George Barna - Fearless Parenting: How to Raise Faithful Kids in a Secular Culture

T his book has been written by a couple of guys with vastly different backgrounds and experience. One guy (George) is a researcher who spends his time collecting data and analyzing the statistical results of surveys and other forms of research. His training taught him to avoid drawing conclusions based solely or primarily on subjective interaction with a few individuals. The other guy (Jimmy) has been a youth minister and professional family and adolescent counselor for nearly three decades. He too spends his time collecting and analyzing data, but it is what George would call soft datathat is, dialogue rather than statistics, anecdotes and stories rather than frequencies and correlation coefficients. Jimmys training demanded that he constantly draw and test conclusions based on the data he received from his counseling clients.

So this book has been crafted by two highly educated, professionally trained, well-respected men with decades of experience trying to understand people to help them optimize their lives. But as you can see, we approach that common objective quite differently. And that is precisely what moved us to explore working together on a book centered on a common passion.

How did it work out? Well, one of our most gratifying epiphanies has been that our respective experiences and wisdom add value to the others work, creating a pleasing synergy. Perhaps even more important, each of us has learned new things from the other. And that truth raises our hope that you will also learn some useful lessons as you engage with the result of that journey, as represented in these pages.

Our goal is to provide you with practical advice to help you effectively influence the mind and heart of your child. Both of us have previously written books about parenting, but we believe this joint effort provides insights and handles on parenting that neither of us could have provided alone.

As you work through this book, we encourage you not to waste time trying to figure out which author is behind each story or revelation. But if you are too much of a sleuth to let it go, then the rule of thumb is this: if youre reading a counseling story, its almost certainly from Jimmys experience. If youre reading numbers or cultural analysis, its most likely from George.

In the end, we believe its not worth your time trying to disentangle who wrote what words or which guy came up with what suggestion. Whatever you read is contained in these pages because we both believe it. And in the end, all that matters is whether the information is of practical value to you. We are too old and have fought too many of lifes battles to worry about who gets the credit or who stands in the spotlight. At this stage in our respective careers, were just blessed to still be able to string together a bunch of words into a coherent sentence.

Our goal is to encourage and help you raise your childrenparticularly adolescentsin this extraordinarily challenging time. We are grateful for the opportunity to publish these lessons on parenting. Further, we appreciate your consideration of how the ideas described in this book can serve you and your family. Realize that we make no promises that anything we suggest will be easy or painless. All we can guarantee is that this is the wisest and best advice we know how to provide based on our combined sixty-plus years of observation, experience, research, and analysis.

A Statement about Confidentiality

Whenever conversations are mentioned between a therapist and a client, we have taken all reasonable steps to ensure the confidentiality of those conversations. In these vignettes, names, ages, the time frame of the conversations, and sometimes even the sex of the clients or respondents have been changed to protect their identities. Some of these subjects are based on an amalgamation of several clients who expressed similar feelings about a given topic.