July 6, 2026
Why Your Parenting Checklist is Failing (And What Scripture Offers Instead)
Is Christian parenting a strict formula to execute, or an art form to practice?
In a culture that bombards Christian parents with exhaustive 10-step checklists and uniform blueprints for family life, it is remarkably easy to accidentally provoke or exasperate our children. This week, Dr. James Spencer, PhD and Dr. Ashish Varma return to the podcast to look at fatherhood through the lens of scriptural wisdom rather than cultural anxieties.
True biblical wisdom doesn't produce recipe-followers; it forms adaptive disciples. Pulling from the book of Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, and the letters of Paul, James and Ashish discuss why parenting requires holy improvisation—a pastoral sensitivity that allows a father to receive his children exactly as they are and adjust his training to fit their unique design.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The "Chopped" Mystery Basket: Viewing your child's distinct traits as raw ingredients that require expert, customized care.
- The Education Fit: An honest, non-judgmental look at public vs. private schooling, and why identical principles led both hosts to entirely different local schooling choices for their kids.
- Healthy Friction vs. Exasperation: Learning how far to push a child to build resilience without crossing the line into crushing their spirit.
- The Long Game: Moving past the urge to "fix" every behavioral issue instantly, focusing instead on building the profound, long-term trust your children will need well into adulthood.
Form your character, drop the rigid checklists, and learn to enjoy the beautiful, improvisational calling of being a dad.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined again by doctor Cheese Farmer. We're continuing our series on Christian manhood and we're going to talk a little bit more about fatherhood today. Last conversation we had on fatherhood, we got into this idea that there isn't a recipe for being a Christian father. Like a lot of times, it requires improvisation. We've talked about that in other episodes and different topics, but one of my favorites is Chopped. It's this Food Network show where they give you a mystery back ask it, and if you're an expert enough chef, you can actually make something edible out of gummy bears and beat root and other strange ingredients. Right, And so the idea I think with the kids is sort of like a kid is like a mystery basket. You're given this set of ingredients, and your job as a Christian father is to be an expert enough chef that you can actually help this child become something palatable. It's probably a little more important than that, but you get the drift. There's an improvisational aspect to raising kids that's really crucial, and so Ashesh and I talked a little bit about this after the last episode, and one of the things we both had sort of interesting convictions around was and a question I've been asking off a lot, why didn't I send my kids to private school, specifically private Christian school, And so we thought we might dive into that. I know that's kind of a hot topic right now, with public school education taking a bit of a hit in recent years, and so it might be an interesting topic and for us to just talk through this improvisational aspect of being a father. So I'll leave it there. I don't know whether you want to give any additional preamble, but.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me give the warning label of this isn't bash on private school. This isn't no one should send their kid to private school. That's not that's not the conversation. The conversation is specifically geared towards its improvisational reality. As we think improvisationally, as we think about what's before us. Why is it that we've come to the decisions that we have with our kids? Not nothing more than that. Nothing prescriptive or totalitarian about whether or not you should send them. There.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: No, And it's a good disclaimer.
00:02:48
Speaker 1: And I will say that just to give people a little bit more context. My wife and I recently adopted a young girl. She was four, and we adopt her. She's five now she's going to private school. So we sent her to a private Lutheran school in her area. Just to give the brief thumbnail sketch before we jump in. It isn't a choice that we probably would have made, but the preschool in our area, the public preschool in our area, was full, and so we needed a place to send her. Obviously to preschool. And so given that the public school couldn't take her for full days, you could take her for a kind of half days. There's a whole thing there, But because they couldn't take her for full days and we needed her to be in full days.
00:03:31
Speaker 3: We opted for private school. So it was a pragmatic choice.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: But I can talk about this a little bit more, but it's ended up being a really good spot for her, and I don't know that we would have recognized that had we just, you know, sort of not been pushed to it. But I think we're both very glad that she ended up in a private school. So yeah, no private school bashing, no real public school bashing either. Quite frankly, I think the whole point of this is you have different kids with different needs, in different dispositions, and so you're asking yourself as a parent, particularly as a father, where is it that this kid is going to thrive? And I think that's the real big question, at least we were trying to answer as we were thinking about our kids and where to send them.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: To school, right, and that question about where they're going to thrive gets maybe to the heart of the question of improvisation that we tried to start to draw out when looking at the text that these passages. We looked at Ephesians colautions, neither one is terribly specific, and you'd be hard pressed to find really any passage in scripture that's terribly specific. Even when you look at something like the Book of Proverbs. That's the framework that it's written in, is a father talking to his son. At least the first part of the Book of Proverbs is written that way. While you do get this distinction between Lady Wisdom, who this father wants a son to chase, and Lady Folly, who this father wants to warrant his son about, the descriptions remain still general, right, They're about the sorts of things that Lady Wisdom does and produces and the sorts of things lady Folly does and produces. Right, And why long term, one truly is the path of wisdom, and one truly is the.
00:05:32
Speaker 3: Path of folly.
00:05:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you're looking for, you know, the ten things that you need to have to make sure that you avoid lady or Lady Folly, you're not finding.
00:05:45
Speaker 4: Them, right.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: And that but that dynamic, I think is to the heart of the Biblical account that it is, especially with its abundant concern for wisdom, right, such that Paul even frames several his own letters in terms of wisdom. Jesus speaks his Sermon on the Mount is him as the wise teacher. This very strong and deliberate focus on wisdom in the scripture is meant to create people who are adaptive. And that's the idea of improvisation. Can I enter into a situation that's totally new or totally outside the framework of what I might have expected, and have the ability to operate within it, And in some ways we get this in other avenues of life. I've never been a great instrumental player, but one thing that I've noticed from those who are is the truly best musicians are the ones who have such a handle on their craft that they're able to riff off others. In fact, the whole genre of jazz is built on this. We've talked before about sports and athletic events, and that's been where much of my life has been wrapped up. And I think think what I've seen is what makes the best basketball players and the best tennis players. Right. You think of the Michael Jordans, you think of the Magic Johnson's, the Roger Fetterer's. That is their ability to take what you give them and to over accept is what some sociologists would say, I receive it and I can in that moment from my training, use my mastery of the footwork, use my mastery of understanding defensive rotations, things like that to make the next play in a way in which you can't you can't shock me. Right, If we can transfer that to the parenting landscape, there's so many things. There's so many things that we encounter, and in a world that's changing more rapidly than ever, there's so much you can't anticipate. But it's about being able to both understand who your children are so that you can help them become the kinds of people that themselves can understand situations that are totally new, and work within the patterns of God's grace to live accordingly. Right, And that's what wisdom is.
00:08:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think the other side of this so I agree with all that. I think the the other side of this is there are some things that we can do that will help us to move toward wisdom, move toward a fear of the Lord. I think of something like Deuteronomy seventeen, right, the Instructions to the future Israeli king supposed to write himself his own copy of the law, have it approved by the priests, read it'll, you know, read it every year, and in that way he is going to learn to fear the Lord. And so I think as fathers, there is something to us. You don't just develop this sort of improvisational instinct because you're a father, right. It isn't just this like, oh, okay, I have kids now, and so automatically I'll just emerge as this wonderful father.
00:09:07
Speaker 3: And that's not quite it.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: I think there is an intentionality that we have to go through in order to develop that expertise, just like anything else.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: You know.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: I can remember when I was a personal trainer, right, and when I started out, I did what I would when I knew how to do what I'd done for myself.
00:09:26
Speaker 3: Right.
00:09:26
Speaker 1: You have people come in and lift really heavy weights. But as I got more and more experience training different sorts of clients, what you quickly realize is that that doesn't work for everybody. It's not really tailored to the individual. There are some people come in, maybe they have an injury, maybe they have an event they're going to go and do. Maybe they have maybe just a particular preference for something, and you have to learn to adapt the workouts to the person while still getting the results. And I think that's sort of it required of me a different sort of learning. I couldn't just lean back and say, well, I've been lifting for fourteen years, I know exactly what I'm doing, because I didn't. I think there had to be adaptation there. And so as we're thinking about fatherhood, there has to be that sort of impetus on fathers to figure this stuff out and to really deeply embed ourselves within God's instruction.
00:10:20
Speaker 3: In a way that will allow us to have a.
00:10:24
Speaker 1: Spiritual sensitivity, a godly sensitivity to how to direct our children, so that we're not just thinking through how do I set my kids up so they can be maximally successful, but how do I set my kids up so they can be wise, so that they can be followers of the Lord, so they can be disciples as well. I don't think anything you said contradicts that. I'm just kind of throwing that in there as my little nugget.
