Balancing Power and Authority in Parenting

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Jim, welcome to For Faith & Family.

JAMES LUCAS: Thank you so much for having me on the program, always a delight to talk to you.

LAND: Probably one of the most provocative parts of your book, and one that I think is going to, on first blush, challenge parents perhaps more than any other part of this book, is when you talk about the paradox of the exercise of authority and the sharing of power, and you state that master parents are in charge and exercise divine authority. Yet, at the same time, they look the other way while their children make their own decisions and do things their own way. So talk to us about this paradox of power and authority and the sharing of it.

LUCAS: You know there are two very interesting verses in the Bible that I know resonate very deeply with both of us and with many of our listeners. One says, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, and what an Amen. We are glad it’s His and He is the owner, but then in another passage it says, but the earth He has given to man. And I think this is that paradox that we see that obviously God is the owner of all and we are stewards of what it is that we have in our hands; but, somehow, He has shared ownership with us, He is sharing authority with us, He is sharing dominion with us, and I think if we exercise authority with our children, and it’s so easy to do, Richard, because they start out so little and they don’t know how to do anything and we are telling them everything to do; but I think if we don’t change that as they get out of those very early years, we end up creating rebels against us and probably mindless followers of their peers because we have taught them by telling them everything to do, we have been the voice outside their head, we have taught them that they need to listen to a voice outside their head and when they get to be adolescents or teenagers they just transfer that from us to their peers; then they are following them. If we go the other way and we share power without exercising authority, a real problem with a lot of baby boomer generation parents who, you know, wanted to have this freedom-oriented environment, we really arm children to do what they are not ready to do, they can’t or shouldn’t do, and so, really, the model that we see with God is that He is an authoritative servant, and I love that passage where it says where Jesus washed the disciples feet but the verse leads into that says He now knew that all power had been given to Him, and, you know, if we were reading a secular book and it said now all power had been given to this person, the next thing we’d see is they are giving out orders and they are bossing people around. What we find with Jesus is right after we are told all power had been given to Him, He turns into a servant. He is an authoritative servant and He is down and He is washing their feet. So, I think master parents have power, but I think they use it as a tool, not a goal. It is not something I lord over my children and, in fact, Jesus warned against people who pretended to be your benefactors but lorded over you, and we use our power to liberate people not to dominant. So what I tell parents is that, if there is no freedom in your home, if we haven’t found a way to let these children share power with us, then whatever else we can say, we are pushing the Holy Spirit out of the home because we are told where the Holy Spirit is, there is freedom. It says that Jesus came to set us free. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free and so, we have to find a way not to let our authority become a power trip for us but to be something where we say there is an opportunity here for me to bring them into making some decisions as well.

LAND: It is true that when you say that all power was given to Jesus, the next thing you would expect in the world would be they would be washing His feet instead of Him washing their feet. That’s the paradox of divine power and the paradox of life in the Kingdom. I’ve seen it happen in my own life. I am a baby boomer, and I used to be amused listening to my children. They would brag about how tough, in our children’s sort of friends, my wife and I were known as the strict ones, which we thought was a little disconcerting because, compared to our parents, on both sides, we were not strict. But, I think children yearn for these limits. They yearn for these guidelines; they yearn for parents to be parents.

LUCAS: I think that’s right and I think part of it is learning how to play that role. I do think they yearn for it; but if we don’t apply it, if we have good intentions but don’t apply it well, and I think I remember some of my kids sitting around the table saying the same kinds of things about me as well. There was an interesting thing in the Middle Ages as the use of octaves and structure came into music, there was a sense that those restrictive boundaries of we are going to have twelve keys in an octave and so on, that that was really going to restrict creativity, and the interesting thing is, is there was a huge burst of creativity right after that happened, and I think one of the illusions of our culture is that freedom means no boundaries when actually the greatest freedom, the freedom that comes with responsibility and a sense of self-worth and those kinds of things, actually comes from living inside of God’s boundaries, inside of His fences, and so these boundaries that can seem so restrictive are ironically the way to the best freedom and creativity and relationships. But I think when we start moving away from setting fences, that we allow our children to have a little room and when they are little, maybe those fences are just a few inches apart, but we keep moving those fences out as they show they can handle it. If they don’t, we leave the fences there and maybe even have to move them back in for a bit. But I think the differences between fences or boundaries on the one hand and rules on the other is just huge and I think when we come in and say do this, don’t do that, or whatever, rules say do this or don’t do this, boundaries say, you can do everything but this. I think Paul said everything is permissible, but then there are things that are not constructive or beneficial and so we tell them, these things are not constructive or beneficial but, you know, if you chose to wear those clothes today instead of the ones I laid out for you, you know, I can live with that. We can allow power shared at that level.

LAND: Now, one of the things that I found to be probably the biggest surprise and the biggest challenge of being a parent is how different my three children were. You know, they are their own remarkable personality from birth onward and what is the best way to handle one child is not the best way to handle another child. Tell us how you have found in looking at God as the master parent some lessons in how to deal with those individual differences in children.

LUCAS: That is such a great observation, you know, and I think this is one of the failures of just a huge percentage of the materials and workshops and things that are out there because they do have these templates where this model, one-size fits all thing, and we are all so absolutely unique. I mean, we have millions of experiences by the time we are our age that have made us into the person that we are that no one else has even come close to sharing ,and when I look at God as a master parent, He isn’t doing one-size fits all. You know, I think at one point, somebody came to Jesus and said, you know, Jesus was talking about things and they said, “Well what about Him?” And Jesus said that’s not your responsibility what I do with him, let’s just talk about what I’m doing with you and so His principles are consistent over time but the application of those principles, how He unshells those principles and applies them to James or Richard or whoever, or our children, I think that is where the diversity comes in in that application. I think as master parents if, again, we can get this idea that I am going to do it like God, I’m going to find a way to take these critical paradoxes and do them in balance, now I can watch my children and instead of saying, you know, this kind of thing always gets this sort of punishment, this sort of thing always gets this kind of reaction on building more restrictive boundaries, did they go over the boundary because there is a rebellious spirit behind it, which may be one of our children they are really pushing back against authority, and it is not just pushing against the fences to spread their wings; it is really rebellion against authority. But here’s somebody else that sort of went over the fence, but it was not because they were pushing against authority, it is human frailty again, they just made a mistake and went too far; they didn’t understand what the boundaries were and so, now we can say, we’ve got a principle of approach here that says we are going to set boundaries, use our authority to set these boundaries, but we are going to use our willingness to share power and do it like God to watch what somebody does as they come up against the fences. And if they go over it willfully and stubbornly, we are going to react differently than if they go over it again because they are stumbling over it because they are human and they just didn’t get it. There we are going to teach; the other way we are going to find punishment or do something else.

This For Faith & Family insight has been produced by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Join the conversation at ILiveValues.com.