Night Light for Parents - Dr. James & Shirley Dobson
This was a present from Christine, and Robyn and I just finished it. It's a 26-week devotional for parents: a short reading each night, a "Before you say good night" section with a few questions to talk about, and a prayer. Each week covers a different topic, from spiritual training to discipline to letting your grown kids go.
I grew up listening to Dobson's "Focus on the Family" program with my family and was raised with his principles in mind. Later on in life I realized what a controversial figure he has become (or maybe always was, but I didn't know it at the time). I feel a little caught between opinions on him, because I agree with some but not all of his ideas, which means there are people on both sides who think I'm crazy (for thinking he's wrong about anything, or thinking he's right about anything).
This book had the same issues; some evenings the reading would rub one of us the wrong way, and other times the lesson was helpful or thought-provoking. The biggest thing I found, though, was that most of it is targeted towards parents of older kids. A lot of the discussion questions just didn't apply to us, since we can't have particularly deep conversations with our two-year-old. And when we got towards the end of the book, about grown kids and being grandparents, well ...
I think my biggest difficulty with most devotional books is that there are sections that are just cheesy, and I don't know that there's anything in the Bible about following Christ that says you have to be cheesy. The Sunday readings are all anecdotes by various authors with a followup by the Dobsons, and those are the nights to expect it to be a little more sentimental. The rest of it is good, and has some good suggestions for how to be God-loving parents.
Fed to jonathan's brain | July 24, 2006
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