Do:
- Know your children’s teachers and textbooks. Volunteer to be the room mother.
- Have a daily (every day –no exceptions) family Bible time.
- Converse with your children each day about the school day.
- Your homework, so that you can successfully refute evolutionary concepts and humanistic teachings,
- Be a presence in your children’s schools, even on the high school level.
- Examine, without bias, other education options such as home schooling. Too much is at stake to keep your children in a situation where souls are at risk.
- Be involved in the homework process. This will help you know when you need to counteract humanistic material being presented.
- Put a Bible in your kids’ backpacks and encourage them from early ages to take it out and read it through the day. This won’t work if you wait till high school to begin.
- Go to bat for your children if they face persecution for speaking their convictions. Let them own their beliefs, but when the going gets tough, help them find ways to avoid compromise.
- Be at home when they get home in the afternoons. Make that time a pleasant and warm homecoming every day.
- Use school travel time to communicate calmly, listen to Bible reading or to uplifting spiritual singing.
- Make decisions when your children are young about activities in middle and high school in which they will plan NOT to participate. In our house, they knew from their preschool years that they would not attend proms or parties where alcohol was being served. Standards of modest dress and decorum were required way before peer pressure set in. This does not magically dissolve all of the temptations the devil hurls their way, but it goes a long way in giving them resisting power.
Don’t:
- Adopt the mentality that since you send your children to school, the responsibility for their education is no longer yours. God holds parents accountable for the education of their children.
- Allow your children to become distant from you. Never stop communicating (Deut. 6:4-6)
- Be too busy to spend daily time with each of your children. Make outings and activities with them a priority.
- Ever, ever skip a scheduled worship service for a school or sports activity.
- Ever let a day go by in which they don’t hear you pray for their souls.
- Leave your children at after-hours school day care as a babysitting service. The bare minimum number of hours is enough and often too much.
- Encourage your children to give in to peer pressure. Get rid of the mentality that you don’t want them to think being a Christian is restrictive and “no fun”. Being a Christian is living sacrificially and is not always fun. But sacrifices strengthen convictions that will serve them well through a lifetime toward heaven.
- Assume you will find out if your children are questioning the existence of God or the doctrines of the Scriptures. Your job is to communicate, communicate, communicate!
- Leave your children in a school situation in which faith is being eroded. There are options. This risk is eternal. You can never regain this important time in their lives.
This post and the preceding one are taken from an article by Cindy Colley first published in an earlier issue of THINK magazine. (Focus Press, Nashville, TN) Below are the sources used.
Bibliography
Anderson, Kerry. “Bible Distribution.” Limbaugh, David. Persecution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003. 44.
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. 05 October 1999. 23 June 2007
Hetzner, Amy. JSOnline. 21 March 2001. 23 June 2007
Liberty Counsel. “”School Officials Trash Truth for Youth Bibles and Ten Commandments Book Covers.” Limbaugh, David. Persecution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003. 45.
Limbaugh, David. Townhall. 27 February 2002. 23 June 2007
Mohammed, Nisha N. The Rutherford Insitute-Press Releases. 04 November 2003. 23 June 2007
More, Thomas. Thomas More Law Center. 25 June 2002. 22 June 2007
Potter, Charles Francis. “Humanism: A New Religion.” Limbaugh, David. Persecution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003. 65.
