Advice to Parents: 1 Lifelong Commitment + 1000 Interventions = 1 Healthy Child

(Audio in Spanish)

One of the most important things is to understand that being a parent is a lifelong commitment, but it is also an intensive, demanding commitment that requires many, many continuous hours of our lives to be invested in shaping the sensibilities of our children.

We want to raise children with solid spiritual values, hardworking, disciplined people, with a hunger for excellence and personal growth, subject to authority, lovers of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, humble, merciful towards others, capable of relating productively with other people.

To raise this kind of person, continuous, repeated interventions are required every day, every week, every month, every year. Being a parent is a mission, it's a work that demands everything from us, and that work also has great benefits and great rewards. It blesses us to have the privilege of seeing that child growing before us and to know that we have played, in a sense, in a very minimal way, a role similar to that of God.

We are instilling values into that life and determining what that life will be and will do in the future. That is to say, for me, it is so important that as we approach fatherhood or motherhood, we arm ourselves with the idea that this is something tremendously serious. It is not a part-time job, optional, when we feel like it, when we desire to. It is something that must be continuous, like a discipline of life: sitting down with our children and sharing experiences, trying to find opportunities to have dinner together or give them a little kiss before they go to school, or if we have the opportunity to pick them up from school, being with the teachers so they know us, and see us, and know that there is a father, a mother who is concerned about that child. Taking them for walks, taking free time to be with them, asking them questions about their day, being vigilant about the friendships they have, inviting their friends to the house so they feel free to be there with us, for us to get to know them better, opening our hearts to our children, so they see us living life and therefore can learn through life modeling how life is lived.

These are things that urban life has stolen from parents. In more rural, developing countries, children have many more opportunities to share farm tasks with their parents, and at night, there isn't much to do, so the family is compelled to be together and share, and they live in an extended family. Unfortunately, all of that has often been lost in the urban world, and so we have to artificially create those opportunities. There has to be a prior vision on the part of the parent that this is what is required. That is to say, there has to be a greater understanding of how to be a parent.

In many other countries and in many other societies, being a parent is something spontaneous, natural, that has already entered the collective sensibility of humanity, and there are simply established mechanisms that facilitate being an effective parent. But in the urban, modern, ultra-industrialized world, those opportunities do not arise so easily. We live in a much more atomized, more separated society, with great demands on our time, on our emotions, and if one wants to be effective as a parent, these conditions must be produced artificially and must be the result of a previously conceived vision, of a conscious understanding of what is required to be an effective parent.

In fact, there is no source I know of more adequate to instruct us in fatherhood or motherhood than the Word of God. God is the model par excellence of parenthood, and by seeing how God treats us, and how God disciples us, loves us, disciplines us, confronts us, instructs us through the Holy Spirit and His way of working with humanity, we can also learn to be effective parents. So my great counsel, number one, from a completely human perspective is: invest time in your children, energy, love, commitment, and seek in the Word of God the means, the source, the standard, the principal resource that will determine what qualities will rule and govern your relationship and your interventions with your children.