Dear Parent: What Every Child Wished Their Parents Knew

By Keith A. Craft

What if you had specific insight into your child's heart?

Dear Parent is more than parenting advice. It is an invitation to transform your entire approach to your child and shift how you view your role as a parent.

Keith Craft wrote Dear Parent 32 years ago and waited for his one-of-a-kind parenting philosophy to be pro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empire Publishing
• Release date: Mar 28, 2025
• ISBN: 9798348564902

Book preview

DEDICATION

To my PRECIOUS wife, Sheila. You are absolutely the greatest gift God could have given me. It is my deepest pleasure and privilege to be able to experience this life together with you. You are the greatest wife, mother, and Peppis in the whole world and I am honored God chose me to be your husband.

Thank you for your inspiration, your understanding, your perseverance, and most of all, your unconditional love. You’re the best part of me!

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

DEDICATION

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

A SPECIAL WORD TO FATHERS

A SPECIAL WORD TO MOTHERS

A SPECIAL WORD TO SINGLE PARENTS

Introduction

I Need You to Love Me

Please Be a Good Example

TEACH ME ABOUT GOD

TEACH ME ABOUT AUTHORITY

TEACH ME ABOUT RESPECT

TEACH ME HOW TO ACT

Please Don’t Penalize Me for Being a Child

LIFE IS A STRUGGLE

DON’T MAKE ME FEEL SMALLER THAN I AM

HELP ME TO GROW

Spend Time with Me

It’s The Little Things That Matter Most

If You Had It To Do All Over Again

THE HOUR GLASS

I Need You to be a Person of Commitment

BE COMMITTED TO YOURSELF

BE COMMITTED TO ME

BE COMMITTED TO THE BEST

I Need You to be Disciplined

BE DISCIPLINED IN YOUR DIET

BE DISCIPLINED AS A DISCIPLE

I Need You to Know Who You Are

Conclusion

ENDNOTES

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

September 2023

I wrote this book 32 years ago while my children were still children. Now, all three of them are adults, parents, and leaders in their own right. Sheila and I are celebrating 40 years of marriage, and over 583 months of dating as of writing this.

My first two, Joshua and Keela, graduated from ORU with degrees in Communications. Joshua Co-Pastors with me and his mom at Elevate Life Church where I am the Lead Pastor.

Keela is also a Pastor on staff and is our Leadership Development Pastor. She also helps host my Think Coach online group coaching and in-person Masterminds.

Whitney, our youngest, graduated high school at 16 with the intention of bringing worship to the world. She and her husband, Clay, are doing just that together at our church. They lead not only our worship department, but our entire creative team.

Joshua and his wife Courtnei have three daughters: Charlie (5), Harper (3), and Daisy born in September 2023.

Keela and her husband Cole have two sons, Arik (3) and Kaln (1).

Clay and Whitney have two daughters, Layla (8) and Livy (6), and a son Clayton Taylor born October 2023. Throughout this book, they will share their perspective on how my parenting philosophy has shaped them, and is shaping their children.

I wrote this book when I was 31. Joshua was 5, Keela was 4, and Whitney was 2. This book was originally written for a potential book deal with a large publisher and I decided not to release it.

32 years ago similar to today there were a lot of unmarried people who gave marriage advice, poor people giving financial advice, and people who weren’t parents giving parenting advice. Instead of joining this same group of theoretical experts, I wanted to see if my parenting philosophy actually worked in my own family first.

With that said, Dear Parent was written but remained unpublished for my children’s entire upbringing. I have left everything in this book the same as it was when I wrote it at the age of 31. The only additions and edits I have made to this book have been this passage, updating the statistics on fatherhood in the Introduction, a word to Single Parents, Chapter 7, and the Conclusion.

My children are the fruit of this parenting philosophy. Again, this is why I waited 32 years to publish this book. I have waited not only for them to grow up, but become parents themselves. I had a dream at 31, that someday my children would comment honestly and openly on this philosophy, and they have done that. I believe that fruit always speaks louder than the seed. Fruit doesn’t lie. Ultimately, it is not the theory or even philosophy that speaks, but it is THE FRUIT…that is THE PROOF!

My wife, Sheila, and I have made our best and imperfect efforts to raise our children in a way that pleases God. It has not been easy, but it has been worth it. We are in the greatest season of our life, seeing our children serve God, have children of their own, and choose to do life with us. I am confident that the same can, and will happen for you with your children.

