How can dads work on having a good relationship with their kids?

Let’s start by understanding what we are talking about. How would you describe the ideal relationship between a father and his children? When we talk about a good relationship, what do we mean by good?

We’re talking about a relationship where the father loves their children, the children know it and experience it as love, and the children love their father. The father and children are able to communicate effectively with one another. They talk with one another in a way that builds each other up. The children know they can trust their father and can speak to him from the heart about what they are thinking and feeling and experiencing. The children look to their father for wisdom and discipleship. The children and father enjoy being with one another.

If we look at the way the Scripture describes the father child relationship, we see talk about honor. In Malachi, God says that is normal for a son to honor their father. A good parent child relationship involves respect. The book of Proverbs says that it is a real problem when a child dishonors their parents or makes them sad. That’s not normal biblically. The Bible talks about how it is a blessing when the hearts of fathers are turned to their children and children’s hearts are turned to their father. So, it’s a good thing when a father is thinking about his children’s best and his children are thinking about their parents best. In Jeremiah, God says that he is going to make his people walk by brooks of water in a straight path in which they will not stumble for I am a father to Israel. So being a father means you are considering your children’s interests above your own and you are trying to make their life easier. Jesus tells the disciples not to be like the Gentiles who are always worried about what to eat and wear, for your father knows what you need. He’s telling us we can assume that because God is our Father He is going to want to provide for our needs. There’s another place where Jesus tells us that whoever loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. He wants to highlight how devoted we must be to Him, so He takes this relationship that is supposed to be so unique, and saying, your love for me needs to be even more than your love for your parents. It's a judgment in the Bible when fathers are taking advantage of their children and when children are taking advantage of their parents. In Ezekiel, it's a judgment when children treat their fathers with contempt. A father provides. A father protects. God is described as the father of the fatherless. He’s a protector of widows. The book of Psalms talk about God as father delivering His people when they are in trouble. It says talks about God showing compassion to us like a father shows compassion to his children. Jesus says that even bad fathers give good gifts to their children. It should be normal for a father to want to bless his children and to make them happy. Job defends himself by saying I was a father to the needy. And what does that mean? He says I searched out the cause of him I did not know. A father is someone who comes to the rescue for his children. He’s looking out for their long term good. I think of the godly father in Luke who is waiting for his prodigal son to come home. When he sees him, he is willing to shame himself by running out to meet him. There’s a delight in this relationship. There should be a closeness between parents and their children. God uses the Father children relationship as a description of his relationship with Jesus.

The Bible pictures a positive, encouraging, helpful, loving relationship between fathers and their children. That’s the way it should be. But unfortunately, that’s not the way it often is. Instead, all too often the child is afraid of the dad. The dad doesn’t encourage their children but shames them. They see themselves as authority figures that have to lay down the law. The child knows he can’t cross him or he is in for it. The child doesn’t want to go him for advice because he is afraid about how his father is going to belittle him for needing it. The child doesn’t respect their father. The child doesn’t listen to their father because they don’t care what the dad thinks. Sometimes the child is acting like they are a Dad to their Dad. The child doesn’t want to spend time with their father and their father doesn’t really want to spend time with their children. When the father is with the children, he thinks it is boring and he just doesn’t like it. When fathers and their children are happy not to spend time with one another, that’s very sad and not the way God designed it to be. That is a sign this relationship is not clicking the way it should, and if we are going to be honest, all too often, it’s not really clicking. There are many fathers who struggle at building loving healthy relationships with their children.

One reason might be that they didn’t have that kind of relationship with their own parents. If you grew up without being in a positive relationship with your parents, it’s hard to know how to develop that with your children. You don’t know what it looks like. It’s hard to put something into practice when you have never really seen a good example yourself. Another reason might be that they don’t really understand the role of the parent in the home. They think, I’m the Dad or Mom. I’ve got to provide, or I’ve got to care for the children. I have these duties to fulfill. But they don’t think about their relationship with their child. The personal relationship gets put on the back burner because they are so focused on taking care of all these other areas and as a result, they are missing out on relational time with their children.

