His Treasure Seekers

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 6 (part 2)

In the years before I got married I spent countless hours with other people’s children as both a classroom teacher and children’s ministry worker.  I felt driven by a passion to disciple the children God brought into my life, but there was always a certain amount of frustration for me.  No matter what I did during the hours I had with those precious souls, in the end I sent them home to those God had called to be the main “disciplers” in their life: their parents.  I longed for the day when I would have my own children to guide and influence.

Jesus didn’t have a casual relationship with his disciples where he met with them for an hour a week, or even an hour a day.  They spent pretty much every hour together.  Sometimes he verbally instructed them.  Sometimes he modeled the ministry of the kingdom of God.  But no matter what method he was employing, they were constantly learning and growing more like him.

When Jesus ascended to heaven, he left his disciples with instructions to follow his example, only now they were going to be the teachers.  “Go therefore and make disciples… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).  That commission has been passed from generation to generation.  Our pastor often characterizes it as “disciples making disciples.”  As parents, the most obvious place to start fulfilling this commission is with our children, who spend almost every hour with us much like Jesus’ disciples did with him.

This is my passion.  It is what I longed for during those years in classrooms and children’s ministry.  Now that I have my own children, I want to use the hours, days, months, and years to disciple them as fully as I am able.

“It is natural and normal for children to look to you for their moral, social, spiritual, and intellectual direction and to want to stay with their parents until they are grown.  It is unnatural and abnormal to believe others should or must raise your children for you and to divide your child’s heart between home and family and other authorities” (page 111).

I’m always a bit taken aback when people express surprise and awe at my wanting to keep my children home with me rather than sending them off to school for someone else to take care of.  “I’d go crazy,” they say.  “You must be Supermom!”  The idea of children spending a large part of their day away from their parents in school has become so normal in our society that we might not even stop to question it.

However, think about how God created families.  Nowhere in Scripture is there a basis for educating children apart from home and family.  I’m not Supermom.  I’m just walking out motherhood the way it was originally designed, spending each day with my children, instructing them and training them in the things God has taught me.  I am so thankful for the ministry He has given me at home, discipling these four precious souls and teaching them how to follow Jesus.

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson), so my Monday posts are all being sparked by things I’m reading in this fabulous book!

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 6

If you are at all confused by all the different ways of homeschooling that you read about, this chapter alone is probably worth the cost of the entire book.  The Clarksons do a wonderful job of explaining the differences between curriculum-centered, content-centered, child-centered, and home-centered approaches to homeschooling, even breaking down those four main categories into smaller divisions and giving examples of well-known books, curriculum, and authors that follow each method.

I’ve been reading about homeschooling since my oldest was a baby, and it’s taken that long to sort through all the information and advice that is out there to get to the point where I feel fairly settled as far as what methods I want to draw from and what I want our educational experience to look like.  This chapter really helped me organize all that information in away that made sense and helped me evaluate the choices I have made.

“Homeschooling is not only about one part of your child’s life, as though you can raise a mind; it is about their whole life—heart, mind, and spirit.  Whatever model you choose, make sure it enables you to raise a whole child” (page 96).

Part of why I wanted to homeschool was to help my children to experience God in every part of their life rather than mentally filing spiritual matters into a separate category from academic subjects, sports, music, and anything else that occupies their minds and hearts.  My own experiences growing up were always so divided.  I chose to follow Christ when I was 14, and I distinctly remember feeling so proud when I gave any thought to God on a day other than Sunday.  He wasn’t a part of our conversations at home, and I attended public school until I went to college, so it took a lot of intentionality on my part to bring Christ into every part of my life.

I love being able to point my children to God as we go through our days, whether reading classic literature, exploring the world around us, or interacting with kids in the neighborhood or at their gymnastics class.  I want to be focused on God not just at church, but in our home.  I want homeschooling to be a lifestyle, a mentality that guides us throughout our day, not just for a few hours each morning as we get through our schoolwork.  I want to raise my children to be Christ-centered learners whose quest for knowledge brings them closer to God because they see His hand in everything they do.

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson), so my Monday posts are all being sparked by things I’m reading in this fabulous book!

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 5 (Part 2)

 If someone asked me to point out the main differences between children educated at home and those in traditional schools, the notion of self-motivated learning would be high on my list.  As a product of public schooling myself, as well as a former teacher, I have seen all too often how schools seem to kill children’s natural curiosity rather than nurture it.  I’m not saying it happens to every child, and it certainly doesn’t happen immediately.  However, by the time children reach high school, their primary motivation throughout the school day is more likely to be achieving a certain grade or meeting a graduation requirement than actually learning.

