A core component of my regular reading diet is books on parenting. As long as I am a parent, and especially a parent of tweens and teens (parenting babies and toddlers is straightforward by comparison!), I want to stay sharp, to be challenged, to be equipped. A good book helps me better understand the purpose…
Last week I told you why I believe the fifth commandment—honor your father and mother—is The Commandment We Forgot. The response was overwhelming and proves to me what I suspected—many people have serious questions and concerns about this commandment. We are comfortable with its implications for children, but perplexed when it comes to the implications…
It is a commandment of God. It is a commandment with promise, with divine blessings attached to it. It is a commandment positioned in a place of special honor and significance. It is a commandment pertaining to the whole life of every human being. It is a commandment with application to the home, church, and…
Should children obey their parents? Or, perhaps more to the point, should parents insist upon their children’s obedience? The culture around us seems perplexed, so focused on personal autonomy that in many families it seems clear that the children rule the roost. Many parents doubt their ability to direct their children and may even doubt…
Few things are sadder to witness than people who once professed faith leaving it all behind. This is especially true when those people were raised in Christian homes by God-fearing parents. These children were given every opportunity to put their faith in Jesus but determined instead to turn their backs on him. Why would they…
Christian publishers are spoiling us—they are spoiling us with high-quality and beautifully-illustrated books for children. Here, representing 6 different publishers, are some excellent new books for children. Marie Durand by Simonetta Carr. This is the latest volume in Simonetta Carr’s excellent series of biographies for young readers. “In 1730, nineteen-year-old Marie Durand was arrested and…
Last year we added a dog to our lives–a dog we named Lucy. Lucy is a chocolate Labrador Retriever (And yes, I know that all of the dog people just shook their heads in compassionate pity). Some people think that Labs are dogs who are loyal and kind and loving toward their owners. These people…
I have written often on the subject of knowing and doing the will of God. Sometimes, though, particular situations arise in which we need very specific applications of those general principles. A reader of this site recently asked me about how to think about how many children to have. Here is what he wrote: The…
Yesterday I began to look at Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child (click here to read it). My interest in this book is based in part on its popularity and in part on the way in which it very clearly highlights how faulty foundational beliefs will lead to faulty actions. In the first part…
What if I told you that there is a parenting technique you can follow that will give you “a renewed vision for your family—no more raised voices, no contention, no bad attitudes, fewer spankings, a cheerful atmosphere in the home, and total obedience from your children?” And what if I told you that this technique…
What happens to infants who die? This is an issue almost every Christian faces at some point during his pilgrimage and it is one for which there is no easy answer. What’s more, surveying the writings of the great Christians of the past or present produces no clear consensus. Here are the predominant views found…
I have been asked to write about the Christian position on birth control. This is something I have discussed in the past, but there are many ways to approach the topic and this time I would like to approach it from a bit of a different angle. I intend to share how I have gone…
It is unlikely that I am the only father who is more than a little bit intimidated at the thought of raising daughters. Terrified and overwhelmed is more like it. If I didn’t have strong, Christian role models to emulate (my own parents among them), I might just despair. One of the early lessons I…
There was a time when homeschooling was a very lonely place to be. Perhaps in some contexts it still is. In today’s Christian circles though, at least the circles I’ve been exposed to locally and across the continent, it seems that homeschooling has entered the mainstream and for many families is now the default option.…
Here is another roundup of 30 Minute Reviews. These are books that I did not have time or opportunity to read from beginning to end. Instead, I tried to spend at least 30 minutes with each–enough to get a bit of a sense of what the book is all about. The Mighty Weakness of John…
This poems comes from John Bunyan’s “A Book for Boys and Girls: or, Temporal Things Spiritualized.” Children become, while little, our delights!When they grow bigger, they begin to fright’s.Their sinful nature prompts them to rebel,And to delight in paths that lead to hell.Their parents’ love and care they overlook,As if relation had them quite forsook.They…
Last week I posted a review of The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West, a book that takes a hard look at our cultural obsession with immaturity. That review garnered quite a bit of attention, so I thought it might be interesting to go into the archives and pull out a review of another…
One of the joys of my work with Ligonier Ministries has been in reading through most of R.C. Sproul’s books, trying to get a sense of what he has written about over the years. Along the way I’ve found that Dr. Sproul is quite a storyteller. There are several times in his books that he…
I’ve got a slightly abbreviated version of A La Carte today (after a long day away from home yesterday). Enjoy! The Human Brain – CNET declares the brain truly awesome. “A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions…
There is a vast amount of Christian music targeted at children. The problem is that there is a lot of junk as well–stuff like this. My kids are not particularly drawn to music so we have probably overlooked a lot of the great resources out there. Nevertheless, there are a few that we’ve come across…