If you are a father who believes that you need to have a relationship with your children and not just tell them what to do, but when you are around your children, you realize you just don’t know how to relate to them. What do you do? While for some fathers this comes more naturally, for others spending time with children feels like spending time with someone from a different world. How can you improve in your ability to relate to children?


First step, pray that God helps you be interested in them. If you recognize this is an issue you don’t have to become the awkward father who is trying too hard and whose kids know it. Obviously, it’s good for your kids see you are trying but you don’t need to become a total goofball. Instead, ask yourself, how can I show interest in what is going on in my child’s life? If you really are interested in them the kids will know it immediately and they will thrive on that. Sometimes what happens when men who are not naturally funny and relaxed try to be funny and relaxed is that they actually end up acting weird and even mean. There are some men whom you can tell are trying to have fun with their kids, but it almost comes across like they are being a bully instead just because that’s not their natural way. So they should probably stop trying so hard to be funny and just be concerned about their kids good.

Another problem that a lot of men have is they are simply too fascinated by themselves to be interested in any one else. “What I like I like and is what I want to think about.” That’s a problem if you are trying to develop a relationship with kids because many times when you spend time with kids you find they are interested in things that are not interesting to you. Can you handle being interested in what doesn’t seem interesting to you at first or do you always have to talk about what you want to talk about? If you are going to learn to relate to children you have to learn to be interested in things not simply because they are interesting but because your children are interesting to you. That’s part of loving a person. If you are trying to find out what your children are interested in, watch them. Ask them questions. Perhaps they drew a picture. Ask them to explain it to you. Let them explain it to you without you interrupting. Too many times we want to be the lecturer Dad who corrects everything. But rather let the child make some choices and help them think through some of the consequences of those choices, but that’s how you bring to find out how they are processing information. Typically proud kids come from proud dads, so if you are a proud dad you will often have a proud kid because that is what they see. That’s why they don’t want to spend time with you and you don’t want to spend time with them. If you want them to humble themselves, give them an example of what it looks like by humbling yourself, and start with listening to them and asking questions and taking their responses seriously. This should become fun for you and your kids should see it. If you are interested in them like that, they will usually end up becoming interested in you. It’s been great to see this process at work in my family as my children ask me questions about books I am reading or songs I like. Usually it takes me a little while to answer, because I'm typically the one who's asking them that stuff.

One of the temptations in any friendships is that you want to relate to people how you like to be related to. If you're a quiet guy you want people to be quiet around you. If you're a talker you want them always to talk. If you like to do things you want to do those things that you like to do with them. But if you're going to have long-term relationships with your kids you must pursue unselfishness with everything you've got. Be willing to talk, if they're talkers. Be willing to be willing to go on walks if that's where they open up. Get into crafts if they like crafts. Do what it takes. It will help the relationship in the moment and you long term, because as you seek to be be interested in them like that you're developing a habit of looking out for their interests and as they get older you've developed it's going to continue and that will help the relationship stay healthy. At the same time, you will have made it obvious that you are looking out for their good. This is so important, because when your kids are older, you want them to know without a doubt, “If I asked my dad for his right arm he would gives it to me with joy and without manipulation.” Because, if your kids know that you're going to have a long-term joyful relationship with them.

I remember once talking to a leader who said he didn't like one of his children. That broke my heart. I don't think the problem was as much with the child as it was with the leader. While I don't know if there's a Bible verse I can give that says you have to like being with your children, affection and delight are included in love. If you don't have affection and delight in your children I think it's a problem with your love. You're also just missing out because there's so much you can learn about yourself and so much you can learn about life and so much joy that God has stuffed into the relationship between a child and his parent.

