Parenting
Several readers and audience members have asked us something like this: What time is curfew at your house? When do you require your kids to be home? Is it different for teens and twenties? It's not an uncommon question but our answer may be unexpected--because we don't have a formal curfew at our house. …
One of the questions we hear is, "How can I get my husband more involved in our homeschooling?" If you look around conventions (we travel to lots of them), admittedly, you do see a lot more moms than dads. It's not just anecdote; a study published by the National Home Education Research Institute in 1997…
We get messages all the time from parents who've found out their son is watching porn. In every one, the parents express shock. They had no idea, no clue that this was going on in their house, so they just aren't prepared to deal with it. When we talk to them, though, the signs have…
A reader asks what to do with a violently angry 11-year-old son who is fighting and hurting his siblings. The father writes, I'm dying here. My boy continues to be violent to his siblings...one in particular...and tells us he wants out of the family. I feel like a prisoner in my own family, needing to…
As Christian parents, we probably all put right at the top of our list, “Teach our children to know and love and serve the Lord Jesus.” The stakes are high, and frankly, it can be a daunting thing to realize we have the biggest influence in our kids’ daily spiritual instruction! Our friend Dennis Gundersen…
Kids these days are so over-programmed it's ridiculous. They go to this camp and that one, moms run them to classes and clubs. When we were kids we made our own fun and it really was fun! Here are some of the things we used to do that you can suggest to your children when…
A reader asked, "We are moving across the country to North Carolina this spring or summer for a great job opportunity our family has been praying for. My 14 yr old son is taking it very hard (he is a believer). My husband and I encourage him and our other 4 children, and we concentrate…
Our oldest son shook his head, sadly. “You never would have let me do that,” he said, watching a younger sibling. We had to admit, he had a point. When he was that age, we were new parents, full of theories but short on experience. He was Offspring 1.0, and parenting was still something of…
Homeschooling allowed us to raise kids that were not peer-dominated, not bullied, not searching for affirmation and validation from every direction. Hooray! The problem is, we parents were not raised that way, and guess what? Often we're the ones with peer group problems. How Does This Happen? One of the great doctrines of the New Testament is the…
We have six boys (some of them grown now), and back when they were little, Melanie got a surprise. (more…)