There are few challenges greater than raising children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord and few challenges for which most Christians feel less equipped. Here are my recommendations of books on parenting.
Top Recommendation
Purposeful and Persistent Parenting
I have often thought that one of the keys to improving your parenting is to find someone who shares some of your parenting philosophies, preferences, and even eccentricities and to deliberately learn from them. And that’s exactly what Purposeful and Persistent Parenting offers. And though my days of parenting little ones are now long past, I still enjoyed this book very much and learned from it. It is rare among parenting books in this way: I would gladly hand to young parents and tell them, “If you generally follow this book and generally hold to these principles, practices, and preferences, you will do just fine.”
Other Recommendations
While it is by no means the perfect book on parenting, Farley excels at showing how the gospel matters in our parenting.
Excellent reading for the parents of young children. Follow it up with Instructing a Child’s Heart.
Because so many parents feel like failures, and because so many apply law to their parenting rather than gospel, this one can prove especially helpful. It is a book about shepherding a parent’s heart even as that parent shepherds a child’s heart.
On helping children ground their identity in something so much more lasting than performance and so much more enduring than feelings.
Brief chapters that give parents the information and the confidence to have today’s tricky conversations well.
Helping Your Kids Know God’s Good Design
Begin with the goodness of God’s design and only then explain how sin has corrupted it; flip the order and a child’s understanding of sexuality will be tainted.
The mundanity of motherhood is exactly where God gives mothers the opportunity to serve others and bring glory to his name.
For single-parent families, and for the churches that surround them—a place where the fatherless can find a father figure and the motherless a mother figure.
Special
It’s for the parents of teens, if the title didn’t tip you off.
A pathway for families who want to make a clean break with smartphones and social media. I highly recommend that parents give the book a read and give the strategy a shot.
Shows how technology and overprotection have combined to shape and harm an entire generation, and offers clear, well-informed instructions that can help today’s young people escape the system.
I would also point you to my review of Mike & Debi Pearl’s To Train Up a Child (a popular book I do not recommend).
(For family worship resources, see my recommendations on devotionals.)
