PARENTING’S No. 1 job
Teaching the Word of God to your kids
Steve Nelson is shown here with his son and daughter, each with a homemade caption of what they might say about Bible study with Dad. (Courtesy photo)
By Steve Nelson According to the Bible, to live the best possible life, each person needs to prioritize their own relationship with God above all. Secondly, if married, a spouse is next priority. Third, if kids, they’re the next most important relationship. From birth, parenting is fun and a lot of hard work. (Intriguing fact: in Eastern culture in the Bible, a child wasn’t considered a full adult until 30 years of age.) How is parenting defined today? To retain custody of a child, as a parent in the state of Idaho and across the country the law requires that you feed and clothe a child, plus no physical abuse. That’s the recipe – just a little dignity and care. The bar is set pretty low. Yet many parents do little else but help the children survive, not thrive. A majority of parents do much more than the bare minimum listed above. Loving a child involves so many other parts of life, and here are four major decision-making categories: school, health care, extracurricular activities and religious instruction. In this article we’re going to focus on that last component, the “religious instruction.” It is the category given the least amount of attention today.
14 May / June 2021 | Christian Living
First, let’s consider how much time kids spend doing different things.
Church time: If a child goes to church at all with their family, it is usually 40 times or less per year, with one hour of Bible time at the most each week. That’s 0-40 hours annually in the Bible. (Nowadays, most families are closer to zero.) School time: As far as instruction guidelines, children from kindergarten through high school spend between 450 – 990 hours per year at school. Yet public schools never give Bible instruction. Even private schools still have to cover the basics of academics, so even a very motivated curriculum only teaches the Bible a little bit, up to 3 hours a week, and even that is rare to see. So that’s 0-117 hours annually in the Bible. (Most kids have closer to zero hours of Bible learning in school.) Time with parents: Not counting sleep time or school, children spend approximately 4,000 awake hours per year with their parents. That’s 4,000 hours annually! Wow. With those numbers in mind, which category of life is the BIGGEST opportunity to learn? Is it church? No. Is it school? No again. It’s when the kids are with their parents. However, the tragic reality is that despite this HUGE amount of time, kids typically receive zero hours of Bible instruction from their parents each year.
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