Your Kid Needs Help!: Why Moms and Dads Matter

By Jason Sanders

Because of a lack of parental engagement, a lot of moms and dads are raising kids instead of shaping those kids into men and women. Too many parents have relied on coaches, teachers the government and even their own parents to accomplish the task of raising men and women. The result has been an overwhelming failure. Through observation, short stories and humor, Your Kid Needs Help! highlights the importance of moms and dads in hopes of encouraging them to take the lead in shaping their children before its too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490858494

Jason Sanders

Jason is a husband and father and the pastor of Towaliga Baptist Church in Jackson, Georgia.

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Copyright © 2014 Jason Sanders.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright (c) 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5848-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5847-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5849-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014919524

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/03/2014

Contents

Introduction

1. Teach Them How to Serve Others

2. Teach Them How to Stand Up

3. Teach Them How to Trust God When Things Get Scary

4. Teach Them That God Is Good

5. Teach Them What Sports Alone Cannot

6. Teach Them About The One Who Is Always There For Them

7. Teach Them to Take Risks

8. Teach Them How to Fail

9. Teach Them the Glory of Being Called Ugly Names

10. Teach Them How to Take It Easy

11. Teach Them That They Matter to You

12. Teach Them That There’s Nothing Average About Being Average

13. Teach Them Those Hard Truths That Every Kid Needs to Hear But Most Parents Are Too Scared to Say

14. Teach Them That Sometimes Being Broke Ain’t So Bad

15. Teach Them Why The Kitchen Table Is Important

16. Teach Them Grace by Showing Grace

17. Teach Them, Don’t Provoke Them

18. Teach Them about the Dangers That Come with Busyness and Success

19. Teach Them to Pursue Their Goals with Integrity

20. Teach Them How Fear and Bravery Can Work Together

21. Teach Them That There Really Is a Difference Between Boys and Girls

22. Teach Them to Talk to You

23. Teach Them How to Laugh

24. Teach Them the Fine Art of Romance (On a Budget)

25. Teach Them Those Lessons That Can Only be Learned at the End of a Bad Day

26. Teach Them Personal Responsibility

27. Teach Them the Dangers of Disobedience

28. Teach Them Why Profiling Is Important

29. A Word to Moms

30. A Word to Dads

31. A Word to Moms and Dads

32. A Special Word to Single Moms

33. A Final Word

Acknowledgments

Additional Resources

For Marsha

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 an 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 while asking grandparents to fund the whole process and the government to babysit them in the down time. 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