00:10:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good, that's good. And to that point, not to overextend the metaphor. If you're training someone, what that person's doing matters, right, You're gonna you're going to try to reduce bulk and the create and the increasing of strength. For a guard in basketball or for a tennis player who doesn't want bulk, that's going to hurt them. If you're if you're working with an offensive lineman, you.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: Want bulk, You just want meat.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: That's right, and that matters both in terms of how the two groups eat, but also in the in terms of the way that they're going to train. Yeah, and that's recognizing that maybe after the fact seems more obvious, but walking into the situation maybe is less obvious. And that's what it is with kids, right. We have kids with different personalities. And one of the things that you and I were discussing that I think would be fun to just sort of lay out, parse out the differences is both of our oldest child children are our boys, and as we talked to them, talked about them, we both came to the conclusion that public school is better for them than a private school setting, even as we recognize very different things about their personality. Is what gets them going.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, we came to the same conclusion, right, Yeah, I'm happy to we came to the same conclusion, but for very different reasons.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: And so.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: I think the first thing to recognize is, so my son is now twenty. He's studying theology and history at Saint Louis University, so he's double majoram there. He's doing great, great kid. But when he first started school, I would say two things. Number One, we were living in a small town. We were living in Carlonville, Illinois, and so there aren't a lot of private schools around. And my mom was a teacher in the public school. She knew a lot of people, and so it just made sense for us to send him there. Now, once he got started in the public, in the private school or in the public schools, we we eventually moved to Chicago, and so going into Chicago public schools is no simple feat when you're coming from a small town. So you think about going from a class of like I graduated with a class of one hundred. Chicago public schools have a few more students than that. They're really large, they're very urban, and so I can remember thinking about sending my son to this very new context, even though it was still a public school, very different context in Chicago than in Carlinville. So we did look at a private school at that point, but we'd already started to see in Judo this sort of sense that he was going to be a little bit more contrarian. He had this way of thinking through issues even at a very young age, where it was he wasn't going to buy it on the first try, and he was going to question what you were telling him.
00:13:54
Speaker 3: And so he just had that sort of bent.
00:13:56
Speaker 1: I think it's part of the reason why history and theology are so fitted to him, right, Like, he likes that sort of pushback and contrariant nature of those disciplines. And so I was concerned about sending him to a Christian private school, not because I thought that he would be getting wrong information, but that I thought he would be reacting to the information he got in that contrarian way. And so if I'm going to lean into his personality and say he's going to push back on whatever he's hearing and he's going to question it, I might as well just send him somewhere where I can deal with the wrong teachings.
00:14:34
Speaker 3: Right.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: I was happy to have the conversations where he's going to push against some of the things that he may be learning in public school and help him come to a more biblically oriented solution to those or biblically resolution to some of those problems. Then I would have been having to defend something that a private Christian school is teaching him and now becoming part of the antagonism. Let's say, you know, he's pushing now not against the Christian school, but also against me as I'm trying to correct things. And so I felt like it would be simpler to be on the same side with him, that I could question these things, and that we could push against some of these things together, and I could help him sort of refine the way he's doing that and refine his thinking overall. And so public school made perfect sense then for my son, even though we'd moved from, like I said, Carlinville to Chicago. My son went to Chicago Public School for his entire elementary school all the way up into eighth grade. We moved out, he started in the suburbs. We'd moved out to the suburbs at that point for his freshman year in high school. But he went through you know, second grade through eight all in Chicago public schools, and we did fine, a lot of good conversations, a lot of a lot of pushing together on things, a lot of refining thought. But I will say that was probably one of the better decisions my wife and I made was it turned out very very well for us. But it was because he was that contrarian nature and was pushing against things. I didn't want to be trying to defend the Christian school against my son, which is what I felt like would happen if we'd send him to a private Christian school.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense if I can be so bold. I wonder if there was another layer that you're not mentioning. Why that you know, as a studied biblical scholar who knows what you're talking about. I know when I go to church, and this isn't a knock on church, but you know, a pastor will say something just this past weeks that the Greek says such and such and that means such and such, and I'm just listening, and you know, it's not one of those things that go around and tell everyone pastor said that and that's just garbage, right. But I heard him and I said, yeah, I know the Greek there.
00:16:58
Speaker 3: And.
00:17:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, you kind of go completely completely non issue.
00:17:05
Speaker 1: No, it's definitely another layer. I appreciate you bringing that out. I had the same problems. I don't like the the Christian private schools we looked at had very strong stances on things like seven day creationism, They had very strong stances on particular eschatological positions. They had very strong positions on even one of them we looked at on Christians and politics. And so as we talked with some of the private school teachers, I did not get the impression that this was going to create the sort of open environment I thought Judah would drive in. I think there's a way that that could have worked, you know, if there's a I think a classical Christian school would have been much more amenable to what we were looking at, where they're doing more reading and socratic method and talking through texts and those kind of things. I probably would have gravitated more towards that this was more of the private schools that we had available at the time, would have been more classroom instruction based. You listen to the teacher and regurgitate what the teacher is going to say to you. There wasn't a lot of dialogue and back and forth, and to me, I was just kind of sitting there going I'm probably what's going to end up happening is I'm going to end up in the awkward situation of disagreeing with a lot of his teachers and having to try to explain to a second grader why Daddy thinks what he's being taught isn't quite right. By the time he was in eighth grade, I would have felt much more comfortable with that. But as you know, when you're at those younger ages, I always felt like limiting dissonance right between me and the school, right me and what he's being taught, particularly theologically and biblically, was important. Limiting the it's between me and what's being taught in the public school was not as big an issue because he already knew that we were a Christian family and that we were going to disagree with things, so you could just frame it up like that. But I think, you know, trying to nuance with a second grader the finer points of how you should think about, you know, Genesis one one through two three, and what are the different views and how could this work? It's just not something that I felt I was going to be capable pulling off.
00:19:29
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's the other reason.
00:19:32
Speaker 1: I just felt like I could do a better job of helping him navigate from against some of what he might get in public school, which he did get some of it. So I felt like I could do a better job of helping him navigate against that versus doing a and a poor job of navigating against what some of what he would have gotten at the Putt Privates Christian schools we happen to be looking at.
00:19:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for that. I wanted to pull that little bit out because I thought it's actually so much of a bridge. So, even as our sons are different in personality, I think that bridge is a similar bridge. So you mentioned your son is the contrarian and I and you're a bit of a contrary, and I'm a bit of a contrarian. Yeah, that's not so much my son, right, that's not so much my son. That is very much my first daughter. So I'll put her story aside because I think in some ways it would match some of the narrative you've said, because you know, she would have a tendency to be a contrarian, and that can create layers of contrariness that a second grader, a third grader isn't ready yet to understand that they're layers. It's sort of an all or nothing thinking for a kid, and that makes sense. Sometimes it's not for an adult too. But with my son, my older son, he's very he gets very excited. He has a lot of energy for everything. He likes everything. He's energetic to learn about everything. If you give him a little bit, he'll dig in and go further. And it's actually precisely because he's not a contrarian that that concerns me a little bit at times, because it's I learned this, and I decided that was exciting, because everything's exciting, and I jumped into it and went a mile deep in it. And now I've got all this information. And he'll say, did you know this? Did you know that? I'm like, no, I didn't because I never got excited about that and didn't jump him out. But interesting, And I think that's a wonderful quality that is ripe for malformation if all you ever get is a very focused perspective on what the goal ought to be and some of the things that often happen. You know, the curriculum in a private school, just like in a private college, especially Christian college, is often going to be something much more integrated in the parts than you are in a setting where the emphasis is on the greater diversity of thinking on a topic. Right, And as a result, with a personality like my son's, it seems like a mistake to say that the goal here is for you to jump them out deep, especially when I know, again the curse may be of the academic theologian, that there are fine points that I know I'm not going to agree with, sometimes not insignificant points, whereas I know that when he's in a setting where there's a lot more scattered of an identity right where it's generally in a public school, there might be a greater openness to what's new out there than in the private school, where there's a greater sense of preserving what's not new against what's new. And as a result of this sort of emphasis of what's of of bringing in the new, the constant curricular revisions and the constant changes of you and how we understand education, it provided an opportunity to say to my son, who's already inclined to see a very specific view and jump all the way in, that there is variety and that it generates conversations. Right. So he comes home and he wants to talk about one thing, and I'll say, you know, that's good. I'm intrigued that you're learning about that. Let's talk a little bit more about that one thing, right, And I'm deliberately being vague so as not to close off the conversation, but it provides the opportunity for nuance. Right. Sometimes those one thing's very much overlap with my research, and I can say, okay, well, obviously, so my son isn't as far along as yours. He's a middle schooler, so he's maybe not getting the kind of nuance that a college student would get, and you wouldn't expect it you and you're hired to get it right. My job isn't necessarily to say, let me pretend you're a twenty year old in college, but it is to say, let's complicate things a little bit, you know, kind of tactical strikes. Maybe a little bit more is going on here than what it seems like right in this initial phase, you need to think there's less going on, so let me give you a little bit more. And I've found with his personality that that's a much easier thing to do when his exposure is broader than it is when it's a narrow exposure. And now he becomes something of an apologist for a viewpoint. In those moments, it's harder to pull him back. And I just think with this personality, that's that's just the better, the better framework, the better place for him. And then with my daughter, who sounds a lot more like your son, you know, i'd say ditto to that. Right, she's a contrary in and yeah she's going to push. Let her push where there's greater variety, because now there's an opportunity to speak into that without having to have again that overly narrow focus.