The Greatest Assignment on this side of eternity that you will ever have is to reproduce the Godness in you, in your children! I pray this book will resource you. I pray this book will encourage you. I pray this book will help you elevate your thinking, so you can elevate your life and be empowered to elevate the lives of your children. I pray this book will serve as both a testimony and a template for you.

Believing God’s BEST for you and your dear family,

Keith

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

The purpose of this book is 3-fold:

All of my life, I grew up hearing that no one is ever taught how to be a parent. Age, season of life, and even a desire for children, are not qualifiers for raising children. What then qualifies someone to be a parent? A desire to love and nurture a child, accompanied with a desire to Be the Best you can be in life. So, this book is written to inspire you to love and nurture your child, and to inspire you to Be the Best you can be as a person.

This book is written to hopefully help open the parent’s eyes to a child’s understanding and their view of the world. As parents, it is easy to forget the special gift that children are from the Lord, not to add pain and sorrow, but joy and fulfillment to the life of a person.

Children are the Future. The world will be a better place to live in, if we do a better job of raising our children.

Children are the greatest gift that God gives to you as a parent and to the world as a gift from God! And you, as a parent, are their greatest resource. You are the example that they will follow. I trust this book will help you. I hope it will inspire you to be better. I believe that it will give you insight into parenting and more importantly, a child’s view and what their unspoken desires really are in a parent.

Keith A. Craft –1991

A SPECIAL WORD TO FATHERS

I once heard someone say, Being a good man is hard. Being a good husband is difficult. But being a good father is the most difficult task of all. What is a Father? Webster says, one who has begotten a child. While this definition is true, a good father is so much more than this.

Abraham Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

That is a wonderful sentiment, but many people don’t know the relationship that Lincoln had with his father. His father Thomas, routinely physically abused him for the slightest mistake, and actively tried to prevent him from attending school or reading books. His father was not present at his wedding, and never met Abraham’s wife or children. And Abraham did not attend his father’s funeral and would not pay for a headstone for his grave.

Here’s some recent stats on fathering in America:

These are just the stats on whether a father is physically present or not. Not whether they are a good father, or a good man. That’s even rarer than having a father in the home.

Ask yourself this question, What is a good father? A good father is someone who assumes a role greater than himself, by taking responsibility for being the best he can be, for the benefit of another, his child.

In Proverbs 29, the Bible tells us that without vision, people perish. What these statistics show is that a father is the chief visionary for his family and his children. Your chief responsibility is to have a great vision for your life. If you have a great vision for your life, you will have a great vision for your family; if you have a great vision for your family, you will have a great vision for your children. The vision you have, or don’t have for your children, will ultimately determine one of the most important things about them, their identity.

A good father is a man who takes responsibility to help his children discover, develop, and deploy their God-given identity and purpose.

The role of your children’s mother is to create a nurturing environment where your children can be developed.

Your role is to develop them. Without development, nurturing turns into over-nurturing, which creates insecure and dependent adults. Without nurturing, development becomes over-coaching where your children will base their value in life solely on performance.

There are many reasons being a good father is so difficult. Most men do not grow up with good role models for fathers, and therefore, the definition of manhood and the role of the father, is never quite understood.

Another problem is that most men evaluate their own manhood based on what they do in life. They see life through the myopic view of their achievements, occupation, and position, rather than focusing on who they really are and who they want to become. Their self-worth is based on their position in life, rather than who they are as a person. They don’t see themselves as God sees them, they see themselves as other people see them.

Many men also misunderstand their role in their children’s life, because they don’t understand the role God actually gave them. They see themselves as being authoritative and they tend to operate from a position of power, rather than being the loving and caring father that their children need.

For many men, intimacy, the ability to be known deeply and personally, is difficult. Men are expected in our society to keep their feelings to themselves. Any show of emotion, outside of the sports arena, is deemed as weakness. Culture has often taught us that vulnerability is the highest form of this weakness.

Again, there are many reasons being a good father is so difficult. I want to encourage you to understand that you can be any kind of father you want to be. This book is to, hopefully, help you know what your children need from you. Remember, you cannot love your children too much. You cannot show your children too much affection. You will not harm them by being the best father that you can possibly be.

If you had a bad father, use the lack you experienced with your own father to help you know what not to do. If you had a good father, use the good in your father to help you know what to do better. No matter what you do, remember this: The greatest influence on a child’s self-image is a close relationship with their father.

