Children used to be brought up by their parents. (Two Worlds of Childhood)

While the family still has the primary moral and legal responsibility for the character development of children, it often lacks the power or opportunity to do the job, primarily because parents and children no longer spend enough time together in those situations in which such training is possible. (Two Worlds of Childhood)

Deuteronomy 6:6-7
These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

"If we are interacting with our children for less than a half-hour per day (as the studies show), it will be hard to practice the above passage. In other words, if we are not even with our children when we are sitting at home, walking along the road, lying down, and getting up, it's going to be hard to teach God's commandments at these times". (The Child Influencers)

Does that seem preposterous to you? Spending only a half-hour per day with your child? What kind of Christian parents do that you may ask? Well…the kind of Christian parents like you and me who go to Church (Sun,Wed, sometimes more), have kids in sports, shop, clean, cook, pay bills, sustain friendships, mentor/disciple younger Christians, make disciples, serve the poor, have TV, video games, and various other hobbies. Now think about the time it takes to do all of these things and tack on an additional 7 and half hours of schooling daily, further extending the child's time away from parental influence. Do you see that the sum of all these parts equals a child who is spends ½ hour to 2 hours of time with their parents per day? How much time do you spend with your children not counting: bathing, feeding, homework, TV/video games? Keep a journal for a week. Remember if we’re not even with our children when they “sit at home” or “walk along the road” it will be harder to teach them God’s commands.


What I want to talk about is the connection between our influence over our children and the time we spend with them. Is it not logical to assume that the less time you actually spend with your children, the less influence you will have over them?
When your child is gone 35 hours a week, teaching and training pale in comparison to the unteaching and retraining that needs to take place.

Proverbs 22:6-Train a child in the way he should go....

Imagine that you just got hired at Burger King (I worked there as a teenager). What is the first thing you do at any job?? You begin training. You get a tour of the facilities and meet the other managers and associates. You read the training manual and watch training videos. You usually take a test of some sort demonstrating your knowledge of the material. You then begin working with an experienced associate who teaches you how to build a sandwich, clean bathrooms, ring up customers, and count change, etc. As part of your training they let you try to do these things and they watch you and correct you. Then you're off to do your job, at first with a lot of supervision, but eventually you're on your own. But that's not all...You are not considered trained until you can actually perform your job. So guess what? If at the end of your "training" you still can't count change, they don't fire you, they re-train you. You are only considered "trained" when you can do your job. When I worked in daycare kids weren't considered potty-trained until they could go two weeks without an accident. Training always has a measurable goal that must be met before the person is considered “trained”. Keep this thought in mind as you consider your children who you are training. Are you as diligent and as thorough in your child training program as Burger King?

Now some people have had the unfortunate experience of poor training. They are given the manual, told the instructions and set loose. They do their jobs poorly because they were trained poorly. Poor training produces poor quality! Poor training also leads to accidents and/or failure. My husband found this out the hard way when he was training on a forklift and his trainer left him. He was severely injured. Poor training is ineffective and hazardous.

But don't we do this with our kids? We read them the Bible, we tell them God's standards. We say: "pray at lunch", "be kind to your enemies”, “share”, “make good friends”, etc. And then we set them loose because we’ve “trained” them. That’s not training! We have only given them instructions. We actually have more vision, determination, and success in training our dogs than our children! Have you ever seen someone housebreak a dog by telling them over and over again to “go outside and pee on a tree”? Or potty train a toddler by showing them where the bathroom is multiple times a day? Training involves not only instruction, but also direction, feedback, coaching, modeling, and finally evaluating. Training is a persistent, rigorous activity that produces the best results when done consistently. The problem with sending our kids away for 7+ hours a day is that the teachers cannot use the same training manual that we use. Her training manual is full of worldly wisdom, inconsistencies, and ungodly standards. The standard in your home is to be truthful, while the standard at school may be “it’s only a white lie”. The standard in your home is sexual purity until marriage. The standard at school is“as long as you use protection”. The Bible is the standard for everyone, all the time, in every matter; it is an absolute. The standard at school is that there are no absolutes, do what seems right to you. This is one of the most harmful attitudes a child picks up in school. At home they are taught the infallible, authority of the Word of God. But when they go to school they are taught by teachers, curriculum, and peers that truth is relative, and your truth can be different from my truth, and as long as we’re doing what seems right to us it’s okay. Now Christians should immediately hear the Words of God revealed in Judges 17:6 “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes”; read the Word of God and find out the consequences of this idea. God admonishes us in Proverbs 14:12, “there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death”.
Is your training program purely instructional? If so that is a poor program. We have to keep going. We give instruction, but we also have to coach, model, direct, give feedback, and evaluate. We must see training through to completion. It’s hard to do this when the kids aren’t even with us!

