Powerful Children Are Not Raised by Chance: Here’s How We Are Doing It

I am 55. My son is 3½. I often say he came in my twilight, and yet, with him, life feels like a new dawn.

Raising a child at this stage of life isn’t just about wisdom about urgency, intentionality, and clarity.

Because I’ve lived long enough to know this truth: too many competing interests hover over our children. From digital algorithms to distorted values, commercial entertainment to cultural confusion, the world is busy trying to raise them for us. And most of these forces are not working in their favor.

That’s why raising powerful children today is no longer a casual pursuit. It is a purposeful agenda. A consistent, strategic, and sacrificial commitment to developing their spirit, soul, and body, with utmost regard for their individuality and destiny.

Power Is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Power can manifest in intellect, influence, creativity, courage, character, or compassion. It’s our job as parents to study our children, observe their spark, and help fan it into flame.

That often starts with trial, introducing them to different possibilities and watching what excites them. In this process, we equip them with both:

• Soft skills like resilience, empathy, grit, communication, and emotional intelligence
• Hard skills like problem-solving, analysis, and practical proficiencies

These aren’t opposites, they often intersect. Behavioral science, for instance, is a soft skill domain that powers hard results. But we must carefully distinguish them when crafting our child’s developmental curriculum.

Yes, curriculum. Because parenting today requires a plan. Not vibes. Not chance. A blueprint tailored to your child’s uniqueness, not society’s stereotypes.

The Right to Grow

Children have four baskets of rights: survival, developmental, participation, and protection. Today, I focus on developmental rights, because the right to grow is not a privilege. It is a right.

But development must be holistic.

A child is not merely a body to

feed or a brain to instruct. A child is a spirit, who possesses a soul, and lives in a body.

So how are we nurturing:

• The spirit (their sense of purpose, grounding, and connection to God)?
• The soul (emotions, will, intellect)?
• The body (health, safety, and physical skills)?

The soul is the bridge between the spirit and body, a channel that must be aligned and nurtured. This isn’t poetic rhetoric. This is spiritual engineering.

We are Not the Only One with a Plan for Our Precious Children

Wake up: other people are making powerful plans for our precious children. And many of them profit from their confusion, rebellion, addiction, sexualisation, or failure.

These forces aren’t casual. They are committed. Strategic. Ruthless.

Just look at the digital ecosystem:

• Algorithms built for retention, not protection
• Platforms ignoring parental boundaries
• Companies monetizing mental health crises
• Sextortion fueled by silence and surveillance

Even Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize before Congress for Facebook’s harm to children.

Even the Inventors Knew

Perhaps what’s most sobering is that the very people who created these platforms often protect their own children from them.

Take Philo T. Farnsworth, the teenage farm boy from Idaho who invented electronic television. Despite changing the world with his invention, he made a striking choice:

“There’s nothing on it worthwhile,” he told his children.

“We’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.”, Quoted by Martin Cheek, Gilroy Dispatch, April 16, 2004

He knew. He foresaw what it could become, and he drew a line. If the inventors are setting boundaries, shouldn’t we, those who inherited the tools, be even more deliberate?

Parenting today isn’t just about love and provision. It’s about protection and precision. It’s about filtering not only what our children eat, but what they see, hear, and internalize.

They protect theirs. We expose ours. That must change.

Powerless Children Are Poorly Understood

A child without spiritual, emotional, or intellectual clarity is exposed, not just to mistakes, but to exploitation.

Powerless children don’t know who they are, why they’re here, or how to say no. Yet we blame “children of nowadays.”

No. The real problem is systems of nowadays, cultures of nowadays, and parents without blueprints

On the Table or on the Menu?

There are two roads before every parent today:

• The broad road of passive parenting, where children are on the menu, served to a world eager to consume them.
• The narrow road of purposeful parenting, where children are on the table, shaped with vision, values, and intention.

The road to the menu is crowded. The road to the table is lonely, but it leads to legacy.

The choice is ours. And the time to choose is now.

🛡 Let’s rise, purposefully, intentionally, and courageously to be the architects of our children’s future.

💬 What path are you walking? What are you learning along the way? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Do have an INSPIRED rest of the week with the family.

#50PlusDad #RaisingPowerfulChildren #PurposefulParenting