00:25:26
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, I think.
00:25:30
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember when I thought to myself, this might actually work, right, And Judah came home one time, and I can't remember who was what the election was, right, but it may have been it may have been, Well, it had to be a Democrat, Like they were talking about these issues, democratic and Republican issues in the school, and you know, it was definitely skewing Democrat. And so he came home and everything I was hearing come out of his mouth, it was like I was listening to a Democratic Party platform.
00:26:01
Speaker 3: Right now.
00:26:03
Speaker 1: You know me, I'm not an overly political guy, so that didn't bother me. And so what I told him was though, I said, look at the end of the day, if you're saying this because your teacher said it, I'm not real happy about that. If you're saying it because you've come to it on your own, You've looked at it, you've thought about it, you've really you're owning this, that's great. So I said, which one are you doing? Do you really understand the other side? Do you really understand the whole issues? Or are you just parroting? I said something like that, and I remember him just sort of standing back and going, I'm just parroting. Never happened again, Never happened again, Like he would never come back home, right he would.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: He would come back home and he would ask me then questions.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: But it wasn't like he was giving me regurchitating the lecture that he'd got in school. And I think now, like as he's because SLEW is a Catholic institution. They offer what I would consider to be like modern theology. It's not really confessional theology. So someone he's getting he went there for history opted into theology, which I thought was great, But it is a different sort of theology than like you or I were exposed to in our education, right, non confessional theology.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: I don't really have.
00:27:26
Speaker 1: To worry about it that much because when he has questions, he's going to come home and we can have conversations about them. He's not accepting a lot of it, you know, he's he's doing well in it, but he's not owned, you know, like he's not Okay, great, this is exactly what it is.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Right.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: He's calling his own balls and strikes, and I think that that experience in public school really gave him the opportunity to go Now, I can call these balls and strikes, like this person who's conveying the information to me is worthy of my respect.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, I have.
00:27:57
Speaker 1: To own this like it's it's got to be my perspective at the end of the day. And so he's sort of learned, I think, over this time, how to sort of sift and sort and think for himself. And he'll I'm sure he'll make plenty of mistakes, but I'm pretty confident in his ability to think through issues. And I would attribute that to his participation in public school as opposed to the Christian private school. Now, again, to go back to that disclaimer, it's not because the Christian private school wouldn't have been good.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: It's that it wouldn't have been right for him.
00:28:36
Speaker 1: I think our daughter, you know, our adoptive daughter, Lutheran school was perfect for her. It's fantastic, really well structured, smaller classes. You know, she came in the other day and said she was going to We had mentioned somebody was sick, and so she came into my office and said, oh, I want to pray for those people.
00:28:59
Speaker 3: It's kind of perfect for her.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: Right Like, I'm glad we got pushed over in that direction, even though we might not have considered it as closely as we did had the public school been open. I think we'll leave her in that private school all the way as long as we can. I think it's just really fitting for her personality. It provides her the structure she needs. And you know, she's the one daughter that we have who came to us with a history, and so I think that we need the extra support to kind of help give her that structure and that guidance going forward that this school particularly does very very well, and then a public school won't.
00:29:45
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: We're still in a relatively large area. The schools are bigger, they just don't always have the capacity to give that sort of guided structure that a smaller Lutheran school will.
00:29:56
Speaker 3: So again, not a I.
00:30:00
Speaker 1: Don't have any sort of philosophical disagreement with Christian private school. It's just a question of thinking through with this one kid, which one works best?
00:30:12
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:30:12
Speaker 2: Right, Well, the word you use was fitting. Yeah, that's the idea at play. That's the improvisational idea. That's the idea of wisdom. It's being able to discern the best fit. And to discern the best fit is you have to know the landscape. Right. If you don't know anything about the schools of either of the kinds of schools, you can't really make an informed decision of fit if you don't know your kid. And this gets to the question of fatherhood and gets to the issues that we were discussing in the last episode that are somewhat ambiguous in writing, but are getting at that fit issue. Fathers don't provoke your kids, you know whatever precisely we see that provoking as you can't understand what that means and what that looks like without being a father of coming to understand what makes your child tick. You know, as a father of four kids, it's hard to miss that there are four different kids, there's similarities. I talk sometimes about how I can see patterns of similarities between the first and the third and the second and the fourth, and I don't really get how that just seems to me like it happened to work out that way. But it'd be a mistake to assume that the first and the third are the same, and the second and the fourth are the same. There's some major differences. And if you're not aware, how could you begin to know what it means to not provoke your child?
00:31:44
Speaker 3: Right?
00:31:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't think that's a weakness in the text, that's right. It's a presumption in the text. That's a right presumption that whatever it is, you need to be in tune with it. And when you're in tune with your child, you know how far to push, how far not to push. I talked last time about being on the basketball team, and my coach seemed to understand that his son wasn't going to receive certain instruction from him, but he was more than happy to be pushed by me. Yeah, and so he encouraged it. He leaned into that, as opposed to another guy in the team that my coach realized that guy's not responding to your pushing, and so he became something of a buffer there to make sure I didn't overpush him like that. That's a discernment again and fit.
00:32:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think as I think through that notion of provoking our children. The reason this came up, this whole topic came up with us yesterday, is that after the podcast, we were talking a little bit about, you know, this sort of co parenting that we end up having to do.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: I called it co parenting. It's not quite that, but we.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Have a lot of unlike earlier ages, we're sending our kids to places for different things. We've outsourced largely education to public war private at schools, and so I would argue that part of what we need to be thinking about. And I don't know that I would have used this verse to think through this at that time, but in retrospect it makes good sense. Am I sending my son or daughter to a place that is going to provoke them, that is going to exasperate them?
00:33:27
Speaker 3: Like?
00:33:27
Speaker 1: Is this what I'm doing? There's a difference the way I interact with my kids. I understand. Just like you're saying, like you can push that button, right, Like you know when you're about to exasperate your kid. But then we also have to think through that, given that we are sending them to these different places, is this also going to exasperate them?
00:33:50
Speaker 3: Right?
00:33:50
Speaker 1: We knew early on that. Well, I'll give an example of my own life. Like, I didn't like team sports, didn't want to have anything to do with them. I was more of a loner, like, just leave me to my own thing. If my parents had pushed me into team sports, I would have been exasperated. I would have hated every minute of it. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the dynamic with the coach and liked the dynamic with the team. It just wasn't my thing, right, So buy me a gym membership and leave me alone, right, And that's what ended up happening. So, I mean, like they intuitively understood that I needed to step away from these things that they would have liked to see me do. But they were okay with me just being able to go to the gym and still get some exercise and take care of myself physically. They didn't have that need for me to be on a sports team, right, And I think that was a wise decision on their part. And I think the same as we dealt with our kids through high school. For instance, my son really struggled in high school, and part of it was just the whole.
00:35:00
Speaker 3: System of it exasperated him.
00:35:03
Speaker 1: Everything about it was frustrating, you know, how early he had to get up, why he had to be there the entire day, the classes he had to take, all these different things, like, none of it made sense to him, and it was really a challenge for him to get through high school. He just struggled with it. He pushed back against it. He was exasperated. Right now, there wasn't a whole lot we could do. We'd try to help him manage it. We worked with him through it, but it was effort on our part. Now that he's in college, it's like night and day, it's no problem.
00:35:38
Speaker 3: Right.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: That high school experience really exasperated him. And I think that's something that we need to think about as we're you know, working with our kids. Am I sending them somewhere that's going to exasperate them? Because there's only so much mental and emotional resources people just have in general, right, And so if we're pushing them into something that's just going to frustrate them. Why are we doing that. I'm not saying shelter your kids and you know, only let them do things that they like to do. Right, there is a point where you have to challenge them. There need the friction, they need that, They need that trial, right in order to get stronger. So I'm not saying, hey, don't ever trigger your kids or push them into challenging situations. But what I am saying is there's a limit to that.
00:36:23
Speaker 3: Right.
00:36:24
Speaker 1: I don't take my daughters like to lift with me. I would never put three hundred pounds on the bench press and have them lay underneath it and.
00:36:30
Speaker 3: Go, okay, lift this up like that's crazy town. Right.
