Four Levels of Parental Concern
Rebecca Prewett
The following borrows heavily from Ronald Nash's "Closing of the American Heart", an excellent book that convicts us to love God with all of our minds, as well as our hearts. In the book, Nash spoke of four levels of concern that parents should have for their children, assuming parents are Christian:
- Emotional--All decent parents--whether Christian or not--begin at this level, concerned with their children's emotional well being, that their children be loved, secure, happy, etc. The danger of never moving beyond this level of concern is that the parents' goal for their children is little more than "whatever makes them happy".
- Spiritual--Here, the parents move up a level. No longer satisfied with the goal of their children's temporal happiness, they desire their children's salvation. Spiritual well-being becomes the primary goal, so to speak, in that other goals may be sacrificed if necessary for the sake of a child's eternal destiny. I believe most Christian parents operate at this level of concern, or at the next.
- Doctrinal--Salvation is not an end in itself, say the parents who have moved to this level. They take on the responsibility of transmitting, by whatever means at their disposal, an education in sound doctrine to their children. I fear this emphasis is far more rare today than in the past, both in churches and in homes. Too many parents are relegating the religious instruction of their children to the Sunday School. One needs only to read the catechisms of the past--many of them written for children and new converts--to realize how little we and our children are learning today. My husband and I see ourselves as probably on this level, hopefully poised to move on to--
- Intellectual--These parents see levels 1,2, and 3 as the necessary foundation for living out Christianity within our culture, but as not being the complete picture. Just as they guard against theological error and unsound doctrine, they also guard against unsound thinking in other fields as well. Why send children to a school that will only fill their minds with intellectual error? Such parents, if they homeschool, will tend to adopt an intellectually rigorous approach, equipping their children to see through shoddy attempts at revisionist history, pseudo intellectual philosophizing, faulty reasoning, modern artistic expression, unscientific methodology, etc. These parents will later carefully select a college for their child, investigating the teaching and philosophical underpinnings on a level far beyond "what classes and majors do they offer?"
We are then left with a dilemma. What if we ourselves are not well grounded in sound doctrine? What if our own education was less than intellectually rigorous? What if we fear that our worldview is less than Biblical, less than well-formulated? Many homeschooling veterans tell me that a great benefit of homeschooling is the education of the parents. Wisdom and knowledge can become a quest for the entire family, as they prayerfully learn together.
copyright 1993 by Rebecca Prewett
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