By Ogova Ondego
Published April 19, 2024
Dysfunctional families, peer pressure, mass media and permissiveness are destroying today’s children who are being forced to lose their innocence before their maturity.
Avoiding prescription, writers Stephen Arterburn and Jim Burns who work with families in crisis, provide parents, teachers, counsellors and youth workers with ways of recognising symptoms of children in trouble so as to assist them before they explode into crises.
Some of the problems addressed in their book titled When Love Alone Is Not Enough: Parenting Through Tough Times are sexual promiscuity and abuse, homosexuality, Aids, pornography, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse (tobacco, alcohol, drugs), the occult and satanism, and runaways.
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This book is aimed at assisting parents to prevent crises and also to help children already in trouble. The writers emphasise that parents are charged with the responsibility of moulding and shaping their children into healthy, thriving people. For this to happen, the writers say, parents may make wrong turns, meet bumps and even be bruised but that the result will be worthwhile if they do not give up.
Reminding parents that it is never too early nor too late to influence their children good character, Arterburn and Bums urge them to enforce discipline with consistency, express affection for their children, help boost the child’s self esteem and love and savour the relationship with their children.
Although the world has never been easy for anyone, childhood today presents challenges never experienced by contemporary adults.
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In parenting, the writers reiterate, love alone is not always enough but is just the beginning.
There can be no denying that today’s children live in a media-bombarded time in which they receive messages that contradict what their parents teach them. Even then, When Love Is No Enough emphasises that parents set standards of living for their children.
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Children should know what their parents expect of them and the consequences for going against acceptable behaviour.
“Children today want to know what’s expected of them. If your children don’t know their boundaries, they don’t know whether … they are violating the family rules,” the authors say.
