Your Kid Needs Help!

Introduction

Your kid needs help. 

No parent wants to hear that. We don’t have a problem saying it under our breath to other parents as their children roll watermelons down the produce aisle at the grocery store or spend six hours kicking the back of our seat on the airplane. 

Your kid needs help.

Not mine.

The truth is that all of our kids need help. And the help that they need can only be provided by their parents.

Our kids need help.

But more and more parents are passing off their responsibility to others. They’re asking coaches to turn their boys into men or teachers to turn their girls into women. They’re asking grandparents to fund their lifestyle. They’re asking the government to babysit them. As a result, we are seeing a generation of kids who’ve earned scholarships to great schools but still don’t know what it means to be an adult. We are seeing kids who view authority figures as automated teller machines that exist only to dispense money and other goodies. We are seeing kids grow in physical stature but never to the level of maturity that helps one to make tough decisions and to think freely.

This is why the job of a parent is important. Coaches, teachers and grandparents are important and they can certainly help us in our task but we are the ones who are given the responsibility to raise our children. The village can help but what it really takes to turn our boys and girls into men and women is parents who are willing to do their job. 

Every day of their lives, our children place a help wanted ad in front of us. To the naked eye it may seem as though all the help that they want is with tying a shoe or learning how to find x in some math problem. But it runs much deeper than that. They need help with growing up. They need you to teach them how. They need  you to show them. 

The job isn’t always easy. Sometimes it feels like you must be having a stroke. Other times it can be frightening. Especially if you didn’t exactly grow up under the best of parental situations. Is it possible to be a good mom when your own mom was terrible or are you destined to become the person who you promised you never would be? How are you supposed to teach your son how to change brake pads when no one was around to teach that to you? These are the questions that a lot of parents ask themselves. Thankfully, as he does with any job that he gives to us, God provides grace for seemingly impossible tasks. 

For most of my childhood I had a frightening hunch that I would one day be a dad.  My hunch was frightening because I was raised by a single-mother.  What did I know about being a dad?  One day my kid would ask me questions that all dads know how to answer. All dads but me.

“Dad, how do you clean a fish?”

“Just cut his head off, son.  The rest should take care of itself from there.”

“Dad, what does a spark plug do?”

“Hey look, a butterfly.”

My senior year of high school I failed out of a trigonometry class and got put in a wood shop class. This excited me.  Trigonometry didn’t seem to have a lot to offer but wood shop would probably help me to learn some dad things.  This way, if my kid ever asked me what a spark plug did I could at least build him a bird house.  My first few days in wood shop were spent telling jokes and seeing who could hammer a nail into a board the fastest.

And then, almost as quickly as it started, I got taken out of that wood shop class.  I don’t think anyone else, in the history of public education, has ever been taken out of wood shop.  Wood shop classes exist for the kids that get taken out of other classes.  When school administrators pull you from a wood shop class, it’s sort of like getting kicked out of prison.  My fears of fatherhood remained.

So instead of wood shop, I got put in an electronics class.  I was okay with this.  Now, whenever my kid would ask me what a spark plug does I could teach him how to slide his church shoes on the carpet and electrocute his friends.  That’s classic dad stuff, right?  Unfortunately, all we ever did in electronics class was watch movies.  The movie we watched the most was Short Circuit starring Steve Guttenberg.  The good news was that I got an A in that class.  The bad news was that now, if I ever had kids and they asked me what a spark plug does, all I would be qualified to do is show them a Steve Guttenberg movie.

Eventually, my fears were realized. I became a father to two boys.  I don’t know a lot of dad stuff and I think my kids are on to me.  My oldest son wants to build a tree house.  I’m really hoping Jesus comes back before that time comes.

To compensate for my lack of knowledge, I try to spend a lot of time with my boys doing what I did as a kid: playing outside, playing on the floor, praying, reading the Bible, loving mom and watching Kung-Fu Theater.  Sadly, Kung-Fu Theater doesn’t come on anymore but there are worthy substitutes.

I always pick up my youngest son, kiss him and ask him who he loves.  He’s 16 so he really hates when I do this.  No, really he’s a lot younger than that.  But every time I ask him who he loves he does the same thing.  He points at the wall, or the ceiling, or the refrigerator.  Anything but dad.

One day I was asking my son this question and he was giving his usual response when his older brother walked up and said, “Hey dad, ask me who I love.”

I sensed a Hallmark moment coming so I gladly played along.

“Who do you love more than anybody in the whole world?”

“Mom!”

For a minute I felt like a real loser.  I should have petitioned to stay in that wood shop class.  But then it hit me.

Maybe my son loves his mom so much because he sees how much I love her.  And maybe he’ll grow to love Jesus even more because of how much I love Jesus.  In a way that’s kind of intimidating but it’s also very liberating.  Who cares if I don’t know how to do a lot of dad stuff?  If I can just, by God’s grace, love my wife like Christ loves the church (Ephesians 5:25), train up my boys in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4) and love Jesus more than anything else (Deuteronomy 6:5), I think all of the rest will be just fine.

Our kids aren’t too concerned with what we know. That’s not what their help wanted ad is all about. What they really want is someone to watch. They want someone to listen to. There is no one more equipped for that job than a mom and a dad. And when what we tell our kids matches up with what we show our kids, we are well on our way to a job well done.

I hope that this book helps you in that process.