I was one of the lucky exceptions.  While I certainly knew how to play the grade game and went through my school career (at least pre-college) with that sort of mindset, I was fortunate to maintain a love for learning.  I spent hours pursuing my own interests, eager to satiate my hunger for knowledge.  When I could combine school and learning, I did.  In my senior year of high school we were told to write a 12-page research paper on a topic of our choice.  My latest fascination was the canonization of the Bible, and I threw myself into the assignment with such gusto that the final product was a 16-page paper that earned me an A++ and a comment from my English teacher proclaiming it to be “a Master’s thesis!”

I remember being so thrilled that I could spend my time learning about something that interested me and having it count as schoolwork.  What a sad commentary on our school system!  I knew several families at my church who were part of the early Christian homeschool movement, so several kids in my youth group had grown up being homeschooled, and I was so envious that much of their education had looked like this.  I decided way back then that if at all possible, I was going to homeschool my own children.

“The ultimate purpose of true education is to create a strong foundation for a lifetime of learning… A child with a positive learning attitude will naturally be come a self-motivated learner and will more quickly become a self-educating student” (page 90).

I love watching my children take delight in learning.  When I see them scouring our overflowing bookshelves for a book about some particular subject they want to know more about, I cannot help but smile.  There are few things I enjoy more than seeing them come across something we’ve learned about as they go about their everyday lives and light up as they experience the satisfaction of feeling connected to the world around us.

The other day I wanted to find something to watch while I sat nursing the baby, so I put on the first episode of America: The Story of Us, and Ian ended up watching much of it with me.  It touched on several things we had talked about before, like the Pilgrims and the beginning of the Revolutionary War, and he was so fascinated we ended up watching it twice.  It stirred up a desire in him to revisit some of what we had done a few months ago, and today as he watched an episode of Liberty’s Kids, he called me over and rewound it so he could show me the engraving Paul Revere had done of the Boston Massacre, which had been mentioned in the documentary we had watched together.

I love that at 6 years old he is getting a thrill out of making connections between things he hears about history when he comes across them in various places!  I hope that as the years pass and his eyes are opened to more of the world around him that he will be just as excited about digging deeper and learning more about history, the Bible, science, famous people, literary treasures, and anything else that peaks his interest.  If he has that “positive learning attitude,” then no matter what gaps we may leave in his education over the next twelve years, he will be more than adequately equipped to set out on a lifetime of learning.

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson), so my Monday posts are all being sparked by things I’m reading in this fabulous book!

 Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 5

Oh, I’m loving this chapter!  Up until now this book has been primarily challenging me and making me ever so aware of my weaknesses (not in a bad way, but it was making me tired just thinking about how far I am from being the mom I want to be).  Chapter 5, however, is right up my alley.  When the Clarksons first described their three “biblical priorities for a Christian home” back in Chapter 1 (home nurture, home discipleship, and home education), I knew right away that the third one is my strongest area at this point.  So I found this chapter encouraging, like having a minute to take a few deep breaths and enjoy a more level stretch after a tough climb uphill.

The idea of growing and exercising “mental muscles” in the areas of language, appetites, habits, curiosity, creativity, reason, and wisdom is one of the main things that is (or at least can be) different about home education in comparison with a traditional school setting.

“The true test of a child’s education is not what they know at any one time relative to what other children know (or don’t know).  It is whether or not the child is growing stronger in all of the most important learning skills–the skills that enable them to acquire knowledge, insight, and ability and to educate themselves independently” (page 75).

The school system has become so focused on testing what children have learned that it neglects to attend to the more important question of whether or not they know how to learn.  Rather than have my children be able to regurgitate a bunch of facts on a test, I want them to have a never-quite-satiated hunger for knowledge and to know how to feed that longing by seeking out the answers to the questions in their minds, whether those questions stem from circumstances in which they find themselves, things they stumble across in books, or simply from their own curiosity.

So we try to fill our children’s lives with rich experiences.  We surround them with quality books, music, and art.  We introduce them to the wonders of God’s world and the marvelous things that people are doing in it.  We try to teach them good mental habits so that they will be able to more fully experience and appreciate all these things.  We encourage curiosity and help them explore and build their knowledge about the things that interest them.

