Asked and Answered (Frustrated Single Dad)

I need your advice about my son. He is 3 years old. I have raised him myself, but since he was a month old we have lived with my mother most of the time. The reason that I included this detail is because it is a major part of the problem.
The Lord saved me shortly after having my son, then he and his mother went our separate ways (we were never married). I knew that I wanted to raise my son and I knew that God would give me the wisdom to do so. A lot of my thinking was similar to the child training principles that I have read in your books and seen in your videos.
I had it all planned out.
But things didn't go as planned. I still have several faults myself that I need to work on, and it did not take long to realize that I did not know as much as I thought that I did.
But the people who I lived with, contradicted everything that I was trying to do. He has picked up a lot of bad character traits from my family. Please don’t get me wrong, I love my family, but their views on raising children are very different from mine.
He has gradually become more defiant and will not listen to me. I feel like I am losing him.
~ Frustrated single dad

Training children successfully is a lot like playing chess. I don’t know how to play chess. And if I am being completely honest, I hardly raised my own children. The only thing that I nurtured, protected, and cared for was my crippling addiction to prescription (not my prescription, but everyone else’s) opioids, alcohol, and pornography. From the age of 17, until I was 36 years old, I was a full-blown drug addict, and a frequent resident of our local county jail. When I was not in jail, I was either in rehab for drugs and alcohol or staying gone for weeks at a time.

So, due to my chosen addiction, my children grew up without me.

It was a shocking realization that even though I had worked so hard to destroy my life, that God had not abandoned me. Instead, he loved me unconditionally; in spite of myself. That forgiveness and freedom is so real and palpable to a former dope head, criminal, and outright immoral person, that it eclipses even the memory of my former life.

Now working at a ministry where so much emphasis is placed on family and child training, the joy that I have is bittersweet. I see the fruit of godly parents bringing their children up in the admonition of the Lord. But I also see the bitter fruit of neglecting my own children, and putting the responsibility for their upbringing onto someone else; that fruit is a life without those children.

They learned from a very early age that their father, even though he was playful and joking (at least in the beginning) could not be trusted or counted on to be there for them. Children do not forget that lesson; it haunts them the rest of their lives.

It has now been a few years. The bleeding has stopped and the wounds have scarred over, but the memory of that pain remains for them as well as for me. But God is a Comforter. He comforts us not only from the wounds we receive from others and the enemy, but he also comforts us from the wounds that we cause OURSELVES. That is his nature. That is what father’s do.

Psalm 103:13 Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.

That does not mean that he takes pity on you or me, so put that victim card back in your wallet. That means that he loves deeply and with compassion. In other words, he does what I and so many other men have not done; care for the heart of their children.

I first read To Train Up a Child because I wanted to see for myself if what I had read about the book, and its author was true. I was shocked. Not because the articles, opinion pieces, and video commentaries were right, but shocked at finding the real reason that so many were offended by the book; the responsibility for the absence of joy, love, and peace in so many homes is laid at the feet of mom and dad.

Even I was somewhat offended. A book on child training should tell me what is wrong with my children and how I can make them behave better, not that my own bitterness and selfishness was the root cause of their wounded and crushed spirits.

The cure was equally shocking and offensive, take responsibility for my failures, and a life left unlived, and then ask God to fix ME.

Now after several years, the relationship with my children shows only the faintest glimmer of hope that any reconciliation will ever be possible. But nevertheless, that faint hope is tangible and real.

I will take that. After all, we are saved by hope.

Romans 8:24-25 For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?
25 But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

So much like myself, you are starting with a deficit. You are already acutely aware of the problem behaviors of your son, and the rift that is developing between the two of you.
And you have well meaning family members that are willing to help, but do not share your values. It is unlikely, given that you are a single father, that you can devote as much time as you would like, or is ideal.
But life is seldom ideal.
The principles in To Train Up a Child and Training Your Children to Be Strong in Spirit - work. They work because they are grounded in scripture. They work even in less than ideal situations (which is good, considering that is the situation that most of us find ourselves in.)