Owner or Ambassador?

Let’s take a look at the third area of distinguishing between the two styles.

3. SUCCESS: what you define success to be.

OWNER: These parents tend to be working toward a specific catalog of indicators in the lives of their children that would tell them that they have been successful parents. Things like academic performance, athletic achievement, musical ability, and social likability become the horizontal markers of how well they have done their jobs. Now these things are not unimportant, but they simply are unable to measure successful parenting. Good parents don’t always produce good kids, and parents should constantly be asking themselves where they get the set of values that tell them whether they have “good” kids or not. I am afraid many good parents live with long-term feelings of failure because their children have not turned out the way they hoped.

AMBASSADOR: These parents have faced the scary truth that they have no power at all to produce anything in their children. Because of this they haven’t attached their definition of successful parenting to a catalog of horizontal outcomes. Successful parenting is not first about what you’ve produced; rather, it’s first about what you have done. Successful parenting is not about what achieving goals (that you have no power to produce) but about being a usable and faithful tool in the hands of the One who alone is able to produce good things in your children.

Next week we will look at the last distinguishing factor. Till then let us work on the above area.