you can be creative in the presentation, but find a setting where you will have few interruptions and you can have their undivided attention. You will also need to reiterate and reinforce your rules from time to time. These rules will, directly or indirectly, be the stuff of conversations with your children throughout your lifetimes, but your greatest opportunity for getting this message across to them will be while they are still young and living under your roof.

Now comes the tough part. Making a concerted effort to come up with the rules and enforcing them with grace will require unending work backed by extraordinary perseverance. As parents, you have to follow through on these rules consistently, no matter how exhausted or busy you are at the time of a challenge or infringement. Most parents do a great job of communicating their rules and enforcing discipline the first couple of weeks or months, but as time passes, resistance slowly creeps in and begins to weaken resolve. You may grow weary of continuously dealing with the same issues and find yourself starting to ignore or turn away when you see something that needs attention. It won’t be long, in fact, before you start choosing golf or shopping over problem-solving. We’ve all done it from time to time. At this point, the whole system behind the “rules to die for” can begin to slowly unravel, like a ball of yarn rolling down a hill. You will need to put your foot down and stop the madness before it overtakes your life.

I am currently advising a gentleman—a really nice guy who is still unfortunately very disconnected when it comes to dealing with the realities of his family. Like most of us, he sometimes prefers to ignore things that are happening in his home because, frankly, the job can be overwhelming. Or maybe he simply doesn’t know what to do. But disengagement won’t solve anything; far from maintaining the status quo, this approach will likely make matters worse. I have had conversations with this individual about the importance of his accepting and understanding his role as family leader. Sometimes exercising that role entails applying truth and grace that can be tough to come by. Nevertheless, it is a vital part of parenting. He, like you and me, needs to accept full responsibility for that which is his responsibility, because his children are watching and learning from his example. So even though he may be tired or hesitant because he is unsure of how to proceed, he needs to make sure he stays engaged and continues to participate in these critical aspects of parenting.

TRUTH

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

MATTHEW 11:28

Instilling character in your child will take longer than a day or a week. It will take years of teaching, guiding, and demonstrating what is important. Traits like gratitude, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, respect, humility, loyalty, integrity, and kindness will be internalized and valued by your children only if you take the first step to ensure that they understand and embrace their importance. Once you have established your rules to die for and communicated them to your children, be ready to enforce them at all costs. If they weren’t important, they wouldn’t come with such a high price—the cost of raising responsible children.

The progression entails establishing what the expectations are, clearly communicating the standards to your children, modeling the behavior you want to see from them, and consistently enforcing the rules and doling out consequences upon violation.

As the parent, you are the primary enforcer wherever and whenever you find yourself with your kids. You can’t relinquish or soften your role when you are in the presence of others or when you are preoccupied or exhausted or just don’t feel like parenting. Integrity and consistency are key. If we establish rules “to die for” that have no real or dependable meaning, we have defeated the very purpose for which we created them.

As you consider all that is at stake, think about the Ten Commandments and God’s purpose for them. These truths are standards for us to live by—God’s “rules to die for”! They were designed both to develop character in us and to protect us from harm. God knew that because of our sinful nature, we would need His guidance to be written down in terms clear enough so as not to be open to interpretation. That is the view I urge you to take of your “house commandments.” Your children need to understand that these standards have been identified, defined, and developed by you, not by the opinion of your children’s friends or what their parents may think!

“You owe it to your children to teach them to make the right choices in life by serving as their example and their mentor, not their best friend.”

When one parent chooses to relinquish responsibility and places the blame for decisions or enforcement of the rules on the other, your authority as a parenting unit is undermined. This is true even if the two of you are no longer married to each other. It is especially critical that stepparents are on board and in agreement, or the children will be nothing more than confused. No matter what the extenuating circumstances, or even your physical proximity as parents, operating as one parenting unit is key to developing character in your children.

For that reason, it is essential that neither Mom nor Dad caves in on important guidelines to try to curry the kids’ favor. Stop worrying about whether your children like you and focus instead on setting up guidelines that will help them succeed in life. Put simply, this is your responsibility as parents. You owe it to your children to teach them to make the right choices in life by serving as their example and their mentor, not their best friend.

When one of our sons was in third grade, his mother and I had to deal with an honesty infraction through balancing truth and grace. Being honest at all times is a “rule to die for” in our home. If it is also a non-negotiable for your household, you have probably pointed out to your kids numerous times: “You will get into more trouble for lying than you will for whatever the offense is you want to lie about.” As a friend of mine expresses it, “If you lie, you won’t get by.”

This particular incident came to my attention as I was driving home from work. I had called my wife to see what she was doing and to tell her I was on my way home. She told me briefly about her day and then said, “Honey, when you get home, you have to deal with a pretty significant issue related to one of the kids.” Right then my heart skipped a beat. I rolled my eyes and felt my blood pressure rising. I was hugely disappointed. I wanted to point my car in the direction of the golf course and ignore my responsibilities, because the last thing I wanted to do after a tiring day was deal with one of the kids. But because I wanted to instill character within my children, I asked her to fill me in on the rest of the story.

“By the time I got home and my son and I had gone into what we call the ‘wobble’ room—a place where there is a little give-and-take—I was prepared for a great conversation.”

She proceeded to tell me that our son Josh had admitted to cheating on a test at school. After I hung up the phone, I found myself fuming. I remember thinking, Boy, am I going to nail that kid when I get home. I can’t believe he would do that sort of thing! Right at that moment, a convicting realization forced its way into my internal monologue: when I was in the same grade, I also had cheated at school.

The rest of my drive home was consumed with a conversation I had with myself about how I would talk to my child, incorporating an admission that I had struggled with the same scenario at the same age and stage. How would I explain that although this was unacceptable behavior, I had done the same thing? By the time I got home and my son and I had gone into what we call the “wobble” room—a place where there is a little give-and-take—I was prepared for a great conversation.

My son, however, looked sheepish and miserable as he slouched against the wall with his head hung. When he looked up at me, I found myself staring into the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. He looked like one of those hound dogs whose face looks perpetually sullen. Although I immediately wanted to comfort him and allay his fears, I knew he needed to feel the discomfort and to associate it with his actions. He explained to me how the cheating had come about, and when he was done I paused for a moment and then said simply, “Son, when I was your age, I cheated, too!”

This surprised—even shocked—him, but I think my sharing that truth with him helped to take the edge off our whole conversation. He didn’t feel so alone, and I stood there as living evidence that people can successfully recover from their mistakes.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

The Truth about Developing Good Character in Your Children

The Truth about Developing
Good Character in Your Children