. Parents assumed a role never before seen in history: loving friends. And this has hurt us tremendously.

Many parents in the last 2 decades have neglected a very important aspect of their childrens development. With the prevailing wisdom being that we must do nothing to impede our childrens free expression and creativity, a valuable component of our childrens upbringing was tossed aside. Parents assumed a role never before seen in history: loving friends. And this has hurt us tremendously.


We cannot provide a strong, safe, structured place for our children by being their friends. We cannot expect our children to emerge into society as strong caring adults, by allowing them to say, do or get anything they desire. The parental role is one of responsive and responsible caring. By bringing a child into this world, by becoming a parent, we should be cogniscent of our responsibility to the world at large. They are our future.


For many parents this permissive liberal atmosphere has caused the erosion of many basic parental rights. The right to discipline, the right to raise or educate your child as you see fit are two areas where many parents have suffered. Parents have been unjustly arrested across the US for alleged child abuse. Many times the report came from their own child, unhappy with what in their world view, was an unfair curtailment of their freedom. Mom’s and Dads, in a desperate 11th hour attempt to undo years of indulgent parenting, find themselves accused of molestation and rape at the hands of their own flesh and blood. Losing jobs, homes and friends in the process. We have all heard of parents having CPS come and remove children from them for disagreements over educational and child rearing practices.


Permissive parenting has exacted a terrible toll on our family units. It is almost routine to hear neighbors share stories about how they swatted their 5 year old for playing with matches or other behavior, and had the child threaten to call the police. This would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.

Children need the safety of definite rules, and a structure of sensible guidelines. It is in a childs nature to test the rules, and it is our job to make sure they are enforced. Our job is to help them understand clearly what constitutes acceptable behaviour. It is our responsibility to help children understand that everything we do impacts others. As hopefully mature adults, we need to help children understand that there are consequences to everything we do in this world. And that if they lie, are rude, abusive, steal or behave in destructive ways, that we will give them the discipline they require. Period.

Spanking is still practiced in many American homes. It has it’s place in a parents role. There is a vast difference between spanking a child for a severe infraction and child abuse. I know this, I was a severely abused child. My father never spanked us without reason. It was never unjust, and it made sense to us, because consequences were consistently explained and used in our home. After he died, my mother became severely abusive with me. I knew the difference, because her beatings never made sense, and were always personal just to me as a human being. She simply hated me.


Children need the sense of safety and structure good parenting provides. Communication, love, affirming a childs worth, moral and ethical guidance, and the courage to love them enough to discipline them. When you give children these things, they see a world that makes sense, they feel secure and the bonds of trust between you grow strong and sure. Don’t love your child to death, love them into living. Living a full, rich meaningful life. We owe that to them and each other.