00:36:35
Speaker 1: There's a progressive overload that you have to give them that's commensurate with their weight and strength. And that's really what we're kind of talking about here, like presenting with those challenges, allowing those challenges to build the resilience of your children as opposed to putting them somewhere where they're just going to get crushed.
00:36:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you also wouldn't do that to me, because you know I couldn't handle that either.
00:36:59
Speaker 4: There's a lot of people I wouldn't throw other drink about Yeah, I think maybe one more angle here is probably helpful too, because I think about, yes, the.
00:37:12
Speaker 2: Issue provoking, Yes, the issue of exasperating. But part of that understanding and knowing is to realize what is that point of actual exasperation and what is that point that maybe he isn't quite there but they might think so, you know, like sometimes you do have to push a little bit beyond what the child thinks, and that's part of the knowing. I think about. My youngest is a first grader, and he was doing basic math and he got a few things wrong. And when I would point out the few things he got wrong for his worksheets that he had to bring home, he started to tense up and he started to act like he was under attack. Right, it really fun like a textbook fight or flight moment. And I saw this and I thought, this is a little bit disproportionate, Like this is learning, right, You miss some things, you get corrected, you realize what you needed correcting on, and then you fix it. But you don't say it to a first grader that way. So I finally looked at him and I said, it seems like you're getting worked up here, and I started to ask him in basic ways, what is it that's concerning you? What's the matter? And he said he wasn't really sure. And that's about what I expected from a first grader, right that he's not sure why he's starting to get worked up. And I said, it seems like you think something's going to happen to you if you get something wrong. Does that sound right? And he said yeah, he said, what do you think it is it's going to happen to you. I don't know that's a good answer, because you don't nothing is going to happen to you a reason to think something's gonna happen to you, But you feel that, So let's work with that right now. And I spent a few minutes sitting there talking him through the fact that, Okay, you did get something wrong right here, and I did tell you you got it wrong, but then what And he started to realize, actually, yeah, then nothing right. You just told me so that I could get it right, and then we did it again. Maybe maybe the thing that happened was he had to spend a little bit longer on it than he wanted to. Yeah, but the satisfaction of oh, I get it now and getting it right way outweighed the sense of some mysterious thing that was going to happen to him. And what was remarkable to me, I tell the story because what was remarkable to me was that in the subsequent quite literally months at this point from that event, I've never once seen him get exasperated and being corrected. Yeah, So it really was a moment of he wasn't even sure why. There was just some hidden anxiety, fear wherever it came from. Perhaps it was just sort of just something in his personality that once he was able to get on top of it, immediately became a non issue. Now in every moment, maybe it's not immediate in this case happened to Ben. But I think the instructive angle that I want to bring in here is that part of that improvisation, probably that part of that fit, part of that wisdom dynamic, is just simply recognizing that sometimes the child does need to be pushed. Yes, pushing is not the same as exasperating, right, Yeah, And in that moment, that's part of again knowing your child to recognize, oh, this is actually a moment where I can push you. Yeah, and it's okay.
00:40:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know it and maybe, well, we're getting we're getting toward the end here, let me give this story is sort of a to give a reinforcement to that. So I think working with clients was really helpful to me when I started parenting. The difference between clients and parents, like clients and children, is that clients can opt not to come back.
00:41:22
Speaker 3: Right.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: So, when I was a personal trainer, if I pushed a client too hard, push them well beyond their limits, push them beyond their comfort.
00:41:30
Speaker 3: Right, and.
00:41:32
Speaker 1: Trip that wire where it's like I pushed them way too far, they just wouldn't come back right.
00:41:39
Speaker 3: Just that's what happened.
00:41:40
Speaker 1: And so you're constantly figuring out the line where Nope, I can make them do another three reps. I can make them do another whole set, I can make them do more weight, I can make them do more exercises. I can have them do this exercise they hate, right, because they really need to like learning. When you can put those things in and at what point in the relationship it's appropriate to do, that became sort of an art form, right. So here's the story. I used to train this gentleman. He would always bring his chihuahua in with him Bruno. He brought Bruno in and I worked at Wow Bruno to Chiuaha. I worked in this like little boutique like upscale personal training studios. Only one on one training is me and maybe three or four other trainers working at the same time, and so that's the context. So it was kind of froofy, but he brought his Chiuah would be running around and this gentleman would be very upfront, like he didn't want to sweat. He was going to work after he didn't want to. He didn't want to have to cool off, so he didn't want to sweat. He just wanted to get a workout in and it goes way and I was like, okay, that's fine. So there would be days where he'd come in he'dn't want to work out for like fifteen twenty minutes and it was supposed to be an hour session and it might be used to have drive my boss nuts.
00:43:00
Speaker 3: He'd be like, what are you doing with this guy?
00:43:01
Speaker 1: And I'm like, it's a long game, right, That's all I got with this guy is a long game, right, So I've got to get to the point where he trusts me enough that he's not doing this every day. He's maybe doing it once during the week, right, Bruno is always going to be running around and that's fine, right, But maybe I can get him to do two hour long sessions a week and then one fifteen minute session right where he's just he's done, like he can't handle it anymore. And that's eventually what it came to. I mean, he was with me for four years, five years when I was training. I worked with him that long, and toward the end of our training together like he'd done well, he'd got in good results, and I could push him a little harder. I could push him a little harder, you know. Second year, I could push him a little harder than I could push him a little harder the third year. I could push him a little harder the fourth year. But it was a long game, and I think that there's something in that that helped me understand how to work with my kids, even though my kids couldn't leave right out a lot of trouble. I think you're being becoming an emancipated minor. Is it difficult? But it did give me this sense of look, I've got a long time here, I've got I don't have to solve this problem right now in this moment. What I need to do is sort of start shaving off rough edges a little by little by little. And it's it's not an immediate problem, right, It's not you know, your kid's about to touch the hot stove.
00:44:25
Speaker 3: I have to pull the hand away, right.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: It's something that I can work on this tendency over time and get them to the point where they trust me enough that I can finally just knock the rough edge off completely. And so I think there is something to be said for looking at these things longer term and understanding that as a parent, you're not going to quote unquote fix your kid in any given moment necessarily, but that part of the job is to build sufficient trust that you're with them and forming them and walking with them through the long term. Having a great relationship with your kids. And again, I know mine are at further along than yours, but like when my son can come home, we can have conversations about history and theology and different books and stuff he's studying at twenty, I'm really happy with that. You know that he trusts me enough to do that. He's got a great relationship with his mom my, seventeen year old twin daughters. Which that's another fascinating talk about improving with twin daughters and not getting Yeah, figuring out the differences between them is fun, I'll say that. But you know, having them have good relationship with me and wanting to come to me with stuff is great. And so I think there is a long game that we play as dads, and it's not just the Hey, it has to end right now, you can ever do that again. There are moments for that, but there's also a sense in which we need to play the long game here because they're going to need us well beyond when they think they'll need us, and we need to be a place and a person that they can come to as they meet lights challenges because everybody needs. Everybody needs some help every once in a while.
00:46:19
Speaker 3: So I'll leave it there.
00:46:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. The idea that comes to my mind as you say all that is I think can sum it up with there's an attentiveness that being a father far from going in with a prepackaged set of expectations and values. Maybe maybe le's the values, but expectations. A father has to be attentive, and a mother as well has to be attentive, right, Yes, and that means understanding. That means recognizing that you receive yourself from those kids in the sense that we are not fathers without those kids.
00:46:59
Speaker 3: Right.
00:47:00
Speaker 2: Our very identities are tied into who they are. But that doesn't mean therefore duplicating ourselves in them, right, It would be a mistake to say, my job here is to take the best of what I would have wanted, and that's what you've got to be. It's the attentiveness of I received myself from you, and in that process, I receive who you are, and I work within those contexts to help you become, according to your talents and your gifts and your personality, a person who will grow up to be a wise person walking before the Lord.
00:47:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:47:40
Speaker 1: And I think uniquely, as Christian fathers, we have the privilege of helping our kids learn to be the image of God that God uniquely made them to be. And that's a really crucial task. And so yeah, I think it's just fun.
00:47:59
Speaker 3: Man.
00:47:59
Speaker 1: I know, we could talk about this like it's a somber event, and it is serious, right, but it's also just.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: A lot of fun being a dad.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: I mean, I've dealt with a lot of serious issues, but at the end of the day, I enjoy it.
00:48:11
Speaker 3: There.
00:48:11
Speaker 1: You know, kids are fun, especially now that they're teenagers. I'm not a great like my five year old kind of drives me a little nuts. I'm man enough to admit that. But even her, it's like, it is still fun.
00:48:23
Speaker 3: It's just.
00:48:25
Speaker 1: When they get to a certain age, I really like my personality start to kick in.