This is what we think education should look like.  I try to stay away from worksheets and busy work (unless it’s something my children are desiring at the moment).  I’d much rather read a good book to them and then talk about what we read.  I can always tell when we start to slip back into “school” mode, because it starts to feel like work.  When we are focused more on their hearts and those “mental muscles,” our school time is just a rich enjoyable learning experience together.

The most important part of all this, however, is not the pleasure we and our children get from learning now.  I try to keep the future in mind, remembering that I am preparing my children for a lifetime of learning.  I won’t always be by their sides to guide them, so I want to use these years to teach them how to teach themselves.

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson).

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 4

“The path, or way, is an analogy for life that almost any child can understand from a very early age, and one that becomes even more meaningful and internalized as they get older.  The power for young children is in the concreteness of the image it evokes.  They can understand in an uncomplicated way that they need to stay on the path God has provided for them in order to be safe from evil and harm…” (page 58).

I love this analogy of the path of life.  It is a beautiful picture of walking in God’s ways, and it helps me see more clearly my role as a parent.  “You walk with your children on the path, and they look to you to be their guide” (page 58). This is something I can do.  Day by day walking in His ways, looking to Him for direction, doing our best to stay on the path.

“As Christian parents, you are the guides that God has appointed for your children.  He trusts you to be able to do the job–there is no heavenly hand-wringing wondering if he has chosen the best guides for your children” (page 59). I know this, but sometimes I really need the reminder.  God knows my failings.  He knows my weaknesses.  He knows where I am prone to stray off the path.  And yet he thought Eric and I were the best guides for Ian, Elijah, Arianna, Nicholas, and any other children with whom He may bless us in the future.

This chapter impressed upon me the importance of showing sympathy to my children.  As I read the Clarksons’ definition of sympathy when it comes to parenting, I realized this was exactly what I felt like I had missed as a child.  “Sympathy was… the willingness to understand and validate a child’s thoughts or feelings, in order to create a channel to the inside of that child’s heart” (page 60).  As soon as I became a mother, I determined that I never wanted my children to feel as alone, misunderstood, and unimportant as I had felt as a child.

Sometimes when Ian goes on and on about motorcycles or monster trucks or other things that bring him great delight I catch myself saying (or at least thinking), “I really don’t care.”  But that’s not the message I want to send to him.  I couldn’t care less about these boyish wonders, but I do care about Ian.  If I want to reach his heart with the things that are important to me, I need to make sure I have opened that channel by listening to the things that are important to him.  When it comes to encouraging him to stay on the path of life, he is much more likely to listen to me if I have made a point of being a willing listener to whatever childish fancies are floating through his mind and heart.
Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson).  If you want to join in, visit our Facebook discussion group page. 

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 3 (Part 2)

As they closed this chapter the Clarksons reminded us that “it all starts in your heart” (page 54) and “it all ends in your child’s heart” (page 56).  Pardon the pun, but I think that really is the heart of the matter.  It is easy for me to think about how I want to shape and guide my children, but I think I get into trouble when I focus on the end product rather than the starting place.

Reflecting on this idea was deeply convicting for me.  I felt the weight of many of Jesus’ words as I realized some of the mistakes of which I am continually guilty.

Clean cups and whitewashed tombs.

Jesus condemned the Pharisees for focusing on the outward appearance while neglecting to tend to the inward reality.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.  So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:25-28).

To be perfectly honest, I think sometimes my mentality is that I’ll clean the outside of the cup first, or present a respectable whitewashed tomb, and then everyone can see something pretty while I work on cleaning the inside.  But even if I manage to fool the outside world, I certainly can’t fool God, and really I can’t even fool my children, who spend pretty much every waking hour in my presence.  They know the real me.  They see my weaknesses and my flaws.  They know that what the world might see isn’t the whole picture.

I don’t want my children to think of me as a hypocrite.  I try to be vulnerable with them, to ask them for forgiveness, to share with them when I struggling.

The other day I was leading them in a time of communion, and I was trying to model for them the thought process I go through as I approach the elements.

“What sin have I committed?” I mused out loud, hoping to help them focus their thoughts inward and consider the state of their own hearts.

“You yell,” Ian said frankly.  (I’ve been asking for forgiveness for yelling a lot lately.)

“Um… yes.  So that’s what I’m thinking about right now.  But you’re supposed to be thinking about your own sin.”

Which leads me to the second teaching of Jesus that the end of this chapter made me consider.

The log in my own eye.

