Just finished a great little book by Michael and Debi Pearl, To Train up a Child. This book has to do with training children, not just discipline, and the principles they teach are really good.
You could easily cross reference this book with Have a New Kid by Friday! by Lehman, which I reviewed a few months ago. Both books have a lot of overlap in good basic principles on how to properly train, discipline and raise children.
The difference with To Train Up a Child is that Michael and Debi are more up front with their faith in Christ and the theology behind their principles. So you get preached to a little here and there, but since I have mostly said similar things, or believe them even if I haven’t said them, it wasn’t so bad for me. It might be way out of the box for some.
The Pearls live in some sort of Menonite or Amish community and therefore are very outdoorsy and simple folk, but they’ve done a lot of thinking, and had a lot of success, about raising children. What makes the book funny is that they adamantly teach that you should not just spank children, but do so with an actual “rod” of some kind. I laughed when they described what kind of tree you could cut down a good branch to be a rod.
To be honest, there were some ideas related to the “rod” concept and even parenting that I hadn’t heard or thought of before, and I’m sure some more liberal minded people would consider some of it too strict or even abusive. Any discipline can be abusive, and I think the Pearls make some amazing points, to the degree where even Becca and I are going to adjust some things we do.
This is a very challenging book. Again, the similarities to the other book by Lehman are amazing. They both make it clear that the kids you have are the kids you raised. One of my favorite lines from Michael Pearl was, “don’t blame the canvas for the painting”, meaning that your children will be trained by whatever you do and are a direct result of how you’ve trained them. Even the absence of training is training and teaching children concepts they’ll hold onto for life, especially in their younger years.
(As an aside, I was thinking today of a great show that my parents love and I used to watch before we moved into the compound, the Dog Whisperer. That dude is amazing. He always does two things: he connects how the dog is to how they were TRAINED to be, even really bad, and he makes the necessary adjustments to change the dog’s behavior by re-training, even to extremes of placing them into isolated environments.
Now, some of you may be balking, “how dare he imply that children are like dogs!”, which I agree can only go so far, but isn’t it amazing that most of those dog owners on that show have similar problems as parents?: we can’t have people over, we can’t take him out to be with other dogs, etc. And yet he always fixes it … although I guess they wouldn’t show a non-success story on the show.)
The Pearls have sold a half million of To Train Up a Child. They, like Lehman, GUARANTEE that if you faithfully and consistently follow their principles, you will raise well-behaved and content children. I also have the same confidence in these principles, despite the naysaying that goes on, even among other parents.
Michael Pearl is the main writer, and he really pulls in principles from scripture, especially Proverbs, to make his points. I really appreciated this approach.
Being an Amish-type community, they are also against classroom settings of any kind and the television in general. They homeschooled all five of their children and have seen great success in these principles. I don’t know if I’d go as far as they do, but it probably can’t hurt.
There is a sweet part at the end of the book where Michael writes a letter to his two sons about their future and the kind of woman to look for, and Debi does something similar with their three daughters. There is a great balance of Truth in these two people, where they realize the temporary and eternal purpose of parents and believed solely on the promise that if you “train up a child in the way he should go, he will not depart from it” and acted based on that promise.
Reading this book could easily make you feel like a bad parent, I’m sure. I know I was challenged. Becca will read this book next, and we will have a long talk about changes we want to make to be better parents and doing a better job at “training” them.
If you’re looking to have children, it is wisdom to dig and look for wisdom in a very important endeavor, raising and training them. This book, along with Have a New Kid by Friday!, will guide you in the right direction and teach important principles. It is interesting how many parents, mothers especially, who get pregnant and read pregnancy books by the bag full, which is important and useful, but then read nothing on how to actually raise those same children.
If you want to order this book, I’m sure it’s on Amazon, but their website is www.NoGreaterJoy.org. There are some interesting articles on the website, too. I did a little looking today.
Peace.
Yeah, to me the thing most interesting about this book was their treatment of the parent’s emotions in training. I.e., you don’t take it personally when your horse doesn’t obey you… And how when, as parents, we become emotional and raise voices, that very act trains the child that they don’t have to obey you until you get frustrated or angry with them. How every bit of instruction should be delivered calmly and unaffected, or else they will never obey your calm instructions, but only when you begin to raise your voice.
There are so many other take-aways from this one which I won’t type out, but I agree it was a great read, one that we hope to adopt many principles from…
This sounds good. Letting kids run around without direction gives them too little credit. I’m glad people are out there who take these issues seriously.