00:48:29
Speaker 3: I really enjoy being with them.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: And so my wife and I always joke, She's like, you're you're not the best pre K through elementary school dad, but you're an amazing teenage dad. You know so, But it is a lot of fun. So I guess my encouragement to Christian dad's out there would be number one. You know, form your own character. Do what you need to do to form your own character, and then don't be so concerned about every little thing that your kid does. Play that long game really developed. Trust be the person in their lives who can direct them back to the Lord when they need it. But yeah, remember that it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience and that you're forming Little Jesus Is in your own house. So anyway, good stuff, man. We'll call it there. We're well over time, but I think that's appropriate. When we're talking about our kids, we probably should go over time, so but we'll call it there. So thanks Man for this conversation. This was helpful and good, and thanks to everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to life audio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined again by doctor Cheese Farmer. We're continuing our series on Christian manhood and we're going to talk a little bit more about fatherhood today. Last conversation we had on fatherhood, we got into this idea that there isn't a recipe for being a Christian father. Like a lot of times, it requires improvisation. We've talked about that in other episodes and different topics, but one of my favorites is Chopped. It's this Food Network show where they give you a mystery back ask it, and if you're an expert enough chef, you can actually make something edible out of gummy bears and beat root and other strange ingredients. Right, And so the idea I think with the kids is sort of like a kid is like a mystery basket. You're given this set of ingredients, and your job as a Christian father is to be an expert enough chef that you can actually help this child become something palatable. It's probably a little more important than that, but you get the drift. There's an improvisational aspect to raising kids that's really crucial, and so Ashesh and I talked a little bit about this after the last episode, and one of the things we both had sort of interesting convictions around was and a question I've been asking off a lot, why didn't I send my kids to private school, specifically private Christian school, And so we thought we might dive into that. I know that's kind of a hot topic right now, with public school education taking a bit of a hit in recent years, and so it might be an interesting topic and for us to just talk through this improvisational aspect of being a father. So I'll leave it there. I don't know whether you want to give any additional preamble, but.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me give the warning label of this isn't bash on private school. This isn't no one should send their kid to private school. That's not that's not the conversation. The conversation is specifically geared towards its improvisational reality. As we think improvisationally, as we think about what's before us. Why is it that we've come to the decisions that we have with our kids? Not nothing more than that. Nothing prescriptive or totalitarian about whether or not you should send them. There.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: No, And it's a good disclaimer.
00:02:48
Speaker 1: And I will say that just to give people a little bit more context. My wife and I recently adopted a young girl. She was four, and we adopt her. She's five now she's going to private school. So we sent her to a private Lutheran school in her area. Just to give the brief thumbnail sketch before we jump in. It isn't a choice that we probably would have made, but the preschool in our area, the public preschool in our area, was full, and so we needed a place to send her. Obviously to preschool. And so given that the public school couldn't take her for full days, you could take her for a kind of half days. There's a whole thing there, But because they couldn't take her for full days and we needed her to be in full days.
00:03:31
Speaker 3: We opted for private school. So it was a pragmatic choice.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: But I can talk about this a little bit more, but it's ended up being a really good spot for her, and I don't know that we would have recognized that had we just, you know, sort of not been pushed to it. But I think we're both very glad that she ended up in a private school. So yeah, no private school bashing, no real public school bashing either. Quite frankly, I think the whole point of this is you have different kids with different needs, in different dispositions, and so you're asking yourself as a parent, particularly as a father, where is it that this kid is going to thrive? And I think that's the real big question, at least we were trying to answer as we were thinking about our kids and where to send them.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: To school, right, and that question about where they're going to thrive gets maybe to the heart of the question of improvisation that we tried to start to draw out when looking at the text that these passages. We looked at Ephesians colautions, neither one is terribly specific, and you'd be hard pressed to find really any passage in scripture that's terribly specific. Even when you look at something like the Book of Proverbs. That's the framework that it's written in, is a father talking to his son. At least the first part of the Book of Proverbs is written that way. While you do get this distinction between Lady Wisdom, who this father wants a son to chase, and Lady Folly, who this father wants to warrant his son about, the descriptions remain still general, right, They're about the sorts of things that Lady Wisdom does and produces and the sorts of things lady Folly does and produces. Right, And why long term, one truly is the path of wisdom, and one truly is the.
00:05:32
Speaker 3: Path of folly.
00:05:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you're looking for, you know, the ten things that you need to have to make sure that you avoid lady or Lady Folly, you're not finding.
00:05:45
Speaker 4: Them, right.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: And that but that dynamic, I think is to the heart of the Biblical account that it is, especially with its abundant concern for wisdom, right, such that Paul even frames several his own letters in terms of wisdom. Jesus speaks his Sermon on the Mount is him as the wise teacher. This very strong and deliberate focus on wisdom in the scripture is meant to create people who are adaptive. And that's the idea of improvisation. Can I enter into a situation that's totally new or totally outside the framework of what I might have expected, and have the ability to operate within it, And in some ways we get this in other avenues of life. I've never been a great instrumental player, but one thing that I've noticed from those who are is the truly best musicians are the ones who have such a handle on their craft that they're able to riff off others. In fact, the whole genre of jazz is built on this. We've talked before about sports and athletic events, and that's been where much of my life has been wrapped up. And I think think what I've seen is what makes the best basketball players and the best tennis players. Right. You think of the Michael Jordans, you think of the Magic Johnson's, the Roger Fetterer's. That is their ability to take what you give them and to over accept is what some sociologists would say, I receive it and I can in that moment from my training, use my mastery of the footwork, use my mastery of understanding defensive rotations, things like that to make the next play in a way in which you can't you can't shock me. Right, If we can transfer that to the parenting landscape, there's so many things. There's so many things that we encounter, and in a world that's changing more rapidly than ever, there's so much you can't anticipate. But it's about being able to both understand who your children are so that you can help them become the kinds of people that themselves can understand situations that are totally new, and work within the patterns of God's grace to live accordingly. Right, And that's what wisdom is.
00:08:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think the other side of this so I agree with all that. I think the the other side of this is there are some things that we can do that will help us to move toward wisdom, move toward a fear of the Lord. I think of something like Deuteronomy seventeen, right, the Instructions to the future Israeli king supposed to write himself his own copy of the law, have it approved by the priests, read it'll, you know, read it every year, and in that way he is going to learn to fear the Lord. And so I think as fathers, there is something to us. You don't just develop this sort of improvisational instinct because you're a father, right. It isn't just this like, oh, okay, I have kids now, and so automatically I'll just emerge as this wonderful father.
00:09:07
Speaker 3: And that's not quite it.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: I think there is an intentionality that we have to go through in order to develop that expertise, just like anything else.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: You know.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: I can remember when I was a personal trainer, right, and when I started out, I did what I would when I knew how to do what I'd done for myself.
00:09:26
Speaker 3: Right.
00:09:26
Speaker 1: You have people come in and lift really heavy weights. But as I got more and more experience training different sorts of clients, what you quickly realize is that that doesn't work for everybody. It's not really tailored to the individual. There are some people come in, maybe they have an injury, maybe they have an event they're going to go and do. Maybe they have maybe just a particular preference for something, and you have to learn to adapt the workouts to the person while still getting the results. And I think that's sort of it required of me a different sort of learning. I couldn't just lean back and say, well, I've been lifting for fourteen years, I know exactly what I'm doing, because I didn't. I think there had to be adaptation there. And so as we're thinking about fatherhood, there has to be that sort of impetus on fathers to figure this stuff out and to really deeply embed ourselves within God's instruction.
00:10:20
Speaker 3: In a way that will allow us to have a.
00:10:24
Speaker 1: Spiritual sensitivity, a godly sensitivity to how to direct our children, so that we're not just thinking through how do I set my kids up so they can be maximally successful, but how do I set my kids up so they can be wise, so that they can be followers of the Lord, so they can be disciples as well. I don't think anything you said contradicts that. I'm just kind of throwing that in there as my little nugget.
00:10:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good, that's good. And to that point, not to overextend the metaphor. If you're training someone, what that person's doing matters, right, You're gonna you're going to try to reduce bulk and the create and the increasing of strength. For a guard in basketball or for a tennis player who doesn't want bulk, that's going to hurt them. If you're if you're working with an offensive lineman, you.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: Want bulk, You just want meat.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: That's right, and that matters both in terms of how the two groups eat, but also in the in terms of the way that they're going to train. Yeah, and that's recognizing that maybe after the fact seems more obvious, but walking into the situation maybe is less obvious. And that's what it is with kids, right. We have kids with different personalities. And one of the things that you and I were discussing that I think would be fun to just sort of lay out, parse out the differences is both of our oldest child children are our boys, and as we talked to them, talked about them, we both came to the conclusion that public school is better for them than a private school setting, even as we recognize very different things about their personality. Is what gets them going.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, we came to the same conclusion, right, Yeah, I'm happy to we came to the same conclusion, but for very different reasons.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: And so.