Always remember, the greatest thing you can do for your children as their father, is to BE A MAN OF GOD. Make decisions and live your life based on the principles found in God’s word, the Bible. Your commitment to do this will protect your spirit and soul and will also protect your children.

The second greatest thing you can do for your children is to love their mother, your wife. Your children did not choose you, you chose to have them. This is a tremendous responsibility. Every choice that you make in life from the point these children are conceived will directly affect them. You need to take this seriously and solemnly. Remember this, no matter what you do, one day your children’s lives will remind you how your choices affected them.

Your child’s self-worth will be in direct relationship to how you see yourself. If you realize your own value, then you will make decisions that will increase your value as a person, and the value that your children place on their own lives will be in direct proportion to the value you place on yourself.

The consequences of making bad choices when you have children, goes way beyond what happens to you. Your bad choices will hurt your children forever. The good news is that your good choices will bless your children forever! You get to decide the choices you make. And in deciding the choices you make, you are deciding what your children will experience in their future. The role you play is of utmost importance.

One word about divorce and children outside of marriage. If you have had children by someone who you are not currently married to, don’t ever make your children your negative sounding board. Making someone else look bad to your child, will actually only make you look bad. And in many cases, the child feels uncomfortably caught in the middle, hearing bad about both from both sides, and yet loving both. Your negativity will breed in your children insecurity, doubt, and lack of respect for marriage and authority. This permanently scars children for life.

If you have already engaged in this negative type behavior, I want to encourage you to apologize to your child and let them know it will never happen again. The only exception to this would be, if a child would be in danger from being around this person.

Even if you are divorced, or unmarried to the other parent of your children, you are still their parent. You will never stop being their parent. Your situation may be difficult, but you can still be the best person/ parent you can be starting right now.

A SPECIAL WORD TO MOTHERS

It is amazing to me the difference in the definition Webster gives for father and mother.

A mother is not someone who has simply begotten a child but a mother gives birth or life to a child. A mother, Webster says, is the maternal source of tenderness and affection.

I find the comparison of how Webster defines a father’s role and a mother’s role very interesting. I also find it typical and unfortunate that most men see their role as less significant than a woman’s in raising children. All one needs to do to find that this is a modern day myth, is to interview a few prisoners behind bars. God never intended for children to be raised by a single parent, father or mother. This statement is not meant to condemn you if you are a single parent, but you must be alerted to the fact that all children need the influence of male and female parents.

Unfortunately, in the world we live today, the vast majority of single parents are mothers. Very few women are raising children alone because the husband has died. Most single women are raising children alone, because the father has abdicated his role as a father.

As a mother, you are vitally important. You wouldn’t be reading this book if you weren’t already a parent or were soon to be one, so there are a few things I would like to say to you:

First, you set the tone in your home. You carried these children for 9 months, your home is an incubator, just like a womb. The environment you create will be healthy or unhealthy. Therefore, your children will grow healthy or unhealthy because of you. Your emotional state will be the state of your family. The decision you make to be healthy mentally, emotionally, and spiritually will create a loving and peaceful home. If you are unhealthy, you will create an unhealthy environment that will stunt the growth of your children.

Secondly, the greatest and most difficult job you will ever have is in the home. It is my opinion and I do mean opinion that after speaking to millions of young people, the best-rounded and most confident young people come from homes where mothers are home.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not asserting that the only place a woman has is in the home. But you, as a woman, are the nurturer and builder of the home your children live in. That is not your husband’s primary responsibility, nor does a man necessarily possess that ability. God created men and women radically different. And He was intentional in His creation. If you choose to have children, the best place you can be is in the home. Of course, you can be anywhere you want to be, and do anything you want to do. You don’t need my permission or approval. But, by having children, you have decided maybe without realizing it that being a mother is the greatest role you can play on this earth. If a woman finds more fulfillment in doing her job outside of the home than she does being a mother, she is deceived and has lowered herself to a wrong mentality that most men have: finding their self-esteem based on what they are doing, rather than who they already are and are becoming. Furthermore, it is my opinion that this type of woman never should have become a mother in the first place. The feminist who says I am WOMAN, hear me roar! will vehemently disagree with me. She will say, You have no right to speak for or to any woman, because you are a man, and besides, why can’t a woman have the best of both worlds?

There is no such thing as the best of both worlds. You’re trying to create a world where you get what you want, and your children get what they need. You can’t always do both at once. One will suffer for the other. The best world you can live