How should parents teach doctrine to their children?

Question 11072

Christian parents are the first theologians their children will ever meet, and most of us only realise it long after the lessons have started. Every answer given at bedtime, every reaction to bad news, every explanation of why we are going to church again this Sunday is doctrine being taught, whether we intended a lesson or not.

So the question is not whether we will teach our children doctrine. We are already doing it. The question is whether we will do it deliberately, accurately and warmly, or whether we will leave it to accident and hope somebody else fills in the gaps.

Why Christian Parents Cannot Delegate This

The instruction in Deuteronomy 6:6-7 is addressed to households, not to institutions. The words are to be on the parent’s heart first, and then taught diligently to the children, spoken about at home and on the road, at bedtime and at breakfast. Notice the order. The parent is the primary teacher because the parent is the one who is there when the questions actually arrive.

Paul says the same thing in his own compressed way when he tells fathers to bring their children up in the paideia and nouthesia of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). The first word carries the sense of formative training, the whole shaping of a life. The second is instruction that puts truth into the mind by word. Christian parents are asked for both, and the two are not interchangeable.

I have heard sincere believers say that they will let their children make up their own minds. I understand the instinct, and I think it is mistaken. Nobody says that about nutrition or road safety. Children are not being kept neutral while we wait; they are being formed by whatever else has access to them. Christian parents are the ones God has placed nearest, and nearness is the whole point.

Start Before They Can Argue

Timothy had known the sacred writings from childhood (2 Timothy 3:15), which means Lois and Eunice were teaching him long before he could evaluate what he was being taught. That is not indoctrination in any sinister sense. It is the ordinary way human beings learn anything at all, from language to music to loyalty.

Small children can carry more theology than we usually credit them with, provided it is in the right containers. A three year old cannot follow a discussion of the hypostatic union, but a three year old can learn that Jesus is God and became a man, and can sing it. The content is not thinned; the vessel is smaller.

Christian parents often wait for a moment of maturity that never comes on schedule. Meanwhile the years when a child absorbs almost everything without resistance quietly pass. Begin now, at whatever age your children happen to be, and begin with the largest truths rather than the fine print.

Teach the Whole Story, Not Fragments

Most children raised in church learn a scattering of episodes. They know about Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions’ den, and they have no idea how any of it connects. Isolated stories become moral fables, and moral fables produce moralism rather than faith.

What children need is the spine of the story, running from creation through the fall, the promise to Abraham, the nation of Israel, the coming of Jesus, His death and resurrection, the birth of the Church, and the return He promised. Once the spine is in place, individual passages have somewhere to attach. I would rather a child knew the shape of redemptive history than could recite forty isolated tales.

This is where Christian parents can quietly borrow from the old practice of catechesis, which I have written about in my answer on catechesis for children. Question and answer teaching has a long and unfashionable history, and it works because it gives a child language for things before experience has caught up.

Doctrine Around the Kitchen Table

The Deuteronomy pattern is conversational rather than institutional. Truth is talked about while sitting, walking, lying down and getting up, which is to say during the ordinary traffic of family life. That is good news for Christian parents who have tried and failed to run a structured seminar in their living room.

A news item about a war, a dead bird in the garden, a school friend whose parents have separated, a science lesson about the age of the earth, all of these are doorways. The skill is not having an instant answer but being willing to walk through the doorway rather than past it. I have found that ten unhurried minutes in the car does more than an hour of forced instruction.

That said, conversation alone tends to be patchy. A settled rhythm of reading and prayer catches what conversation misses. If you want something practical on that, see how to make family Bible reading effective and what family devotions can look like.

What Your Children Watch You Do

Children have a fairly reliable instrument for detecting whether their parents believe what they say. They watch what happens when money is tight, when a promise is inconvenient, when somebody at church has been unkind, when the parent is caught out and has to apologise. Doctrine taught in words and contradicted in the hallway is not doctrine taught at all.

This is not a call to perform holiness in front of the children. Quite the opposite. The most useful thing many of us can model is repentance, out loud, to the people we have wronged, including the children themselves. A child who has seen a parent say sorry properly has watched the gospel work.

Christian parents who fear their own inconsistency should take some comfort here. Your children do not need a flawless exhibit. They need to see someone who takes God seriously enough to keep returning to Him after failing.

Choosing Resources Without Outsourcing

There is more material available now than at any point in history, and a good deal of it is thin or theologically careless. Children’s Bibles in particular vary enormously, and some quietly reduce Scripture to a set of life lessons about being brave. I have said more on that in my answer on children’s Bibles.

My rule is simple. A resource should be a tool in the parent’s hand, not a replacement for the parent’s hand. Read the book with the child, comment on it, disagree with it out loud where it deserves disagreement. A child who hears a parent say that a particular page has got something wrong is learning discernment as well as content.

Move children onto the real text as early as they can manage it. Paraphrases have their place for the very young, but the sooner a child is handling an actual Bible, with chapters and verses and difficulties, the better. Difficulty is not a defect in Scripture; it is an invitation.

When the Questions Get Sharp

At some point a child will ask why God allowed something dreadful, or whether the Bible can be trusted, or why their friend who is kinder than anyone at church is going to hell. These questions arrive earlier than parents expect and are usually asked at inconvenient moments.

The worst response is panic, and the second worst is a brisk answer that closes the subject. Christian parents do not need to have an answer ready for everything. Saying that you do not know, and that you will look into it together, teaches a child that faith and honest enquiry belong in the same house. Pretending to certainty you do not have teaches the opposite.

Doubt expressed at home is a gift. It means the child still trusts you enough to say it aloud. Doubt driven underground because the parent reacts badly is the thing to fear. Keep the conversation open even when the content of it alarms you, and see how conviction and humility hold together for the posture I think this needs.

The Church Alongside the Home

None of this makes the local church optional. The home teaches, and the gathered church teaches, and the two are meant to reinforce one another. A child who hears the same truths from a parent and from a preacher and from an older believer at the back of the hall receives a kind of confirmation that no single voice can supply.

Christian parents should therefore resist the modern habit of treating church as a service consumed when convenient. If doctrine matters enough to teach at home, it matters enough to structure a week around. Children read our calendars accurately.

Equally, the church cannot do the home’s work. An hour a week, however good, will not outweigh the other hundred and sixty seven. The children’s worker is a colleague, not a substitute.

So, now what?

Pick one thing and start this week. Read a short passage at a meal, ask one question about it, and pray briefly. Do not design a syllabus you will abandon by Thursday. Consistency at a low level beats intensity that collapses.

If your children are older and you feel you have missed the window, you have not. Begin by telling them honestly that you wish you had done this earlier, and then begin. Christian parents who start late and start humbly usually find their children more receptive than they feared. What are you going to talk about at your table tonight?

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Deuteronomy 6:5-7, ESV