Christian Parent: What Are You Thinking?

Perhaps a better title might be "Christian Parent:  Are You Thinking?", but I'm trying to be nice, here, having come across several mentions in the past week concerning "crusty" Christians who are ever-so-smart and critical and yet not very winsome. 

Besides, being a Christian parent...and I mean a Christian parent in the strictest sense of the word: a believer, regularly attending church, studying scripture to inform your life and specifically your parenting, and cooperating with the Holy Spirit to root out the sin in your life...is a difficult thing these days, and mercy ought to be extended.  The choices are legion and challenging:  preschool or not? Homeschool?  Private School?  Church-with-age-graded-Sunday-School?  Family-integrated-Church? Homemade baby food? Once-a-month-cooking? The list of decisions is enormous and overwhelming.

So adding yet another facet of consideration to the Christian parents' insomnia-inducing list should be carefully weighed against it's potential fruitfulness. Yet I find I must offer this question for meditation: are you training your children for battle?

A Christian's battle with sin and self lasts until death.  So it makes sense, as a parent, to carefully train our children to come to grips and succeed in mortifying these tireless enemies in every possible teaching moment we are granted in their lives. It is vital that you concern yourself with your children's readiness for something besides reading! They must be ready for battle, and you have a responsibility to train them.

A couple of years ago I was speaking with a homeschooling mom who was concerned about her teenage son.  She explained that he was starting to engage the world a bit, and she didn't feel he was making good choices.  When I questioned her further, the issues she was worried about seemed rather trivial to me:  this son was 17-going-on-18, plenty old enough to decide the issues she mentioned on his own.  As our conversation continued, she revealed more about the parenting this young man had received, and I realized that yet again a child, although carefully homeschooled, had failed to be trained for battle.

This is not the first instance I have heard of or witnessed of this failure.  The parent, attempting to protect the child from [fill in the blank with your choice of the following:  "low self-esteem", "sin", "the world", "the flesh", "the devil"] shields the child from every danger, injury, encounter and consequence possible.

Listening to this mom continue explaining her parenting methods I heard a familiar story.  "I don't understand why he isn't making good choices. We never let them play with any of the neighbor kids. We carefully controlled their environment so that they didn't develop a taste for "the world". I remain their primary teacher so that they would always have information provided to them through the proper worldview. I never let them sleep over at anyone's house."

These parents, in their diligent desire to protect their children, made every decision FOR them.  Instead of building a solid foundation of scriptural principals, then allowing their children to make decisions for themselves while they were still at home in a safe environment where they could learn from their mistakes without life-altering consequences, they prevented them from having to make any major decisions at all or having to rely on any principles of scripture carved in their own hearts.  The result is a family of children who are completely unprepared to make scripturally-based decisions as they grow up and leave home.

And when they leave home, they often leave the Church and Christianity.  Nancy Pearcey, in her article "How Critical Thinking Saves Faith" summarizes a recent study by Fuller Seminary on teens who become "leavers" in college:

The study indicates that students actually grow more confident in their Christian commitment when the adults in their life -- parents, pastors, teachers -- guide them in grappling with the challenges posed by prevailing secular worldviews.  In short, the only way teens become truly “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks” (1 Pet. 3:15) is by wrestling honestly and personally with the questions. 

Do enjoy the whole article.

Recently I treated myself to a good read:  I happened to pick up an old (very old!) volume of "Reader's Digest Condensed Books".  I noticed the publish date of 1960--and since that is the year I was born, it held a little more interest for me.  I chose to read the title "The Lovely Ambition" by Mary Ellen Chase.  In it was the following quote concerning the raising of children--and allow me to point out that the book was published in 1960, but it discusses "50 years ago" from the perspective of 1903!

"Fifty years ago people were rarely made aware as they now are of the necessity for adaptation--or "adjustment," perhaps I should say, in the tiresome, shabby terminology of today.  They just took things as they came along; and, of course a more stable world was immeasurably helpful in the process.  Children took things, too, in part because parents respected their children enough to allow them to learn what life was really like in order that they might assume its obligations with a natural robustness and buoyancy, sadly mistrusted in many families nowadays.

At all events I have always been grateful for that extraordinary summer of 1903.  It had its consoling, reassuring features as well as it's alarming ones, and it contributed lavishly to the richness and the mystery of human experience." (emphasis added)

Thinky Things

Christian parent:  are your children prepared or being prepared to assume life's obligations with robustness and buoyancy?

Even if they are very young, each time they have an opportunity to make a decision for themselves, it is also a teaching opportunity.  Your job as a parent is to allow for as much of that learning to take place as is safe and reasonable:  i.e., can you pick up the pieces afterwards?  Will they learn a valuable life lesson from the consequences of their decision?  Do you respect your children enough to allow them to learn what life is really like while you are there to help them cope with the consequences, and while you are there to structure the tests to their age level and ability, while you are there to provide a scriptural foundation from which they can make decisions?  Are you allowing them to grapple with the questions they have about life and spirituality, or are you not sure you, yourself know enough to help them?

This applies whether it is a decision the child makes is one of obedience ("Johnny, you must clean your room.  If you do not, then you may not enjoy a movie with the family tonight"--and stick WITH that, because it is training Johnny to mortify his sin so he can face that in a bigger way later on in life:  for instance, getting up to go to work to earn money to feed your grandchildren) or one of wisdom ("Jane, do you REALLY want to go outside without your coat on?  All right then, it's your decision").

Train your children for the battle against sin and self.  Train them for the battle for the Kingdom of God.  This training is absolutely vital to their spiritual and emotional health and to their eternity.  It's not easy--oh, it's much easier to make every decision for them.  But the sacrifice will result in children who can face what life throws them with godliness and equanimity.