Grace Based Parenting: Get It!!!

I just finished Grace Based Parenting by Tim Kimmel. Wow, wow and wow. What a beautiful, uplifting, encouraging book. If you are a parent who is tired of feeling like you are battling your children everyday, this is the book for you. Tim shows us how to parent in a way that is grace-filled, that releases our homes from legalism and lets our children truly live as God intended: free in Christ.

I cannot recommend this book more highly. I came away feeling refreshed and more confident as a parent. Parenting shouldn't be a daily downer; it should be uplifting. Tim has helped me see how to accomplish this.

Tim focuses on the three inner needs that every child has: a need for security, a need for significance and a need for strength. He approaches each of these in its own chapter revealing how parents can provide love for security, purpose for significance and hope for strength. He then discusses the freedoms children should experience to assure they do have the previous three elements in their homes: the freedom to be different, the freedom to be vulnerable, the freedom to be candid and the freedom to make mistakes.

I learned so much from this book, but one of the things I learned that stands out is that our children should be free, not strapped down with meaningless rules that breed fear of the world. Meaningless rules and parenting out of fear, out of a desire to keep the world away from our kids, doesn't produce godly minded children. I can vouch for this truth. Time after time I have watched teens from Christian homes leave and deny their faith. As I read the book, I realized that these teens grew up in fear-based homes, homes of legalism to keep the world out, but these homes just left children weak and open to attack when they did meet the world.

This book is challenging. It will challenge your preconceived notions about Christian parenting. It will make you take a hard look at your parenting. But it is a good look. I am so glad I read this book. I kept thinking, "I am glad I found this early in my daughter's childhood." This is a book I feel every Christian parent should read. It's a book that will probably end up a baby shower gift that I will give over and over and over!