TLP 12: Prepare Your Kids. Don’t Protect Them. | fighting the urge to shelter your kids

There are things in this world from which we must protect our children, but there are also battles our children must fight themselves. They don’t need to be protected from those onslaughts; they need to be prepared to meet them head on.

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Next Episode: Parenting Blood to Water | blood is never thicker than spiritual water

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Transcript

Introduction

​Thank you again for joining us today. I pray this episode can be a part of your journey to becoming an intentional, premeditated, God-glorifying parent. One of the factors that precipitated my move from Chicago to the Northwoods of Wisconsin was that I wanted to work in a ministry that afforded me the freedom to educate my children at home.

There are many facets of my love of homeschooling, but one in particular bears significant weight in light of today’s discussion.

I remember using a similar illustration with my former administrator. I said, “Imagine a universe where every eighteen year old is required to fight a professional soldier as a rite of passage and be afforded all the privileges of adulthood. Children who fail to overcome the soldier would not be able to get a job, own a home, or start their own family. 

What are you going to do with your own daughter? Will you schedule her match as soon as she can stand? Will you teach her to knit instead of training her in martial endeavors? Will you wait until she’s seventeen to sign her up for self-defense classes? Of course not! If you want her to be truly successful in that world, you’ll start her training as soon as possible. You’ll make sure that when it comes time for her to face off against that professional fighter, she’s as equipped as a girl her age can possibly be. You’ll do your best to prepare her.

There are somethings in this world from which we must protect our children. There are things from which we should protect ourselves, but there are also inevitable battles that are going to be fought by your children. They don’t need to be protected from those onslaughts, they need to be prepared to meet them head on.

That’s one reason I chose to homeschool my children. I believed God wanted me taking a more active role in preparing my children for the realities of spiritual warfare. I believed God would have me and my wife be full-time, intentional, premeditated, disciple-making parents.

Topic

I’m going to read a short article for you written by Doug Wilson. Mr. Wilson is a prolific author and speaker, and his insights on this subject are profoundly accurate. His article is called, “Skanky Movie III.” Here we go.

“One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requires some explanation.
“The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids — kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

“But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that’s a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don’t send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

“In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors — equally bad. One is to accommodate yourself to the presence of this kind of room temperature sin, in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself. That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff. But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you have daubed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve. This is another way of spiritual death.

“The mere presence of sin discredits nothing and no one. A school is not a poor school because junior high girls are catty at lunch, because one of the boys in the fourth grade makes earthy observations about certain bodily functions, or because some blonde named Kimberly gets great grades and the word among the kids in the back row who don’t like to study is that she might be the teacher’s pet. Welcome to earth, everybody. This is not the kind of sin parents are required to keep their kids away from. They are in fact required not to try. This is the kind of sin that parents need to teach their kids to handle, and avoidance is not a biblical strategy. Because it will be necessarily unsuccessful, avoidance is simply a pretence of avoidance, with the down side — because you are too busy kidding yourself — of having children who are not learning how to respond and resist.

“Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the Lord. But you know for a fact that two/thirds of the kids in your son’s class are all hot about the latest skanky movie. Just last night, after the youth group get together, they all went to see Skanky Movie III, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross. What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well-intentioned the folks running the school might be, the “tone” of the school is not nearly “high enough,” and that all these families clearly have poor standards. You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of Mom School.
​
“You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents — including you — are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like. About a third of the kids who went to that movie didn’t really want to, and wouldn’t have gone if someone in the class — I am thinking of your son in particular — had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up. You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader. The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one.”

Conclusion

I’d encourage you to listen to Episode 7: Stop Being the Leader! for more advice on how to prepare your children to be the kind of Leader to which Mr. Wilson is referring.

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Next Episode: Parenting Blood to Water | blood is never thicker than spiritual water

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