Sometimes people will talk about quality time over quantity time. When it comes to relationships, you generally don’t have quality time without quantity time. Don’t try and relate to your children five minutes a week and think that you are going to have a great friendship in the end. The more time you intentionally spend with them, the more opportunities there are to connect and talk and understand them. How do you do that when your life is so busy? One big step is actually trying. You have opportunities to spend with your kids, but you are going to have to be unselfish. When you go to the store to go pick up milk and bread, take a kid with you and when you take them with you, interact with them in a loving and fun way. One of the dangers to a good relationship is busyness. Either we don’t spend time with our children because we are busy, or when we are with them, we are not with them. You have to waste a lot of time to disciple somebody well. If you have to be so efficient all the time it’s not going to work. “I’ve got five minutes, now tell me your deepest sin.” People don't work that way. It usually takes an hour of nothing much happening to get those five minutes of someone feeling ready to tell you what is really going on in their life. They are not machines. They are not cars you can just fix and go on. It takes time to develop a good friendship with most people but it’s worth it. Your kids are definitely worth it. It’s work but it’s joyful work. If you are fighting the selfishness, it pays big dividends when they come to you later and are willing to talk to you about what’s really going on in their life or they ask you for help or they want to be with you.

Part of your job as a parent is correcting your children. This is sometimes where the relationship can feel difficult. But it doesn’t necessarily have to. You need to think a little thought about how you are correcting them. It is helpful to begin by remembering that they are people. For most of us, it’s not easy to be instructed. Imagine if you had someone following you around all day and giving you instructions about every single last thing that you were doing. You would get really tired of that super quickly. If you are thinking, but there’s just so much to correct them on, it may help for you to think about the difference between principle and preference. Many of us have more preferences than we think. We don't think we have them until we're in the moment and then they come out and then we recognize, oh wow, this is really important to me. They feel so obvious, we don’t even think of them as preferences. It’s good to learn to ask yourself, is this something I should really be serious about right now or is this my own personal opinion? If it's my own personal opinion, do I have a personal opinions about everything that I'm forcing on my whole family all the time? If you do, don't be surprised when your children start getting tired. And don’t be surprised if long term, your children are super opinionated and that their opinions aren’t your opinions and if after a while they start following you around and correcting you all the time. Your children are different so you are going to have to customize the way you relate to them as you get to know them. That’s part of being a good friend. A friend is someone who notices how the other person is and what the other person likes and what the other person thinks is important and isn’t just forcing the other person to like what he likes but tries to relate to them in a way that encourages them instead. You are thinking as a father, how do I do that for this child? For example, kids respond differently to a firm rebuke. Some might not even hear it as firm. Others might start crying the moment you look at them. As you relate to your kids you're going to need to learn what is most help and seek to help them flourish by relating to them accordingly.

While I realize this is a lot of practical specific instruction, at the end of the day, it’s actually all about applying the gospel to the way you relate to others. You are not going to be able to do this without spending a lot of time enjoying Jesus. The gospel is our motivation to deny ourselves. Look at Christ as the example of how to care for others. Now we pour out that kind of love on our kids. The gospel helps you realize you are not perfect, so you can stop pretending. You can be real. You may need to be honest that you are not good at this, that you have sinned, and that you need to learn from others. When you're struggling to relate to your kids there's nothing wrong with you know calling on a friend for advice. The design of the local church is so beautiful because we can spend time with other families and observe and learn from one another. We all need a little help sometimes.

I don’t think I can end without emphasizing that friendships tend to grow when you are on mission together. The best way to be a friend to somebody is not just sit and stare at each other and talk about how good a friend you are but to partner together for a cause bigger than yourself. So, your final cause with your children can’t be just have a good relationship for a little while or make sure you child gets into a good college or something like that. But make the cause that you're partnering together with the most important cause. You're partnering together with your child for something bigger than baseball or basketball or a good job. Make it the the glory of Christ. But you have to teach that and pursue that. You have to talk about what is the purpose of the family? Why did God put us here at this time? How does it connect to what He is doing through the church? And what He is doing in the world? And how can we think creatively of reaching more people for Jesus? Now obviously as your kids grow up if they're not really converted long term, there are going to be problems in your relationship.You're going to be putting out and loving them but you're you're trying to have a relationship with a dead person. So it's it's not all on you. If your child's not a believer long term there's just sometimes not a lot you can do besides be unselfish and love and pray. But at the same time if your child is a believer you want to be on mission together even beginning for the glory of christ and as you do that your relationship with one another is going to grow and and really thrive. Could there be anything much better than serving Jesus with your family? What a joy!