> Tim Adeney Case #76 Masculinity

Fathers & Daughters

August 27, 2026

Fathers & Daughters

Tim Adeney

Not alone

Earlier last year our fourth and youngest daughter, 18 at the time, was baptised. In the pool to do the dunking was her former youth group leader who, for six years, had been there on Friday nights, and at mid-year camps. And in between had taught, chatted with, consoled, advised and befriended her. Week-by-week and year-by year she provided an example for my daughter to follow, encouraged her to trust Jesus and was a friend walking beside her.

A few months later I walked my third daughter down the aisle to marry a young man she had met as leaders at Presbyterian Youth (PY) Summer Camp. This story had its origin more than a decade earlier…

A friend had taken our second daughter to a writing workshop with a local author, Chris, who happened to be a Christian. A month or two later, I took our two eldest girls to another writing event with, also with Chris. Along with writing, Chris led on various PY camps and invited the girls to attend one. Since then, often funded by gifts from their grandparents, one or more of our girls, has gone to PY Summer Camp. There, they were taught the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on their behalf, and encouraged to trust and follow him. They learned from and discussed the Scriptures with leaders who loved them and modelled following Jesus—all while having fun and making friends.

As parents, Ally & I, accumulated debts we can never repay to all those who, in a world short on villages, helped us raise the girls God had entrusted to us. We were not alone. For us, this help came from parents, sisters, youth group leaders, camp leaders, friends, babysitters, teachers, others at church, and more. Under God, raising children is best done with others. It is worth asking God to provide help, as well as providing help to others as an answer to their prayers.

I suspect much of the help we received was an answer to prayers prayed many years before. My late grandparents were known to pray every day for all their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, including those who wouldn’t be born for many years. When my grandfather died, our second daughter, aged 10 at the time and knowing my grandparents’ reputation for prayer (and perhaps intuiting a little too accurately her father’s prayer life) asked, ‘who will pray for us now?’

Good Enough

Where the previous section recognises that parents welcome help raising children, this one acknowledges that in the ordinary course of things it is help, and not replacement, that should be welcomed. Children are a gift to the church and the community, but they are primarily a gift and blessing to parents.

The first part of a parent’s prayer is that God would work through us to bring our children to follow Jesus, and that along with this, they would develop and enjoy godly character, general maturity (‘adulting’), good relationships, health, and the skills and desire to serve in the world and amongst God’s people, all the while holding out the word of life to a world that needs Jesus.

The second part of the prayer is that, if for some reason God can’t work through us, he will work in spite of us.

The first part recognises that the gift of children to parents brings with it the responsibility to welcome and raise them. God has structured creation to ordinarily work through parents. It also recognises the significance of the role and the fact that we’ll need help. And lastly, it recognises that while children will typically follow the pattern of their parents’ faith, there are no promises that they will. Each new disciple of Jesus remains the miraculous and gracious work of God.

The second part of the prayer acknowledges that very often we (or at least, I) have often not been conduits that make it easy for God to work through.

I can’t quite remember who introduced me to the concept of ‘good enough’, with respect to parenting, but it provided a helpful mindshift. Of course we would all like to be very good, or even great parents, but when it comes to raising children, the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘not good enough’ is much much more significant than the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘very good’.

Typically, ‘good enough’ will include some areas that were quite good or even very good, others that were barely good enough, some that were ‘really not good enough’ and perhaps even some that were really not good enough. I wish I had been less anxious and angry; a little more able to just enjoy whatever a day threw up. I wish I’d understood that an imperfect system poorly implemented is better than a perfect one unimplemented. Most of us who’ve raised children—even when overall we were ‘good enough’—will have some cause for regret and repentance, and some cause to ask our God, and our children, and for forgiveness.

The idea of ‘good enough’ parenting is not an excuse for ungodly behaviour, but to release us from some of the anxiety we’re likely to feel about whether or not we’ll be great, and to provide an encouragement that God works through imperfect parents.

Hair

For many years, if you had asked me the difference between having sons and daughters I would have answered, ‘hair’. The apostle Paul may say hair is a woman’s glory, but with four young daughters, and endless tear-soaked battles with nits and knots, the ‘glory’ was elusive. By God’s grace, Ally & I were not just given children, we were given daughters, and that has meant some things, like ‘hair’, have been different.

It is not something I want to overstate. I suspect much of what we did was because they were children, some because of their individual needs and personalities, some brought on by the changing circumstances of the world and our family, and yes, some because they were daughters. Without attempting a theory, then, let me note some things that have been different.