00:12:19
Speaker 1: I think the first thing to recognize is, so my son is now twenty. He's studying theology and history at Saint Louis University, so he's double majoram there. He's doing great, great kid. But when he first started school, I would say two things. Number One, we were living in a small town. We were living in Carlonville, Illinois, and so there aren't a lot of private schools around. And my mom was a teacher in the public school. She knew a lot of people, and so it just made sense for us to send him there. Now, once he got started in the public, in the private school or in the public schools, we we eventually moved to Chicago, and so going into Chicago public schools is no simple feat when you're coming from a small town. So you think about going from a class of like I graduated with a class of one hundred. Chicago public schools have a few more students than that. They're really large, they're very urban, and so I can remember thinking about sending my son to this very new context, even though it was still a public school, very different context in Chicago than in Carlinville. So we did look at a private school at that point, but we'd already started to see in Judo this sort of sense that he was going to be a little bit more contrarian. He had this way of thinking through issues even at a very young age, where it was he wasn't going to buy it on the first try, and he was going to question what you were telling him.
00:13:54
Speaker 3: And so he just had that sort of bent.
00:13:56
Speaker 1: I think it's part of the reason why history and theology are so fitted to him, right, Like, he likes that sort of pushback and contrariant nature of those disciplines. And so I was concerned about sending him to a Christian private school, not because I thought that he would be getting wrong information, but that I thought he would be reacting to the information he got in that contrarian way. And so if I'm going to lean into his personality and say he's going to push back on whatever he's hearing and he's going to question it, I might as well just send him somewhere where I can deal with the wrong teachings.
00:14:34
Speaker 3: Right.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: I was happy to have the conversations where he's going to push against some of the things that he may be learning in public school and help him come to a more biblically oriented solution to those or biblically resolution to some of those problems. Then I would have been having to defend something that a private Christian school is teaching him and now becoming part of the antagonism. Let's say, you know, he's pushing now not against the Christian school, but also against me as I'm trying to correct things. And so I felt like it would be simpler to be on the same side with him, that I could question these things, and that we could push against some of these things together, and I could help him sort of refine the way he's doing that and refine his thinking overall. And so public school made perfect sense then for my son, even though we'd moved from, like I said, Carlinville to Chicago. My son went to Chicago Public School for his entire elementary school all the way up into eighth grade. We moved out, he started in the suburbs. We'd moved out to the suburbs at that point for his freshman year in high school. But he went through you know, second grade through eight all in Chicago public schools, and we did fine, a lot of good conversations, a lot of a lot of pushing together on things, a lot of refining thought. But I will say that was probably one of the better decisions my wife and I made was it turned out very very well for us. But it was because he was that contrarian nature and was pushing against things. I didn't want to be trying to defend the Christian school against my son, which is what I felt like would happen if we'd send him to a private Christian school.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense if I can be so bold. I wonder if there was another layer that you're not mentioning. Why that you know, as a studied biblical scholar who knows what you're talking about. I know when I go to church, and this isn't a knock on church, but you know, a pastor will say something just this past weeks that the Greek says such and such and that means such and such, and I'm just listening, and you know, it's not one of those things that go around and tell everyone pastor said that and that's just garbage, right. But I heard him and I said, yeah, I know the Greek there.
00:16:58
Speaker 3: And.
00:17:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, you kind of go completely completely non issue.
00:17:05
Speaker 1: No, it's definitely another layer. I appreciate you bringing that out. I had the same problems. I don't like the the Christian private schools we looked at had very strong stances on things like seven day creationism, They had very strong stances on particular eschatological positions. They had very strong positions on even one of them we looked at on Christians and politics. And so as we talked with some of the private school teachers, I did not get the impression that this was going to create the sort of open environment I thought Judah would drive in. I think there's a way that that could have worked, you know, if there's a I think a classical Christian school would have been much more amenable to what we were looking at, where they're doing more reading and socratic method and talking through texts and those kind of things. I probably would have gravitated more towards that this was more of the private schools that we had available at the time, would have been more classroom instruction based. You listen to the teacher and regurgitate what the teacher is going to say to you. There wasn't a lot of dialogue and back and forth, and to me, I was just kind of sitting there going I'm probably what's going to end up happening is I'm going to end up in the awkward situation of disagreeing with a lot of his teachers and having to try to explain to a second grader why Daddy thinks what he's being taught isn't quite right. By the time he was in eighth grade, I would have felt much more comfortable with that. But as you know, when you're at those younger ages, I always felt like limiting dissonance right between me and the school, right me and what he's being taught, particularly theologically and biblically, was important. Limiting the it's between me and what's being taught in the public school was not as big an issue because he already knew that we were a Christian family and that we were going to disagree with things, so you could just frame it up like that. But I think, you know, trying to nuance with a second grader the finer points of how you should think about, you know, Genesis one one through two three, and what are the different views and how could this work? It's just not something that I felt I was going to be capable pulling off.
00:19:29
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's the other reason.
00:19:32
Speaker 1: I just felt like I could do a better job of helping him navigate from against some of what he might get in public school, which he did get some of it. So I felt like I could do a better job of helping him navigate against that versus doing a and a poor job of navigating against what some of what he would have gotten at the Putt Privates Christian schools we happen to be looking at.
00:19:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for that. I wanted to pull that little bit out because I thought it's actually so much of a bridge. So, even as our sons are different in personality, I think that bridge is a similar bridge. So you mentioned your son is the contrarian and I and you're a bit of a contrary, and I'm a bit of a contrarian. Yeah, that's not so much my son, right, that's not so much my son. That is very much my first daughter. So I'll put her story aside because I think in some ways it would match some of the narrative you've said, because you know, she would have a tendency to be a contrarian, and that can create layers of contrariness that a second grader, a third grader isn't ready yet to understand that they're layers. It's sort of an all or nothing thinking for a kid, and that makes sense. Sometimes it's not for an adult too. But with my son, my older son, he's very he gets very excited. He has a lot of energy for everything. He likes everything. He's energetic to learn about everything. If you give him a little bit, he'll dig in and go further. And it's actually precisely because he's not a contrarian that that concerns me a little bit at times, because it's I learned this, and I decided that was exciting, because everything's exciting, and I jumped into it and went a mile deep in it. And now I've got all this information. And he'll say, did you know this? Did you know that? I'm like, no, I didn't because I never got excited about that and didn't jump him out. But interesting, And I think that's a wonderful quality that is ripe for malformation if all you ever get is a very focused perspective on what the goal ought to be and some of the things that often happen. You know, the curriculum in a private school, just like in a private college, especially Christian college, is often going to be something much more integrated in the parts than you are in a setting where the emphasis is on the greater diversity of thinking on a topic. Right, And as a result, with a personality like my son's, it seems like a mistake to say that the goal here is for you to jump them out deep, especially when I know, again the curse may be of the academic theologian, that there are fine points that I know I'm not going to agree with, sometimes not insignificant points, whereas I know that when he's in a setting where there's a lot more scattered of an identity right where it's generally in a public school, there might be a greater openness to what's new out there than in the private school, where there's a greater sense of preserving what's not new against what's new. And as a result of this sort of emphasis of what's of of bringing in the new, the constant curricular revisions and the constant changes of you and how we understand education, it provided an opportunity to say to my son, who's already inclined to see a very specific view and jump all the way in, that there is variety and that it generates conversations. Right. So he comes home and he wants to talk about one thing, and I'll say, you know, that's good. I'm intrigued that you're learning about that. Let's talk a little bit more about that one thing, right, And I'm deliberately being vague so as not to close off the conversation, but it provides the opportunity for nuance. Right. Sometimes those one thing's very much overlap with my research, and I can say, okay, well, obviously, so my son isn't as far along as yours. He's a middle schooler, so he's maybe not getting the kind of nuance that a college student would get, and you wouldn't expect it you and you're hired to get it right. My job isn't necessarily to say, let me pretend you're a twenty year old in college, but it is to say, let's complicate things a little bit, you know, kind of tactical strikes. Maybe a little bit more is going on here than what it seems like right in this initial phase, you need to think there's less going on, so let me give you a little bit more. And I've found with his personality that that's a much easier thing to do when his exposure is broader than it is when it's a narrow exposure. And now he becomes something of an apologist for a viewpoint. In those moments, it's harder to pull him back. And I just think with this personality, that's that's just the better, the better framework, the better place for him. And then with my daughter, who sounds a lot more like your son, you know, i'd say ditto to that. Right, she's a contrary in and yeah she's going to push. Let her push where there's greater variety, because now there's an opportunity to speak into that without having to have again that overly narrow focus.
00:25:26
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, I think.
