"He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8)
To walk humbly with God, as a parent, puts you in the place of God to your children. The extremes in parent/child relationships, both of which mar a child's conception of God, can be described with similes. One extreme is like wild unsupervised, undisciplined children, the other is like a museum gallery filled with rigid sculptures of children. The first has no structure and the second no life. The goal is a balance.
Parent/child relationships that are continuously fraught with difficulty, if they are not simply the result of godlessness, are either a mis-understanding and/or a mis-application of the relationship between God and His children through Christ. The best parenting points to God the Father in His provision of Truth (law) and Grace (in Jesus Christ), that is, love. Neither Truth nor Grace includes the 1) manipulation, threats, or passive and active aggression used to produce desired behavior, 2) the avoidance of loving discipline (aka: discipleship) used to minimize effort, 3) the helicoptering used to control and manage outcomes, and/or 4) the denial/delusion used to assuage the fear of failure.
Christian parenting (all parenting) always contains a degree of failure because parents are not actually full of Grace and Truth as Jesus was (John 1:14). The only way to redeem inevitable failure is to live honestly in the liberty of your own redemption, with your children. That by Grace, leads little ones to Truth and their need of God, as opposed to "provoking your children to wrath" (Ephesians 6:4).
A spirit of liberty, which is particularly instructive for children, is simultaneous opposition to the tyranny of sin with accompanying freedom to choose the right, and fail, without fear.
