What is the ultimate goal of parenting, and how can we effectively guide our children toward it?

Jeffrey D. Johnson emphasizes that the ultimate goal of parenting is a divine task beyond our own capabilities. While it is God who must save our children, parents are called to guide them through preaching, evangelizing, praying, and engaging in family worship. These efforts are made with hope, trusting that God will work in their lives. Parents are tasked with sowing seeds of faith and optimism, investing in their children's spiritual growth.

Alongside nurturing, parents must also protect their children, much like shepherds guarding their flock. Children lack the discernment necessary to navigate the world's temptations and deceptions. As such, parents must guide them, shaping their conscience and teaching them self-control. The goal is to prepare them for independence, equipping them with wisdom and spiritual maturity to make sound decisions, including the responsible use of technology and freedom.

Proverbs 22:6 (NKJV): "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

The goal of parenting ultimately is a divine thing that we can't do. God has to save our children. But we can point, we can preach, we can evangelize, we can pray, we can do family worship. We should do these things and God uses these things and so we sow in hope. We invest in our children with hope that God is gonna work and will work in our children's life.

So we're optimistic there. But with that, we also are not just sowing into our children's life, we have to protect them. So just like a pastor has two voices, one for the sheep and one for the goats, one for the sheep, one for wolves, we have two voices. One is to nourish our children, to invest in them, put good things in their life, but also shepherds of our children. So we have to protect them and guard them.

They're too young to have discernment. We want to teach them discernment so they don't need us when they're 25, that they're self-equipped and self-contained with the power of the Spirit and the Word of God. So we don't want to be their eternal conscience, but we want to shape that conscience, especially the early ages, and so that they can wean away from our instruction and live on their own instructions that's hopefully similar to the instruction that we gave them. But in that meantime, we have to protect them because they're tender and they're undisciplined and they are naive and they're not accustomed to the ways of the world. They're not tested in battle.

And we don't need to treat our young children as if they're old men and old women. They're fragile. And sin is tempting, is luring, is deceptive. And They don't have the discernment to see how deceptive it is. They can get on the cell phones and say, well, this, I'm not hurting myself.

They don't realize the danger and the destruction that comes with such devices. They have access potentially to the whole world and all the evil that's in the world. So we need to, as parents, guard them and hopefully teach them self-restraint and self-control so that one day they can have a cell phone. What age should a child get a cell phone? That depends on the discernment of the child and the spirituality of the child and the wisdom of the child.

You can't put an age on it. You have to have spiritual discernment. Go, now my child has self-control. My child is disciplined myself. My child is becoming a woman or a man.

Yes, I trust my child with this device or with this liberty or with this freedom. I want my child to have freedom. I don't want them to be constantly restricted, just like the Bible tells us about the Old Testament Israelite. They were like a child, and so there's not a lot of difference between a child and a slave. But eventually you want the child to be free.

We want our children to be adults and have a lot of freedom. But that freedom is to be graduated to different levels of freedom. So our job is to protect them, not necessarily micromanage them, but to shepherd their conscience, shape their conscience, and to use when they do sin as opportunities to show them the grace of God and use every opportunity, their strengths, their failures, their good things, their bad things as a means to shape them until they're Lord willing, mature and independent.