As an example: Sometimes when my son and I do math together he grumbles and complains or becomes sullen and lazy. All of these attitudes are sinful. So I instruct him about his attitude and explain to him how this habit, if left unchanged will become a part of his character. We learn in Corinthians that the Israelite’s history was written down for us as examples so that we don’t do what they did. “Let’s see what happened to the Israelites when they grumbled against the Lord”. I ask him, “When you go to a restaurant how do you like it when the waiter grumbles and complains about taking your order, and has a disgruntled face while bringing you your food? This will be you, if you don’t change this habit and replace it with a godly habit”. I may remind him about what we read in “Thoughts for Young Men”. “Son, do you remember how forceful the power of habit is? Do you remember ‘habits are like stones rolling downhill...the further they roll, the faster and more ungovernable their course. Habits, like trees are strengthened by age’”. If you allow the habit of complaining to become your character, what kind of teenager or young man will you be? How will it affect your job? Church? Family? Etc. God will judge the attitudes of the heart, what will the Judge say?" But I don’t stop there. I give him feedback, I let him know where those feelings are coming from and why they’re there. I coach him. Before we even start math, I prepare him for how he needs to respond. We all have default responses, most of them ungodly, so I help him identify his default response and then together we come up with a better response and I hold him accountable for it. “Son, I know you want to change your responses, when you are starting to get into your old habit, would you like me to remind you of the new habit you are trying to start?” I model it for him. I’ll re-enact a typical response from him, and then I’ll model a righteous response. I show him my weaknesses, I’m just as “happy” to cook as he is to do math, and he knows it. I model the right response and when I fail, I model repentance. I show him what it looks like to be diligent, to respect hard work, to be “patient in affliction”. This is school. It’s not just academics, sometimes it’s rarely academics. I’m training a person’s character and molding their soul. Training is a persistent, rigorous activity that produces the best results when done consistently. We do this over and over again until it becomes a part of his character, and we learn math too!

Note-all these conversations with my son don’t happen on one day at one time, they are natural conversations that we have regularly. I’ve just shared them all here at one time for convenience.

Now I share this episode to remind parents that it’s not just academics children are getting (or not getting) in school; their character is being developed, shaped, and trained there too. Bad attitudes, of this sort, are nearly always ignored in schools; a bad attitude about learning is really the least of a teacher’s worries. Having a bad attitude about math only hurts the student, not the teacher and not the classroom. So a teacher having to choose her battles chooses battles that will bring peace to the entire classroom. Teachers focus on teaching and classroom management, not character training. So if my son were in school his bad attitude, becomes a bad habit, and a bad habit becomes a bad character. This is one occasion, how many occasions for character training arise in 7 ½ hours that would be neglected if my children were in school? Children need to be trained and souls need to be guided.

Remember the saying:
Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Parents send their children to school with the intent of having their minds shaped, but their character is shaped there too. It’s not just a child’s body you send off to school, but his soul as well.

So we’ve talked about training, take a look at 49 character qualities. How long do you think it would take you to train your child in each of these? Remember training isn’t just teaching. Think about how long it would take you to coach, model, direct, give feedback, evaluate, and see each of these character qualities through to completion. And don’t forget your trainee isn’t trained until they can accurately and consistently display these qualities. If your child were away from your training program 35 hours a week, would it hinder your efforts? Could you be faced with having to retrain them because they have forgotten what you taught them? That’s what a lot of Christian parents spend summer break doing, retraining their kids.

Please don’t mistake the goal to mean perfection; “all sin and fall short”, and “we all stumble in many ways”. Perfection isn’t the goal. Perfection assumes no failure; we know our children will fail. The goal is accuracy: do they correctly and truthfully handle the word of God. Consistency: are they steadfast, unwavering, and persevering.

To be contintued....

Previous Installments in the "Why Homeschool Series"