Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11152. Christian grandparenting carries a peculiar kind of influence that parenting itself often cannot, because a grandparent usually comes with more patience, less daily authority to resist, and the simple gift of time that busy parents rarely have to spare. 2 Timothy 1:5 mentions Timothy’s sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in his…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11151. Prodigal adult children break a parent’s heart in a way that is genuinely hard to describe to anyone who has not lived it, and I have sat with enough grieving parents in my study to know that generic reassurance rarely helps. What helps, I think, is Scripture’s own most famous story about exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12056. Physical discipline is the part of this question that gets argued about, though behind it sits a whole theology of children, of authority and of correction. I want to deal with the wider matter first, because most of the heat here comes from people talking past each other. I should also say at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11107 Biblical parenting is a phrase that has sold a great many books, most of which contain considerably more method than the Bible does. Scripture is not a manual on sleep training, screen time or how to handle a fifteen-year-old who has stopped speaking to you. What it gives instead is a small number…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08107. Protecting children from spiritual attack is one of those parental concerns that can either drive you to prayer or drive you slightly mad, and I have watched it do both. The instinct behind the question is right and God given. A parent who did not want to shield their child from spiritual attack…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08099 When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a household, and God has been working through households ever since. That alone tells you why the family draws so much fire. Over the years I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously they took it. Luther, Calvin, and the various confessional traditions that followed them all produced structured question-and-answer documents specifically designed to teach children, and often…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, God gave parents themselves the primary responsibility for teaching their children sound doctrine, woven into the actual rhythm of daily household life rather than confined…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1128. Helping children love Scripture is, I think, one of the most important tasks any Christian parent takes on, and also one of the most quietly daunting. We want our children not simply to know facts about the Bible but to treasure it, to reach for it naturally, and to find in it the…