“You Don’t Love Your Daughter.”

We were young parents. Our daughter was four, and we were expecting our second child. We lived in relative isolation as missionaries on a pioneer mission field. It was our third year on the field. There was no one around us to speak into our lives other than the Buddhist Cambodians around us. Then a pastor and his teen daughter came to visit. What he said to us before he left changed us forever. He challenged our love for our daughter.

We had a good time with them. They were our first foreign visitors to our rural province. The spiritual fellowship was a true encouragement and blessing. It is always helpful for long-term cross-cultural gospel workers to see what life on their mission field looks like through the eyes of a visitor. It reminds them of unique blessings and challenges in ways that might be forgotten or overlooked as missionaries become familiar to their new ministry home.

A Shocking Revelation: Misguided Love

Before this pastor friend and his daughter left us, I asked him if he observed anything in our family life that concerned him. Jennifer and I were at our wits end with our four-year-old. She was a little terror. Every day there was a battle. We were parenting the best we could, thinking we were doing everything that there was to do to raise our daughter well. But something was wrong. We wondered if he could give some insight.

When I asked him, he acknowledged that he was waiting for an opportunity to talk about something that concerned him. He said, “You don’t love your daughter.” My wife and I were absolutely shocked to be told this. We loved our daughter! We were Christians, even missionaries! While we were reeling from his words, he added something like this: “I don’t mean that you don’t love her at all. You don’t love your daughter like God loves you. Every time that little girl turns around, she gets disciplined. Every disobedience, every misdeed, results in correction. She is constantly being rebuked and disciplined. She can’t turn around without getting in trouble. God does not treat you like that.”   

The Right Standard for Parenting: God’s Love

Here are some takeaways we had from that conversation:

1. We didn’t need to take disciplinary action for every misdeed big and small. We needed to be patient and longsuffering while also be consistent in our training of our children. Our children are children, after all. Are we not very grateful that God is slow to anger and great in mercy towards us?
2. We needed to reserve stern punishment for just a small range of sinful behavior. Everything else worthy of correction needed to be dealt with using much lighter measures of encouragement. For us, that meant stern punishment would be reserved for direct disobedience, lying, and violence towards siblings. Are we not thankful that God is slow to chasten us sternly?
3. We needed to actively love our child when correcting, not disciplining her from anger, frustration, exasperation, or with impatience. Again, don’t we find great comfort in a God that is longsuffering and gentle, forever kind and good?

We had really gotten off track. We were not showing God’s love, His character, to our child. Our parenting needed an overhaul. Our own sin and ignorance had led us astray. We were greatly humbled, ashamed, by this discovery.

A Test of Love: Provocation or Encouragement?

Our guests returned home, and we began to train our daughter according to God’s ways, according to His love. We saw an immediate change within days. After a few weeks, we had a different daughter! It was so heartbreaking for us to realize that our harsh and overbearing parenting was driving our little daughter to respond in such sinful ways. Praise the Lord for working in us and sparing our children from a childhood dominated by this truly “toxic” environment.

We had been guilty of parenting in the very way which God commanded us not to through Paul. As the father, I take responsibility for this failure. Paul said,

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), and, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (Colossians 3:21).

The Amplified Bible gives a very helpful explanatory paraphrase of Colossians 3:21:

“Fathers, do not provoke or irritate or exasperate your children (with demands that are trivial or unreasonable or humiliating or abusive; nor by favoritism or indifference; treat them tenderly with lovingkindness), so they will not lost heart and become discouraged or unmotivated (with their spirits broken).”

I was provoking my daughter. Daily. She felt the harshness as injustice. Our daughter did not feel loved and cherished. This stirred her little heart to anger and rebellion, even if she had no conscious thought of the reasons why.

If you would like to meditate on these two passages further, consider reading Two Powerful & Practical Commands for Fathers: One DO & One DON’T.

The Powerful Influence of God’s Love

By God’s grace, as our parenting changed, so did she. My point is not that there is always a direct correlation between our children’s actions and choices and our parenting.  However, often there is a direct correlation as the Holy Spirit through Paul teaches in the above verses.

Parents have great power over their children to direct them for good or evil. The emphasis in these verses is the tremendous influence of faithers upon their children. This power and influence is exercised through the HOW of parenting. How parents teach, correct, train, discipline, is as important the doing of it. Why? How we parent reveals whether or not we really love our children as God loves us.

Praise the Lord for His forgiveness and cleansing when parents fail. We serve a patient and kind God that disciplines His children faithfully and consistently with love (Psalm 103:8-14; Hebrews 12:5-11).

We Christian parents must learn to love our children as God loves us (and them). With God’s love as our standard, we influence our children for good, toward God. If we fail to love our children as God loves us, we drive them away from God. Are we provoking our children to anger and resentment, or are we encouraging them to love and good works?

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), Copyright © 2008 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Photo by Ryan Stefan on Unsplash