Unison Parenting Blog: Showing Loving Faithfulness to Your Child

What bigger trust is there than to be responsible for a child? We must not only show our faithfulness toward God in this charge but also our faithfulness toward our child.

I have long taught a class on the Spirit fruit of faithfulness, using three tenets to exhibit faithfulness toward God and others: (1) Say it, show it (2) Take an active interest (3) Make sacrificial choices. Here’s how those three principles apply to faithfully loving your child.

From decades in youth ministry, I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve known that are convinced they often say and show their love, and how many of their children have a different opinion. As a basic rule, I would say that if you feel like you’re doing it a bit too much, then the level of expression is about right.

To combine the first and second tenets, one way to effectively express love is by detecting and responding to your child’s love languages. In a short column, I won’t try to explain Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages, but the point is that if you can identify your child’s love languages, you can express your love in ways that will resonate strongly with them.

That effort starts with taking an active interest in them, which is what you should do in many ways. It might mean listening to them discuss their favorite video game until your head spins. It might mean doing their favorite activity rather than your preference. I often found that it means learning more about their topic of interest so you can have a good discussion with them, as you widen your own horizons to meet theirs.

This ties into the third tenet, making sacrificial choices. Investing time in their interest is one example. Cancelling an appointment to watch their performance is another example.

Throughout the day, you can make small sacrificial choices on your child’s behalf. You might have to ask them to wait a bit at times, but generally speaking, it means putting the interests of others, in this case your child, ahead of your own interests.

These three principles offer tangible ways to faithfully love all the members of your family.