00:25:30
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember when I thought to myself, this might actually work, right, And Judah came home one time, and I can't remember who was what the election was, right, but it may have been it may have been, Well, it had to be a Democrat, Like they were talking about these issues, democratic and Republican issues in the school, and you know, it was definitely skewing Democrat. And so he came home and everything I was hearing come out of his mouth, it was like I was listening to a Democratic Party platform.
00:26:01
Speaker 3: Right now.
00:26:03
Speaker 1: You know me, I'm not an overly political guy, so that didn't bother me. And so what I told him was though, I said, look at the end of the day, if you're saying this because your teacher said it, I'm not real happy about that. If you're saying it because you've come to it on your own, You've looked at it, you've thought about it, you've really you're owning this, that's great. So I said, which one are you doing? Do you really understand the other side? Do you really understand the whole issues? Or are you just parroting? I said something like that, and I remember him just sort of standing back and going, I'm just parroting. Never happened again, Never happened again, Like he would never come back home, right he would.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: He would come back home and he would ask me then questions.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: But it wasn't like he was giving me regurchitating the lecture that he'd got in school. And I think now, like as he's because SLEW is a Catholic institution. They offer what I would consider to be like modern theology. It's not really confessional theology. So someone he's getting he went there for history opted into theology, which I thought was great, But it is a different sort of theology than like you or I were exposed to in our education, right, non confessional theology.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: I don't really have.
00:27:26
Speaker 1: To worry about it that much because when he has questions, he's going to come home and we can have conversations about them. He's not accepting a lot of it, you know, he's he's doing well in it, but he's not owned, you know, like he's not Okay, great, this is exactly what it is.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Right.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: He's calling his own balls and strikes, and I think that that experience in public school really gave him the opportunity to go Now, I can call these balls and strikes, like this person who's conveying the information to me is worthy of my respect.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, I have.
00:27:57
Speaker 1: To own this like it's it's got to be my perspective at the end of the day. And so he's sort of learned, I think, over this time, how to sort of sift and sort and think for himself. And he'll I'm sure he'll make plenty of mistakes, but I'm pretty confident in his ability to think through issues. And I would attribute that to his participation in public school as opposed to the Christian private school. Now, again, to go back to that disclaimer, it's not because the Christian private school wouldn't have been good.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: It's that it wouldn't have been right for him.
00:28:36
Speaker 1: I think our daughter, you know, our adoptive daughter, Lutheran school was perfect for her. It's fantastic, really well structured, smaller classes. You know, she came in the other day and said she was going to We had mentioned somebody was sick, and so she came into my office and said, oh, I want to pray for those people.
00:28:59
Speaker 3: It's kind of perfect for her.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: Right Like, I'm glad we got pushed over in that direction, even though we might not have considered it as closely as we did had the public school been open. I think we'll leave her in that private school all the way as long as we can. I think it's just really fitting for her personality. It provides her the structure she needs. And you know, she's the one daughter that we have who came to us with a history, and so I think that we need the extra support to kind of help give her that structure and that guidance going forward that this school particularly does very very well, and then a public school won't.
00:29:45
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: We're still in a relatively large area. The schools are bigger, they just don't always have the capacity to give that sort of guided structure that a smaller Lutheran school will.
00:29:56
Speaker 3: So again, not a I.
00:30:00
Speaker 1: Don't have any sort of philosophical disagreement with Christian private school. It's just a question of thinking through with this one kid, which one works best?
00:30:12
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:30:12
Speaker 2: Right, Well, the word you use was fitting. Yeah, that's the idea at play. That's the improvisational idea. That's the idea of wisdom. It's being able to discern the best fit. And to discern the best fit is you have to know the landscape. Right. If you don't know anything about the schools of either of the kinds of schools, you can't really make an informed decision of fit if you don't know your kid. And this gets to the question of fatherhood and gets to the issues that we were discussing in the last episode that are somewhat ambiguous in writing, but are getting at that fit issue. Fathers don't provoke your kids, you know whatever precisely we see that provoking as you can't understand what that means and what that looks like without being a father of coming to understand what makes your child tick. You know, as a father of four kids, it's hard to miss that there are four different kids, there's similarities. I talk sometimes about how I can see patterns of similarities between the first and the third and the second and the fourth, and I don't really get how that just seems to me like it happened to work out that way. But it'd be a mistake to assume that the first and the third are the same, and the second and the fourth are the same. There's some major differences. And if you're not aware, how could you begin to know what it means to not provoke your child?
00:31:44
Speaker 3: Right?
00:31:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't think that's a weakness in the text, that's right. It's a presumption in the text. That's a right presumption that whatever it is, you need to be in tune with it. And when you're in tune with your child, you know how far to push, how far not to push. I talked last time about being on the basketball team, and my coach seemed to understand that his son wasn't going to receive certain instruction from him, but he was more than happy to be pushed by me. Yeah, and so he encouraged it. He leaned into that, as opposed to another guy in the team that my coach realized that guy's not responding to your pushing, and so he became something of a buffer there to make sure I didn't overpush him like that. That's a discernment again and fit.
00:32:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think as I think through that notion of provoking our children. The reason this came up, this whole topic came up with us yesterday, is that after the podcast, we were talking a little bit about, you know, this sort of co parenting that we end up having to do.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: I called it co parenting. It's not quite that, but we.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Have a lot of unlike earlier ages, we're sending our kids to places for different things. We've outsourced largely education to public war private at schools, and so I would argue that part of what we need to be thinking about. And I don't know that I would have used this verse to think through this at that time, but in retrospect it makes good sense. Am I sending my son or daughter to a place that is going to provoke them, that is going to exasperate them?
00:33:27
Speaker 3: Like?
00:33:27
Speaker 1: Is this what I'm doing? There's a difference the way I interact with my kids. I understand. Just like you're saying, like you can push that button, right, Like you know when you're about to exasperate your kid. But then we also have to think through that, given that we are sending them to these different places, is this also going to exasperate them?
00:33:50
Speaker 3: Right?
00:33:50
Speaker 1: We knew early on that. Well, I'll give an example of my own life. Like, I didn't like team sports, didn't want to have anything to do with them. I was more of a loner, like, just leave me to my own thing. If my parents had pushed me into team sports, I would have been exasperated. I would have hated every minute of it. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the dynamic with the coach and liked the dynamic with the team. It just wasn't my thing, right, So buy me a gym membership and leave me alone, right, And that's what ended up happening. So, I mean, like they intuitively understood that I needed to step away from these things that they would have liked to see me do. But they were okay with me just being able to go to the gym and still get some exercise and take care of myself physically. They didn't have that need for me to be on a sports team, right, And I think that was a wise decision on their part. And I think the same as we dealt with our kids through high school. For instance, my son really struggled in high school, and part of it was just the whole.
00:35:00
Speaker 3: System of it exasperated him.
00:35:03
Speaker 1: Everything about it was frustrating, you know, how early he had to get up, why he had to be there the entire day, the classes he had to take, all these different things, like, none of it made sense to him, and it was really a challenge for him to get through high school. He just struggled with it. He pushed back against it. He was exasperated. Right now, there wasn't a whole lot we could do. We'd try to help him manage it. We worked with him through it, but it was effort on our part. Now that he's in college, it's like night and day, it's no problem.
00:35:38
Speaker 3: Right.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: That high school experience really exasperated him. And I think that's something that we need to think about as we're you know, working with our kids. Am I sending them somewhere that's going to exasperate them? Because there's only so much mental and emotional resources people just have in general, right, And so if we're pushing them into something that's just going to frustrate them. Why are we doing that. I'm not saying shelter your kids and you know, only let them do things that they like to do. Right, there is a point where you have to challenge them. There need the friction, they need that, They need that trial, right in order to get stronger. So I'm not saying, hey, don't ever trigger your kids or push them into challenging situations. But what I am saying is there's a limit to that.
00:36:23
Speaker 3: Right.
00:36:24
Speaker 1: I don't take my daughters like to lift with me. I would never put three hundred pounds on the bench press and have them lay underneath it and.
00:36:30
Speaker 3: Go, okay, lift this up like that's crazy town. Right.
00:36:35
Speaker 1: There's a progressive overload that you have to give them that's commensurate with their weight and strength. And that's really what we're kind of talking about here, like presenting with those challenges, allowing those challenges to build the resilience of your children as opposed to putting them somewhere where they're just going to get crushed.
00:36:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you also wouldn't do that to me, because you know I couldn't handle that either.
00:36:59
Speaker 4: There's a lot of people I wouldn't throw other drink about Yeah, I think maybe one more angle here is probably helpful too, because I think about, yes, the.
