A door-to-door salesman knocks on a door and a five-year-old boy opens the door, holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The little boy takes a sip of the beer then a little smoke on the cigarette.
“Can I help you?” asks the boy.
The shocked door-to-door salesman asks the little boy, “Are ... are ... are your parents home please?”
The little boy smiles and replies, “What do you think?”
Although thousands call me “Father” I have no children, so I employed the services of someone who is an excellent parent and an excellent human being (I think the two go hand in hand) to edit and improve this column.
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Parenting has never been ‘easy’ and there’s no book or even YouTube video to prepare you for the real thing, and everybody starts as an amateur.
TV shows and media adverts try to tell us what to wear, eat, look like, talk and basically what to believe about a whole range of subjects. Television preaches with more passion than any priest I know. Children are influenced by the zealous preaching of Australian television’s doctrines, so as a parent, you need to be wise enough to identify what can lead them into troubled lives.
While parents blame television and the internet as corrupters of children, it’s parents that allow children to have televisions and unsupervised internet in their bedrooms.
Nobody doubts that even careless parents love their children.
Television preaches with more passion than any priest I know.
- Father Brendan Lee.
And look at how passionately some parents get behind their children’s sport and only because it is their child and every parent wants to see their child win.
Parenting is a great privilege that is a gift from above. It is a vocation from God.
Just as the priesthood is a full-time vocation, so is parenting. Parenting consists of individual understanding of each child, their strengths, their weaknesses, and guide them with appropriate guidance and love.
Guidance must always be given in love, to better and strengthen the individual to face the world with courage and fearlessness.
If it is true that children are the product of their parents, and if it is true that the youth are our future, then it is also true that parents are the present, and to some extent, our future hangs on what they do now in the present.
