April 30, 2013 • 3:11 pm 0
For anyone interested in an extremely helpful and in depth review of two of the most popular “children’s story Bibles,” David Shaw has done a great job here. It’s a long read but well worth it as it provides a helpful way to think through the important issues in reading God’s Word with your children.
Filed under: Children, bible reading, Bible translation, christian parenting
April 25, 2013 • 7:54 am 0
Following on from the previous post, Kevin DeYoung lists 10 items originally by John Witherspoon on raising children and parental authority here.
Of particular note are the following three comments on a parent’s authority or lack of it:
Filed under: Children, Marriage & Family, christian parenting
April 23, 2013 • 10:33 am 1
A helpful post for parents from Justin Taylor summarising Anthony Esolen’s book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It’s available from Amazon as a hardback, but you’d be far better off buying it in the Kindle version.
1. Begin by rearing children almost exclusively indoors
2. Never allow children to organize their own worlds of exploration of that which is interesting or challenging
3. Don’t risk allowing children to explore machines or encounter those who know and use them
4. Replace fairy tales with cliches and fads
5. Denigrate or discard the heroic and patriotic
6. Cut down all heroes to size
7. Reduce all talk of love to narcissism and sex
8. Level all distinctions between man and woman
9. Distract the child with the shallow or unreal
10. Deny the transcendent
Filed under: Children, christian parenting
March 19, 2013 • 3:35 pm 0
Here’s Peter Hitchens column from Last Sunday’s Mail newspaper on what the government really thinks of motherhood.
The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.
You can read the whole article here, and it’s hard to deny that our secular liberal ruling classes want to encourage parents to have as little to do with the upbringing of their children as possible, in the light of the most recent announcement of a £1,200 bribe to parents to ‘warehouse‘ their children in state regulated child care.
It’s clearly not as innocent a move as giving parent’s a choice on how they wish to raise their children, if the state incentivises one means of child-care, while to all intents and purposes it penalises (cutting child benefits) the other option. There’s something more sinister going on.
To illustrate this, below is an exert from a piece in today’s Telegraph quoting an education minister’s response to the accusation that stay-at-home mums are being discriminated against
“We have helped stay-at-home mothers with increasing the free early education from 12.5 hours to 15,” she said. “We all know that childcare is so expensive that parents simply don’t have the choice to go out to work because they can’t afford the childcare. What we’re doing is helping parents make that choice.”
Did you spot that? We’re helping mother’s engage in the high calling of motherhood, enabling them to be the most influential voices in their child’s upbringing, by paying someone else to look after their children for a large proportion of the week. Some choice!
Filed under: Apologetics, Children, Marriage & Family, christian parenting, motherhood, Peter Hitchens
February 18, 2013 • 3:24 pm 0
This article by Joe Carter, on whether Christian parents have a fundamental right to homeschool their children, should be read with concern by Christians in the UK. Whether we chose to homeschool our children or not, it is fairly evident that Western secular government believes it has the right to determine what our children are told.
Filed under: Children, Culture, Marriage & Family, christian parenting
February 13, 2013 • 2:43 pm 0
February 7, 2013 • 8:50 am 0
A big thanks to Steve McCoy. Although you may not agree with every item on this list there’s a lot of wisdom here on how to parent young children.
Filed under: Children, Marriage & Family
February 5, 2013 • 6:58 pm 0
We’ve recently picked up a new children’s Bible, The Gospel Story Bible – Discovering Jesus in the Old and New Testament, by Marty Machowski, which you can find out more about here. So far I really like what I see and it looks like it will be a useful resource to use with our children. Released a couple of years ago, Justin Taylor has some good things to day about it (and some other good children’s Bibles) here.
Among the benefits of this particular children’s Bible is that it has an accompanying Daily Devotionals to Draw Your Family To God - a series of 156, 10 minute family devotionals that can be purchased for an additional amount.
Whilst on the subject of children’s Bibles, I discovered today that The Beginner’s Bible, which we have amongst the Bibles we’ve used with our young kids over the last few years, has an accompanying website with a number of useful resources to download from it.
Filed under: Children, bible reading, christian parenting
October 23, 2012 • 6:05 pm 0
Here is a new family devotional resource form the people who brought you the Jesus Storybook Bible.
Thoughts To Make Your Heart Sing is a collection of 101 thoughts on the Bible and faith in God and is aimed at family devotions.
Our copy has yet to arrive from Amazon, but we do use the Jesus Storybook Bible among other Bibles for our family worship times and find that a helpful resource. I would guess that if you like that Bible, this is something you might want to get hold of.
Filed under: Children
October 22, 2012 • 5:38 pm 0
One of the really helpful features of the New City Catechism is that it has been developed with both children and adults in mind. For example, the first question and answer
Q. What is our only hope in life and death?
A. That we are not our own but belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Saviour Jesus Christ.
The bold parts of each answer are meant for young children to learn (I wonder how old before graduating onto the whole answer?).
I’m looking forward to starting these with at least some of our children later this week.
Kathy Keller talks about catechism with kids – the reasons, joys and pitfalls on the other side of this link.
Filed under: Children, christian parenting, Tim Keller, westminster shorter catechism