00:37:12
Speaker 2: Issue provoking, Yes, the issue of exasperating. But part of that understanding and knowing is to realize what is that point of actual exasperation and what is that point that maybe he isn't quite there but they might think so, you know, like sometimes you do have to push a little bit beyond what the child thinks, and that's part of the knowing. I think about. My youngest is a first grader, and he was doing basic math and he got a few things wrong. And when I would point out the few things he got wrong for his worksheets that he had to bring home, he started to tense up and he started to act like he was under attack. Right, it really fun like a textbook fight or flight moment. And I saw this and I thought, this is a little bit disproportionate, Like this is learning, right, You miss some things, you get corrected, you realize what you needed correcting on, and then you fix it. But you don't say it to a first grader that way. So I finally looked at him and I said, it seems like you're getting worked up here, and I started to ask him in basic ways, what is it that's concerning you? What's the matter? And he said he wasn't really sure. And that's about what I expected from a first grader, right that he's not sure why he's starting to get worked up. And I said, it seems like you think something's going to happen to you if you get something wrong. Does that sound right? And he said yeah, he said, what do you think it is it's going to happen to you. I don't know that's a good answer, because you don't nothing is going to happen to you a reason to think something's gonna happen to you, But you feel that, So let's work with that right now. And I spent a few minutes sitting there talking him through the fact that, Okay, you did get something wrong right here, and I did tell you you got it wrong, but then what And he started to realize, actually, yeah, then nothing right. You just told me so that I could get it right, and then we did it again. Maybe maybe the thing that happened was he had to spend a little bit longer on it than he wanted to. Yeah, but the satisfaction of oh, I get it now and getting it right way outweighed the sense of some mysterious thing that was going to happen to him. And what was remarkable to me, I tell the story because what was remarkable to me was that in the subsequent quite literally months at this point from that event, I've never once seen him get exasperated and being corrected. Yeah, So it really was a moment of he wasn't even sure why. There was just some hidden anxiety, fear wherever it came from. Perhaps it was just sort of just something in his personality that once he was able to get on top of it, immediately became a non issue. Now in every moment, maybe it's not immediate in this case happened to Ben. But I think the instructive angle that I want to bring in here is that part of that improvisation, probably that part of that fit, part of that wisdom dynamic, is just simply recognizing that sometimes the child does need to be pushed. Yes, pushing is not the same as exasperating, right, Yeah, And in that moment, that's part of again knowing your child to recognize, oh, this is actually a moment where I can push you. Yeah, and it's okay.
00:40:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know it and maybe, well, we're getting we're getting toward the end here, let me give this story is sort of a to give a reinforcement to that. So I think working with clients was really helpful to me when I started parenting. The difference between clients and parents, like clients and children, is that clients can opt not to come back.
00:41:22
Speaker 3: Right.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: So, when I was a personal trainer, if I pushed a client too hard, push them well beyond their limits, push them beyond their comfort.
00:41:30
Speaker 3: Right, and.
00:41:32
Speaker 1: Trip that wire where it's like I pushed them way too far, they just wouldn't come back right.
00:41:39
Speaker 3: Just that's what happened.
00:41:40
Speaker 1: And so you're constantly figuring out the line where Nope, I can make them do another three reps. I can make them do another whole set, I can make them do more weight, I can make them do more exercises. I can have them do this exercise they hate, right, because they really need to like learning. When you can put those things in and at what point in the relationship it's appropriate to do, that became sort of an art form, right. So here's the story. I used to train this gentleman. He would always bring his chihuahua in with him Bruno. He brought Bruno in and I worked at Wow Bruno to Chiuaha. I worked in this like little boutique like upscale personal training studios. Only one on one training is me and maybe three or four other trainers working at the same time, and so that's the context. So it was kind of froofy, but he brought his Chiuah would be running around and this gentleman would be very upfront, like he didn't want to sweat. He was going to work after he didn't want to. He didn't want to have to cool off, so he didn't want to sweat. He just wanted to get a workout in and it goes way and I was like, okay, that's fine. So there would be days where he'd come in he'dn't want to work out for like fifteen twenty minutes and it was supposed to be an hour session and it might be used to have drive my boss nuts.
00:43:00
Speaker 3: He'd be like, what are you doing with this guy?
00:43:01
Speaker 1: And I'm like, it's a long game, right, That's all I got with this guy is a long game, right, So I've got to get to the point where he trusts me enough that he's not doing this every day. He's maybe doing it once during the week, right, Bruno is always going to be running around and that's fine, right, But maybe I can get him to do two hour long sessions a week and then one fifteen minute session right where he's just he's done, like he can't handle it anymore. And that's eventually what it came to. I mean, he was with me for four years, five years when I was training. I worked with him that long, and toward the end of our training together like he'd done well, he'd got in good results, and I could push him a little harder. I could push him a little harder, you know. Second year, I could push him a little harder than I could push him a little harder the third year. I could push him a little harder the fourth year. But it was a long game, and I think that there's something in that that helped me understand how to work with my kids, even though my kids couldn't leave right out a lot of trouble. I think you're being becoming an emancipated minor. Is it difficult? But it did give me this sense of look, I've got a long time here, I've got I don't have to solve this problem right now in this moment. What I need to do is sort of start shaving off rough edges a little by little by little. And it's it's not an immediate problem, right, It's not you know, your kid's about to touch the hot stove.
00:44:25
Speaker 3: I have to pull the hand away, right.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: It's something that I can work on this tendency over time and get them to the point where they trust me enough that I can finally just knock the rough edge off completely. And so I think there is something to be said for looking at these things longer term and understanding that as a parent, you're not going to quote unquote fix your kid in any given moment necessarily, but that part of the job is to build sufficient trust that you're with them and forming them and walking with them through the long term. Having a great relationship with your kids. And again, I know mine are at further along than yours, but like when my son can come home, we can have conversations about history and theology and different books and stuff he's studying at twenty, I'm really happy with that. You know that he trusts me enough to do that. He's got a great relationship with his mom my, seventeen year old twin daughters. Which that's another fascinating talk about improving with twin daughters and not getting Yeah, figuring out the differences between them is fun, I'll say that. But you know, having them have good relationship with me and wanting to come to me with stuff is great. And so I think there is a long game that we play as dads, and it's not just the Hey, it has to end right now, you can ever do that again. There are moments for that, but there's also a sense in which we need to play the long game here because they're going to need us well beyond when they think they'll need us, and we need to be a place and a person that they can come to as they meet lights challenges because everybody needs. Everybody needs some help every once in a while.
00:46:19
Speaker 3: So I'll leave it there.
00:46:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. The idea that comes to my mind as you say all that is I think can sum it up with there's an attentiveness that being a father far from going in with a prepackaged set of expectations and values. Maybe maybe le's the values, but expectations. A father has to be attentive, and a mother as well has to be attentive, right, Yes, and that means understanding. That means recognizing that you receive yourself from those kids in the sense that we are not fathers without those kids.
00:46:59
Speaker 3: Right.
00:47:00
Speaker 2: Our very identities are tied into who they are. But that doesn't mean therefore duplicating ourselves in them, right, It would be a mistake to say, my job here is to take the best of what I would have wanted, and that's what you've got to be. It's the attentiveness of I received myself from you, and in that process, I receive who you are, and I work within those contexts to help you become, according to your talents and your gifts and your personality, a person who will grow up to be a wise person walking before the Lord.
00:47:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:47:40
Speaker 1: And I think uniquely, as Christian fathers, we have the privilege of helping our kids learn to be the image of God that God uniquely made them to be. And that's a really crucial task. And so yeah, I think it's just fun.
00:47:59
Speaker 3: Man.
00:47:59
Speaker 1: I know, we could talk about this like it's a somber event, and it is serious, right, but it's also just.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: A lot of fun being a dad.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: I mean, I've dealt with a lot of serious issues, but at the end of the day, I enjoy it.
00:48:11
Speaker 3: There.
00:48:11
Speaker 1: You know, kids are fun, especially now that they're teenagers. I'm not a great like my five year old kind of drives me a little nuts. I'm man enough to admit that. But even her, it's like, it is still fun.
00:48:23
Speaker 3: It's just.
00:48:25
Speaker 1: When they get to a certain age, I really like my personality start to kick in.
00:48:29
Speaker 3: I really enjoy being with them.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: And so my wife and I always joke, She's like, you're you're not the best pre K through elementary school dad, but you're an amazing teenage dad. You know so, But it is a lot of fun. So I guess my encouragement to Christian dad's out there would be number one. You know, form your own character. Do what you need to do to form your own character, and then don't be so concerned about every little thing that your kid does. Play that long game really developed. Trust be the person in their lives who can direct them back to the Lord when they need it. But yeah, remember that it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience and that you're forming Little Jesus Is in your own house. So anyway, good stuff, man. We'll call it there. We're well over time, but I think that's appropriate. When we're talking about our kids, we probably should go over time, so but we'll call it there. So thanks Man for this conversation. This was helpful and good, and thanks to everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to life audio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
