Printer Friendly Format
Email this to a friend

September, 2001

Any time people engage in an important, responsible undertaking for others' welfare - whether a business, a job, government affairs, or a family - there's a need for clear, competent leadership. The more serious the challenge, the greater the need for someone to direct everyone's efforts in an inspiring, encouraging way toward the ultimate goal.

The real goal for the family is to raise the children toward responsible adulthood. All the dynamics of family life lead to this: what kind of men and women the children will grow to be. No challenge is more important than this, and so great parents emerge in family life as real leaders.

How do they do this? How do fathers and mothers lead their children effectively? To form a picture of parental leadership, over the next few months we will look at the characteristics of leaders and see how parents, especially you fathers, fit the profile of leadership in family life.

Leaders are moved by a distant vision, and they thus win people's respect.

Here's a broad statement that you'll probably agree with: in business and professional life and in affairs of state, our most respected leaders are those who look farthest toward the future and foresee oncoming perils and opportunities. Respected leadership and strategic foresight go hand in hand. The farther and clearer the vision, the greater the respect.

If you page through the works of outstanding American leaders of the past - people like Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King - you are struck by their hopeful, future-directed vision. Frequently, these leaders referred to "posterity" and foresaw future events in a way that was both realistic and hopeful, an idealism without illusions.

In our own time, too, outstanding professional leaders have a clear long-term vision about their company's future success, and they communicate this goal, at least occasionally, to everyone who works with them. They think 5 to 20 years ahead, and this goal-setting drives them and their team forward - for they know that people's efforts are most effective when they're focused on some future achievement.

It seems that this dynamic works in successful families, too. Parents - all kinds of men and women with different temperaments - succeed in family life through their confident leadership. Successful parents base their confidence in knowing they have this sacred mission to carry out with their children. They see themselves raising adults, not children. They have been called by God to carry out a job, and that holy task is this: to lead their children - with daily sacrificial effort - to grow into confident, responsible, considerate, generous men and women who are committed to live by Christian principles all their lives, no matter what the cost. Being conscious of this mysterious and sacred mission, holding it always before their eyes, is what turns these parents into great men and women themselves, real heroes to their children, and makes their family life together a great, rollicking, beautiful adventure.

Printer Friendly Format
Email this to a friend