No matter who or where we live, or what our goals may be, we all have one thing in common: a heritage. That is, a social, emotional and spiritual legacy passed on from parent to child. Every one of us is passed a heritage, lives out a heritage, and gives a heritage to our family. It’s not an option. Parents always pass to their children a legacy … good, bad or some of both.A spiritual, emotional and social legacy is like a three-stranded cord. Individually, each strand cannot hold much weight. But wrapped together, they are strong. That’s why passing on a positive, affirming legacy is so important and why a negative legacy can be so destructive. The good news is that you, with God’s help, can decide to pass a positive legacy on to your children whether you received one or not.
Today, if we don’t intentionally pass a legacy consistent with our beliefs to our children, our culture will pass along its own, often leading to a negative end. It is important to remember that passing on a spiritual, emotional and social legacy is a process, not an event. As parents, we are responsible for the process. God is responsible for the product. We cannot do God’s job, and He won’t do ours.
The Emotional Legacy
Sadly, we struggle to overcome a negative emotional legacy that hinders our ability to cope with struggles of life. But imagine yourself giving warm family memories to your child. You can create an atmosphere that provides a child’s fragile spirit with the nourishment and support needed for healthy emotional growth. It will require time and consistency to develop a sense of emotional wholeness, but the rewards are great.
A strong emotional legacy:
- Provides a safe environment in which deep emotional roots can grow.
- Fosters confidence through stability.
- Conveys a tone of trusting support.
- Nurtures a strong sense of positive identity.
- Creates a “resting place” for the soul.
- Demonstrates unconditional love.
Which characteristics would you like to build into the legacy you pass along to your children? Even if you don’t hit the exact mark, setting up the right target is an important first step.
The Social Legacy
In order to prosper, our children need to gain the insights and social skills necessary to cultivate healthy, stable relationships. As children mature, they must learn to relate to family members, teachers, peers and friends. Eventually they must learn to relate to coworkers and many other types of people such as salespeople, bankers, mechanics and bosses.
Nowhere can appropriate social interaction and relationships be demonstrated more effectively than in the home. At home you learned — and your children will learn — lessons about respect, courtesy, love and involvement. Our modeling as parents plays a key role in passing on a strong social legacy.
Key building blocks of children’s social legacy include:
- Respect, beginning with themselves and working out to other people.
- Responsibility, fostered by respect for themselves, that is cultivated by assigning children duties within the family, making them accountable for their actions, and giving them room to make wrong choices once in a while.
- Unconditional love and acceptance by their parents, combined with conditional acceptance when the parents discipline for bad behavior or actions.
- The setting of social boundaries concerning how to relate to God, authority, peers, the environment and siblings.
- Rules that are given within a loving relationship
The Spiritual Legacy
Parents who successfully pass along a spiritual legacy to their children model and reinforce the unseen realities of the godly life. We must recognize that passing a spiritual legacy means more than encouraging our children to attend church, as important as that is. The church is there to support parents in raising their children but it cannot do the raising; only parents can.
The same principle applies to spiritual matters. Parents are primary in spiritual upbringing, not secondary. This is especially true when considering that children, particularly young children, perceive God the way they perceive their parents. If their parents are loving, affirming, forgiving and yet strong in what they believe, children will think of God that way. He is someone who cares, who is principled and who loves them above all else.
Here are five things you do that predict whether your children will receive the spiritual legacy a Christian parent desires. Do you:
- Acknowledge and reinforce spiritual realities? Do your children know, for example, that Jesus loves everyone? That God is personal, loving and will forgive us?
- View God as a personal, caring being who is to be loved and respected?
- Make spiritual activities a routine part of life?
- Clarify timeless truth — what’s right and wrong?
- Incorporate spiritual principles into everyday living
Thrive for all three!!!
