In His wisdom, God chose to create human beings and wire them to flourish within families. The family unit provides shelter, stability, love, and people to teach and train the child. God teaches us and we pass it on.
Keeping the Child Alive
Most people naturally understand the first job. Your child depends on you to live. You must feed them, provide shelter, and protect them from danger.
Loving Them
The second job really sums up all the parental responsibilities. After all, feeding your kids and teaching them are acts of love. However, it also includes caring for your child’s emotional well-being, playing with them, giving hugs, telling them you love them, and, generally, making sure they know they are loved.
Raise Functional Adults
Our passage for today speaks to this as well as to the next one. There have been movements in the past that pushed letting children figure things out for themselves. There are two problems with this philosophy.