A Child's Future: In the Hands of Its Parents?

by Rev Dr Herbert Tan

The view of children as an asset in an agrarian society has changed to one in which they are seen as a liability. From contributing to the economic well-being of the family, today most children exist for the gratification of their parents. For many parents, their children’s future is a projection of their own dreams of what it means to do well in life.

Most parents place an emphasis on education for their children. Typical Chinese families, for example, push their children very hard to do well in school. Perhaps this originated from the Confucian philosophy that human beings are basically good but they went wrong because of lack of education, and so the emphasis on education in order to teach us to live rightly. Or it may be that past experiences have shown that with education, a family can climb up the social ladder and improve substantially its financial well-being. Therefore, many parents want their children to become doctors, lawyers, engineers and so on. They push their children very hard as though every child can be made to become a doctor or engineer, failing to see that each child is unique and gifted to contribute to society in different ways.

Christian Parents Are No Different

Christian parents by and large are no different from the average parent in society. If they have a child who is smart, they think of the child becoming a doctor. If they have a child who is smart and can talk well, they think of the child becoming a lawyer. Even some pastors and Christian workers think that way sometimes, out of frustration with their own state. They fail to see that children are a stewardship from God and that it is not for parents to determine their future but to discover what God’s plans are for their future.

In the parental push for a "good" education, we have inadvertently sacrificed a number of important aspects of our children’s lives. We have, for example, sacrificed important priorities that need to be built into the lives of our children. A number of parents tell their children to skip church and other aspects of Christian education to concentrate on preparation for examinations, saying that they can return to church after their examinations. When parents do that, they are indirectly telling their children that the things of God are not important.

If their child is going to get an "F" in a test, an extra one to two hours of studying will not help much but they will be building a dangerous priority system in the lives of the young ones. It’s like planting cow grass and expecting to see durians at the end. It is ironic that we would raise children on this system and at the same time expect them to be godly or end up marrying someone godly. A young man lost his potential life partner, a godly woman, who said, "Why should I continue with him… he is not even interested in the things of God?"

Education for Life

While parents want their children to have a good education, an area that is often neglected is education for life. Growing up, children get 30 to 40 hours of formal education each week, 20 to 40 hours of media education, more than 10 hours of peer education, zero to two hours of Church education and who knows how many hours of parental education. If we were to ask ourselves the question, "Which is more powerful in their lives, Christian or other influence?" we would have to conclude that our children are not getting a good influence in terms of life from the Christian perspective, especially if parents are not a factor in the equation. The world wins hands down!

If we are serious about our children’s future, we need to spend time interacting with them so that they have a vibrant personal relationship with God. We would be training them for godliness in the context of all of life.

Then, there is the other area of the calling of God in our children’s lives. It is a delicate act balancing our children’s personal desire in education and our own desires with God’s calling in their lives. One of the greatest areas of struggle for parents after investing so much in the education of their children, especially financially, is to be challenged to release them to God’s ministry. We think it is insane of our children to have had such a good education in fields like medicine, engineering and law to want to enter vocational ministry. We think we might have wasted our resources investing in our children only to "lose" them to ministry.

Parents Need to Change Their Mindsets

Perhaps we need to change our mindset and perspective of education and investment. We need to see that God’s work needs the best of our children, and that the educational opportunities that God has allowed for us to provide for our children are part of His process of preparing our children for His work. We should count it our privilege to have helped prepare our children for God’s work. If anything, we should be pushing our children to be educated and trained well for the kingdom of God. Perhaps we should even consider dedicating our children fully to God’s work while they are still infants before we find out how smart they are and have second thoughts. That way, if God should call them into vocational ministry, they would have had one of the best tracks of education provided by their parents in preparation for that. And if God is not calling them into vocational ministry, the education they have had would have prepared them to be one of the best marketplace missionaries.

A Child Is a Mirror of Its Parents

Who a child is and will be is often a mirror of who the parents are. The child reveals in major ways our motivations and values by the way they live and choose, and the kind of education they go through. While it seems that their future is in our hands as parents, we will do well to remember that they are only a stewardship and we will have them to influence and shape for only about 18 years… then they will be choosing their own life journeys. While they are with us, we need to seriously think what it means to be good stewards of their lives in order to bring forth fruit manifold as we engage ourselves in raising the next generation of leaders for the church of God.

Rev Dr Herbert Tan is a FamilyLife Consultant with MCCC. Married with 2 children, he does extensive training for families and leaders who work with youth throughout Malaysia. He is also a Strategic Resource member of South-East Asia Campus Crusade for Christ.