Today’s Tin Foil Talk:
What if we’ve got the starting point of Biblical parenting wrong?
We like to pretend that kids are born perfect, sweet, and innocent… and then somewhere down the line, sin and the world corrupts them, and now they need saving.
But the more I read Scripture, the more I’m wondering if that’s actually true.
And honestly, I think it could be a pretty big pitfall for biblical parents.
Because between Ephesians 2 and Proverbs 22, it seems pretty clear that we aren’t born spiritually neutral.
We come into this world sinful and foolish.
Not because our parents messed us up.
Not because the world eventually got to us.
It was already there.
And weirdly enough, I think that’s freeing.
Because if I start parenting from the assumption that my child was born perfect and innocent, then the trajectory looks like this:
→ perfect innocent baby
→ world/sin corrupts them
→ everything is going downhill
→ I need to fix it.
But what if the biblical picture is actually:
→ foolish heart
→ training
→ wisdom
→ understanding
→ Gospel
→ faith
If you know anything about mathematics you realize, the first describes a negative graph 
and the second describes a positive graph 
.
That changes how I think about parenting.
Maybe I shouldn’t be parenting from a place of trying to preserve some innocence that was never actually there.
Maybe I should be parenting from the reality that foolishness is already bound up in the heart of my child.
Which means I start training from that place.
Not waiting until the behavior gets bad.
Not blaming the world when the sin starts showing up.
Not acting shocked that my three-year-old is selfish when… myself and everyone else came into this world that way too.
The GOAL is to get that foolishness out of their heart.
Because from the heart, everything else flows.
And that means the goal isn’t simply behavior modification.
It’s wisdom.
Which brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about in 2 Timothy 3:15.
Paul says Timothy had known the Scriptures from childhood, and that they were able to make him wise FOR salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
That wording matters.
The wisdom doesn’t save him.
The faith does.
The wisdom is what ALLOWS the faith, which is the avenue for salvation (which is only done by God, not us).
So maybe that’s actually our job as parents:
Teach the wisdom.
Give them the Scriptures.
Train them.
Correct them.
Point them toward Christ.
Teach them what is true.
And THEN trust God with the part that only God can do.
We. don’t. save. our. kids.
And maybe that’s another parenting burden we were never meant to carry.
We can be faithful parents without believing we are the saviors of our children.
Our job is to faithfully train the child.
God’s job is to save the child.
I’m still working through all of this myself, but the more I read it, the more I wonder if we’ve made parenting harder by starting from the wrong premise.
Maybe our kids don’t need us to preserve their innocence.
Maybe they need us to train their foolishness upward toward wisdom while putting the Gospel in front of them from the very beginning.
And then… we trust God with the rest.
— Katie
Word & Weekdays
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