Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. There's an abundance of really bad child training books. I might have a hundred of them, but we want to tell you about three that are really good, that we've been recommending for two decades. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Here's the obvious.

Every parent needs four resources to raise their children. You know what they are? Well, let's start with the Bible. I'm sure, I hope that was on your list. It is, no, number one, a transformed and happy heart.

Number one, by the Lord Jesus. Second, the word of God. Third, they need mentors who've been there and done that who can help them. And they need good resources. They need good books.

So we wanna talk about three books. Number one, Child Raising Tips by Rob Bradley. Number two, Shepherding a Child's Heart by Ted Tripp, written in the mid-90s, and then a newer book, Purposeful and Persistent in Parenting by John and Cindy Rackett. I endorsed this book a couple years ago. It's a really good book.

So we're just gonna pound through and talk about some of the virtues of these books. So let's talk about child training tips. I'll start. One of the things I really like about this book, it's kind of an outline form. He just has all kinds of really, really practical bullet points.

Easy read. Easy to read. Easy lift. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm not familiar yet with the newer book that you have endorsed. I look forward to getting familiar with that. The older books, they are older books. They've got to be at least 30 plus years. We've been recommending them for years to parents, especially young parents, and we've been recommending them in tandem, meaning that shepherding a child's heart is very strong on certain things, the theology of parenting, the philosophy of parenting, the objectives of parenting, communication in parenting, and really, the thesis of the book is go for the heart, which is so important for parents.

And the truth is, parents need both of these things, which is why when we hand off books to young parents, it's these two together. So like you said, Jason, child training tips is extremely practical. And one of the things I really like about it is that the author describes various kinds of behavior and says, here's what you should do about it. There's a really helpful phrase. Just actually becoming aware of the phrase sort of helps to orient yourself as a parent.

So I'm going to say the phrase and then just ask you to run with it. Are you ready? I'm ready. Child run home. Yeah, He talks about the child run home where parents don't actually feel like they have any authority and how to deal with a child run home.

Children have all kinds of desires. They need to understand that there's an authority in the room. And he gives really helpful advice about how to do that. And he kind of unpacks the way that children will try to run your home. Yeah, the core of this is proactive versus reactive.

A child run home is a reactive home where parents are just reacting to behaviors, express desires, problematic behavior of the children. This happens and then parents react to it. And red Bradley is trying to pull us up to being proactive parents where the child isn't always driving the agenda by what they're doing and with us reacting to it, but us actually know where we're wanting to take the ship and getting out ahead of it and leading these things and let our children react to our leadership. The author makes a statement that your children need to understand they're not the center of the universe. Yeah, right.

That is the human frailty, right, that we're also radically self-centered and that is on full display in the lives of our children. And so, Reb Bradley gives us some great tools for combating that, which is so important in every home. Yeah. Yeah, I love the chapters, methods of incorrect discipline, nurturing children with discipline, raising responsible children, raising respectful children. These are just really critical categories.

What he does is he gives you a book that's full of the Word of God. Every section is very well supported by Scripture. And that's what I really like about the book. He's not just pulling from the psychobabble world. He's actually pulling from specific statements of scripture and teaching parents how to deal with the specific things that they see going on.

Most Parents are very nervous about physical discipline, corporal punishment. And so he goes into a lot of detail to help you understand how to go about that in a godly way, how to keep anger out of the equation, How to stay consistent with it. Most parents think that it should be the last resort. That's actually not what the Bible teaches, so Red Bradley helps to sort of reset our thinking on that. Yeah.

So are you ready to move to shepherding a child's heart? Yeah, just one last comment on this. Near the end of the book he has chapter 17. The title pretty much says it all. Beyond obedience, raising children who love God and others.

It's a really helpful thought to keep in mind. We are aiming for obedience, but not just obedience. You can have very respectful, obedient, unbelieving children, And actually there should be a period of their lives where they are that, where you have secured obedience and respect, but they're not yet born again. And we want to keep our eyes beyond just churning out good citizens and securing obedience and respect that we want to keep our eyes beyond that looking to help them to love God and love others. Well that takes us to Shepherding a child's heart.

It does. Because that's his focus. I'm gonna read David Pallison's forward to this book. Most books on parenting give you advice either on how to shape and constrain your children's behavior, or on how to make them feel good about themselves. Either control or self-actualization is deemed the goal of parenting.

But then he says shepherding a child's heart contains something very different. The book teaches you what your goals as a parent ought to be and how to pursue those ends practically. It teaches you how to engage children about what really matters, how to address your child's heart by your words and actions. And then he goes on and says, it teaches you how communication and discipline work together for parents to love their children wisely. I think, I thought that was a great description of this book.

