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I love the smell of new books; they look good and feel good. Anyway, one of the newest book that got through the mail is Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus by Elyse Fitzpatrick (Crossway 2011). The title alone is telltale of gospel-saturated-raising-kids teaching. Even though I have adult children now, I still need to go back to showing grace to them. And this book helps.
“Lie to Your Child to Make Him Good
So much of what we’re advised to do as parents is so that our kids will feel good about themselves. This advice has roots in the self-esteem movement, which claimed that a child’s success in life is based on whether or not he feels that he is good. Although the modern self-esteem movement began in the 1950s and 1960s, this was no novel lie. It has been around for thousands of years. It’s the same deception that Eve believed in the beginning. Yum, she thought; this fruit looks good and it will make me good. I think we’ll have it for dinner tonight. Since the fall of the human race, we’ve been alternately telling ourselves that we are good, that if we try hard enough we’ll be good enough, or that being good is an impossibility so we should just give up and have fun. After all, nobody’s perfect!” (p. 42)
