Parents constantly receive advice about raising children from family and friends, social media, books, podcasts, churches, and television. Open-relational parenting offers a way to sift through the advice and find what fits into a healthy parenting style.

Open-relational parenting seeks to encourage a nurturant relationship between parents and children. It recognizes that people’s views of God affect most aspects of their lives, including parenting, and suggests nurturant and loving perspectives of God.

Open and Relational Parenting

Open and relational parenting encourages parents to interact with their children somewhat like God interacts with creation, guiding their children toward overall well-being with aspirational and responsive love. Open and relational parents guide by empowering rather than controlling their children. They show love that is covenantal and unconditional. They aspire for their children to grow, explore, and live in a way that creates healthy relationships with the family, others, and God. They also respond to their children’s words and actions by receiving them in love and meeting them with the grace of new possibilities with affirmation, incorporation, or redirection.