Grace Based Parenting: Set Your Family Free

This book was supposed to be given to my son but I changed my mind when I looked through it because it had ink underlined passages all through the book as well as bent page corners. Tim Kimmel did an awesome job writing it but it was not in good condition when it arrived. I’ll give my son a copy in better shape.

Dr. Tim Kimmel relates to every Christian parent that wants more depth in their relationship with and for their children in a real and practical way with an understanding that he too is on the journey with us to show and receive more grace!

This book has literally been escruciating to read. It has exposed the extremes of our style of parenting that we had been using. It caused us to examine the premises upon which we were operating as parents. In being exposed we were forced to say that much of how and why we did things to our children were wrong. The fruit of our style of parenting was bearing ugly fruit that was very painful and destructive. We were losing our son. The Christian boarding school we got him to required this book for us to read and we are so very thankful that we did. It is hard to put into words the emotions that we have gone through as parents; the grief, the guilt; the anger; the deep sadness. Upon reading and discussing the contents of this book, we came to a realization that we were pharisaical parents based upon fear not love and grace. That we had kept things away from our children out of fear that they would turn to "worldly" things. This only caused them to reject us and want it more which caused a huge spiralling out of control mess until our 16 year old was totally out of our control with violence and was tossed out for the sake of the other children. This book caused us to see our wrong and begin to correct it. We now have our son back and are on the road to reconciliation and restoration of our relationship. We have not arrived but we now have a different grace based approach that does not deny Biblical standards and discipline. It is a walk of faith not of formulas because our God desires to have a relationship with us that then we model to our children. It is working!

I think every parent would benefit from reading Kimmel's book. One of the best aspects is his discussion of his own failures with his own children, but also his description of how he recovered from some of his mistakes. This would be a good book for heavy disciplinarians to read, but I wonder if they would be able to take on board what he says. A good aspect of the book is his discussion of how often parents base their discipline of their children on ensuring that other parents approve of them! How true! There are many amusing and provocative anecdotes, which will make you think. I also recommend H Norman Wright's "How to Talk So your Kids will Listen."