Revolutionary Parenting course

‘As parents our deepest desire is to raise children who succeed in life. This is also our greatest challenge. How can we foster traits such as honesty, compassion and dedication in young minds? How can we raise children who will love and serve God as adults? How can we develop future spiritual champions?’

George Barna lives with his wife and three daughters in Southern California. He has written over forty books including Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions and Revolutionary Parenting.

Revolutionary Parenting was written as a result of a series of interviews with young adults who had grown up to be spiritual champions and their parents to learn what the parents had done that was effective.

Now George has collaborated with Karen Lee-Thorp to develop Revolutionary Parenting into an eight-week journey that can be worked through by couples or lone parents or can be run as a parenting course. The aim is to help families create a parenting plan that is unique for their children.

But, as George says, ‘Raising children isn’t quite like running a small business – the “products”, after all, are human beings. And many parents have no idea how to create a business plan, or any kind of plan. How do you articulate goals for a five-year-old without being a control freak driven to squeeze your kid into a mould of your own imagining? And am I crazy to suggest that one can actually reach goals for a child’s character or eternal destiny when it seems to require the parental equivalent of a black belt just to get a child to put his toys away?’

So the course is designed to help parents find out things about who their children are and what’s going on in their heads that don’t typically come out in the rush of getting them out of bed and off to school; and to reflect on what they are trying to achieve as parents – is it enough to see their children survive to age eighteen without becoming pregnant or drug-addicted? They will create goals and create steps to get to them, weighing the cost of time and energy against other life priorities. By the end they will have a plan. Not a perfect plan, but a plan to start, put into practice and revise along the way.

The Revolutionary Parenting Workbook Leader’s Edition is for course leaders or parents working through the course by themselves. It includes a DVD with two short videos for each of the eight sessions. The Revolutionary Parenting Workbook is for parents attending a course.

The eight sessions are:

1. A Crisis in American Parenting (although the statistics presented in the book are a result of surveys carried out in the US, I think most people would agree that, had the surveys been carried out in the UK , the results would have been similar or even worse.)
2. The Goals of Revolutionary Parents
3. Biblical Priorities
4. Developing Character
5. Drawing Lines in the Sand
6. Behaving Like a Parent
7. Fostering Faith
8. Leaning on God