Here's here's another quote from Ted Tripp's own introduction, just a single sentence, but it says so much. He says, God's ways have not proved inadequate. They are simply untried. And I think in a world where Bible counsel about child training has been thrown out the window, that's so true. That's probably way more true today than when he wrote the introduction.

It was true then. It's radically true now. God's ways for raising children haven't proved inadequate or insufficient at all. They've been set aside. If people would give themselves to them, they would find how wise the exhortations of Scripture really are.

Tintrip says this, parents often get side-tracked with behavior. If your goal and discipline is changed behavior, it's easy to understand why this happens. He says, you think you've corrected when you've changed unacceptable behavior to behavior you sanction and appreciate. And he says that's not the same thing as a heart change. Right.

And that's really the brilliance of this book. And he talks about how to help parents penetrate to the heart of the matter, not just the outward manifestations. Which means that as we're training our children we keep the gospel in view. So here's another quote also from the introduction. He says, the central focus of parenting is the gospel.

You need to direct not simply the behavior of your children, but the attitudes of their hearts. You need to show them not just the what of their sin and failure, but the why. Your children desperately need to understand not only the external what they did wrong, but also the internal why they did it. You must help them see that God works from the inside out. Therefore, your parenting goal cannot simply be well behaved children.

Your children must also understand why they sin and how to recognize internal change. So I love this about this book as he's always pegging what we should be doing as parents to the gospel and leading our children to understand sin so that they see it for what it is. And he's making the distinction between an outward compliance and what God actually desires to work in us, which is a heart towards the things of God. And he's advocating discipline where you get to the point where it's clear that there's been heart change, not just acknowledgement of sin, but actual repentance. You know, he talks about, you know, helping your children understand why they did what they did.

And I think that's good advice. But in raising our own children, after they're all raised and grown and gone, one of them told me, Papa, you would ask us why did you do that? And a lot of times we didn't know. They're just sinners, you know, and they needed to be confronted. They didn't know why, they just did it.

But that was just one funny thing about my kids. It sort of exasperated them, you know, because they couldn't tell me why, and I wanted to know why. Hey, here's the problem. God gives these precious children to young and inexperienced adults, right? And so...

First-time parents. Every oldest child has first-time parents. That's right. Isn't that amazing? Chapter seven in this book, Discarding Unbiblical Methods.

We all grew up in a home. It probably had some biblical principles and some unbiblical principles, but you just have to know as a new parent, your default is probably what you experienced in the home that you grew up in, which might have been actually filled with unbiblical methods that need to be discarded in favor of the Word of God. Yeah, and there's so many in-course corrections that you have to do anyway as a parent. You know, as your children start to challenge you in different things, you realize this isn't really very biblical that I'm doing. So let's try to get focused on what the Word of God would lead me to do.

And I found that parents, and Deborah and I needed this too, we needed lots of recalibrations, parental corrective action about how we were raising our kids. I think That's normal. Chapter 12, entitled Appeal to the Conscience. So here Ted Tripp picks up on something that the Bible teaches, which is that even if you've never laid eyes on a Bible, that God has made you with an inborn sense of right and wrong that you find in every culture actually, lots of commonality about that, and that as parents we should be doing more than just behavior modification where we make you cut it out. Our kids should cut it out, but actually we should be appealing to their inborn sense of right and wrong because we can we can draw on the fact that we know that they have it and it gives us something to sort of grab on to as we're parenting and addressing things that aren't acceptable in their behavior.

Which means you have to explain why this is wrong from Scripture. We need to be dealing with Scriptural sins and where is this going? So explanation is necessary. On the one hand, we don't know our children detailed explanations of why the word is no, but in many cases, it's really good to explain that I think you need both. A child who's just willing to accept, my father, my mother said this, I need to accept it.

On the other hand, it's good for parents to explain. Okay, let's move on here. Now, this is a book that I endorsed, Purposeful and Persistent Parenting by John and Cindy Rackett. This book covers the whole gamut of child raising issues and what I really like about it, They are very thoughtful about explaining so many different kinds of scenarios and they cover a lot of the same things that you find in child training tips and shepherding a child's heart. But it's different and I just highly recommend it.

I think it's a really, really helpful book. Can't have too many good books on child training. We need the help. Yeah. Yeah, we do.

Hey, I know they'll help parents because they helped me a lot as a young father to think through things that I hadn't thought through before. And so anyway, I have appreciated the contribution that both of these books made in my own life as a young dad. Yeah. Amen. Okay.

Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com