Ideas for strengthening families (Part 3)

Recently I shared two great ideas my wife came up with for strengthening family life. Now I’d like to share a couple of ideas I got from elsewhere that particularly focus on helping parents follow Ephesians 6:4 (“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord”—NIV).

The first idea is having a regular date with each of your children. I was taught this by John Gray, the Senior Minister at St John’s Park where I served as an Assistant when I first graduated from Moore College. I’m sure the idea is not his originally, but he modelled it with his kids.

In brief, every second Wednesday, I arrive home early just after school finishes. (I also start early on Wednesdays.) And on a rotating basis, I take one of our three daughters out for ‘time alone with dad’.

We get a milkshake and something nice to eat, and then my daughters get to choose something they want to do with me. It could be a bike ride, or a trip to the beach in the warmer months. We’ve also often visited Wollongong Art Gallery. Occasionally we’ve gone shopping.

And my jaw dropped when my wife—against all expectations!—suggested we try Timezone. When we go there, we omit buying something to eat to keep costs down, and we avoid the shooting games (not that my girls are interested in them). I was recently defeated by one of them in air hockey for the first time.

But of course, the point of all this is not just to hang out. It’s to remind each of my daughters that I love them and am interested in them individually, and that I want to spend time with them. In particular, I hope hanging out makes it easier for them to talk to me.

You can’t force quality conversation. Sometimes we talk in a way that connects at a deeper level—conversations about how our family is going or about the things of Christ. Sometimes not. But as the cliché goes, quality time seems to flow more readily from quantity time.

Of course, obviously, sometimes the father needs to take the initiative. I have found Rick Gamache’s list of questions to ask your kids (HT: Justin Taylor) to be a helpful springboard for moving to deeper matters. (But this resource should not be used as a straitjacket, and I don’t use it every date, let alone work through the whole list each time!)

My older twin daughters are moving into high school next year, and recently it was suggested to me that I try a variation with them—a date night, instead of an afternoon. First I would encourage (and resource!) my wife to take each of them out to buy a special dress. Then I would take each one to a restaurant of their choice—again, individually—and model for them how a gentleman should treat a young woman.

I’m thankful to have received these ideas from more experienced Christian fathers than myself. If you are a dad and you have heard about this sort of idea before but have never got around to putting it into practice, maybe it’s time to rearrange your priorities to make it happen.