I don’t think we would have stayed in inner city apartment accommodation for as long if we’d had sons, I doubt we would have accumulated quite as big a costume collection, and I don’t think Ally would have had as many companions when she went op shopping. I’m sure we had more conversations about beauty and about inner beauty. We probably had more conversations, full stop. When the girls were in primary school I’d rotate taking them out ‘for a coffee’. In high school, we’d still go for coffee, but our best conversations were often in a car as we were driving to or from activities.

We had many conversations about marriage and children. Marriage talk often consisted of banter and teasing around what criteria made it to various lists, along with the more serious discussion that it was better to marry someone good than marry at the right time; and that exclusive ‘dating’ relationships were (albeit tentatively, and calibrated according to age) a place to discover whether you could marry someone. We also made it clear that they didn’t have to marry but could have a joyful and productive life as a single person, and that being single had advantages over being married. Regarding children—that they are a blessing and a gift in marriage, and that in the ordinary course of life, when you welcome marriage you’re also called to welcome children.

The important conversations were not just about marriage and children, but also friendships more generally. Whether it was dealing with the effects of ‘where two or three girls are gathered together thou must exclude one’, or the weaponisation of ‘best’ friends, or secrets, or getting off never-ending group-chats, or navigating friends with anxiety or who were self-harming—all this took place through conversations.

And of course we’ve struggled with screens generally. I recall once our younger two girls saying they’d been watching too much Netflix, and so they’d decided for the next week that they’d just watch YouTube!

Meanwhile we encouraged them to be physical—unladylike, if you like. I wrestled with the girls when they were younger, encouraged climbing trees and rocks, and described any minor injuries that ensued as the natural cost of being an ‘adventure girl’. But along with that I got to hold their hands for years longer than I would have with sons, and shared—and still share—more hugs.

* Fathers *

It's worth noting that Ally, as do many mothers, did most of the work. I’ve noticed that when this is the case, fathers (including me) are tempted to enjoy the fruit of our wife’s labour and focus our role on providing fun. And perhaps in God’s economy fathers do often have special opportunities to inject some fun and chaos into family life. But we can’t just be fun; we also need to take the lead in discipline, which is one aspect of helping our children to hear, understand and welcome the good news of Jesus Christ, and to walk in the way of life that goes with following him. Of course, ‘taking the lead’ does not mean doing it all, or doing most of it, or ‘just doing my bit.’ Rather it’s about initiative and responsibility. This might mean starting the conversation about parental policy, playing a direct role, or helping set up a routine which helps make it less likely that discipline will be required in the first place. It involved different things in different years. One example were the discussions and other measures related to tone and timing: ‘You are welcome to disagree with me, but you are not welcome to disagree with me with that tone’; ‘You can tell Mum you would like to do something different, but not with that tone, and not last thing at night’, and so on, and so on, again, and again.

As for the lead in discipline, so also the lead in love. If you want a bath, a plug is essential. Discipline is like the plug. Without it the work of parenting, like bathwater, drains out. But if all you have is a plug, it’s not much of a bath. When fathers take the lead in love, it means both helping create a general climate of love, and specific love for each child—in my case, each daughter.

‘Love’ is a summary of infinite ways of serving. I found it particularly important to tell them they were loved, to be physically affectionate, and to have done a good enough job of loving in other ways—including demonstrating insight into things they particularly valued—that the words were credible and they felt loved. Of course, all parents need to love all their children, but something particularly costly seems to happen when daughters are not told and do not feel loved by their fathers.

Grace

When our eldest was around 6 she was sent to her room in response to some infringement. As she rounded the bottom of the stairs to start the slow trudge to her room she proclaimed, ‘there hasn’t been much mercy here.’ Ally and I laughed and called her back. Since then it has served as a reminder for how reliant we were, and still are, on God’s grace. This is not to say discipline doesn’t need to happen; when, at a later time, the same strategy was attempted again, it was received with less laughter. But our own salvation is won by grace, and children themselves are a gift. One of the things we hope to teach is the grace of God, and we help teach it when our discipline is marked by mercy, and our failures are accompanied by repentance and seeking forgiveness from God and our children. And yet in the end, whether our actions exhibited or denied grace, our greatest hope is that God pours out his grace on our children, and that they in turn respond in faith.

Tim is the father of four adult daughters, married to Ally, and pastor of Petersham Baptist Church in Sydney.

Images: Pexels