Ian may have been overlooking his own sin to point out mine, but he learned that from a master.

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5).

As I try to help guide my children and correct them, I often am pointing out specks that pale in comparison to the log in my own eye.  Now, obviously this passage isn’t addressing parents, and if we waited until we had dealt with all our own imperfections before correcting our children we would turn out some pretty scary offspring.  However, I have sometimes often caught myself speaking to one of them in a tone that I just corrected when I heard them use it toward a sibling, or saying things in a less than encouraging way when I am frequently reminding them to “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29).

So as I consider the importance of nurturing my children’s hearts and shepherding their spirits to long for God, I want to keep in mind that it all starts in my heart.  I need to be spending time daily in the Word of God.  It gets said over and over, but in the craziness of life with four young children I let it slip far too often.  I have taken to leaving my Bible open so I can catch a snippet in any spare moment.  I often only get to read a few verses a day, but I try to make sure I at least take in a little of the Word daily.  I post verses above my kitchen window and reflect on the same one for weeks at a time.  I am trying to tend my own heart so that what overflows to my children is the kind of spirit-filled life I desire for them.  Only then will I be able to truly nurture the hearts and nourish their spirits in such a way that they will hunger for the true source of life.

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson).  If you want to join in, visit our Facebook discussion group page. 

Educating the WholeHearted Child: Chapter 3

As I started to read through Chapter 3 (“Home Nurture: Shepherding Your Child’s Spirit to Long for God”), one word stood out to me: life.  Here are a few of the quotes I highlighted on the first page:

“A home can be filled with praiseworthy Christian things and activities and yet still seem lifeless.  It just doesn’t seem as though the Spirit of Christ is alive there.”

“…your first responsibility as a parent is to lead your children to the life-giving presence and reality of Christ in your heart and home.”

“You are to be the primary life-giving presence of Christ to your children, through his Spirit living and working in your life as a Christian parent and through his Word, just as Christ imparted life to those who came in contact with him…”

“Children who grow up in a home that is alive with the Spirit of God and whose spirits are nurtures and fed will be coming life-living and life-giving adults.”

When I finished page 45 I realized that every passage I had highlighted contained the word “life.”  I’ve shared over the past few weeks that I find “home nurture” more challenging than “home discipleship” and “home education” (the Clarksons three “biblical priorities” that define a Christian home) (page 20).  However, as I read through these first few pages of Chapter 3 I felt a sense of relief.  (As in, I’m not screwing up my kids quite so much as I thought!)

I do think our home is full of life.  There are a lot of Christian “things and activities,” but there is definitely more than that.  The Clarksons look at Ephesians 6 and talk about Paul’s instructions to bring children up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (To “bring them up” could also be translated as “to nourish” or “to nurture” them).  As I read through their descriptions of what that nurturing looks like, I realized that there is a lot of that going on in our home.

We try to address things on a heart level.  We practice grace.  We talk to our kids and speak life-giving words into them.  We pray with them.  We ask for forgiveness when we’re wrong.  We regularly have other families over for times of fellowship, prayer, worship, encouraging one another, etc.  We are trying to walk out a life of faith in front of them.

I’m not saying we’re perfect or we’ve got it all together, but I’m not beating myself up quite so much either.  I think reading through this book is helping me to take more notice of what I do and how I do it.  It’s showing me not only my weaknesses but also my strengths, and I can see more clearly things I want to work on and areas in which I need to pray that God will help me to grow.  For instance, I loved the Clarksons encouragement about the Word of God: “When you read the Bible, let them know it is God speaking to you as a family” (page 47).  It would be easy to bring this into conversation, but sometimes I forget and Bible time just becomes part of our routine.  I want to make sure my children know that I believe God’s Word is “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12).

I love that we never stop learning and growing.  I am so thankful for God’s grace in my life.  I look back at the growth He has brought about in me over the years that I have followed Him, and I know that He is going to continue to help me become the parent He wants me to be.  And when I mess up, at least I know my children have a Savior they can turn to.  After all, if they had a perfect mother who could make all things right in their life, why would they need Him?  All I can do is turn to Him to fill me with His life, and then let that life pour out of me into my children.  And someday they will learn to go right to the source of true life because they have tasted and seen that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8).

Each Mentoring Monday I share my reflections on what I’ve been learning from my “paper mentors.”  I am currently joining in a book discussion of Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson (with Sally Clarkson).  If you want to join in, visit our Facebook discussion group page.