My father was the ultimate free range kid. He grew up in a Virginia coal mining town called Dante (if you’d like to know how to pronounce it, think less literary history and more along the lines of a word that rhymes with ‘ain’t’), a place nestled so deep in the Appalachian Mountains that you literally have to look straight up to see the sky. Like most of the men in that town and dozens more like it, his father and his father’s father were coal miners, and while his father worked he and his … [Read more...]
Helping Kids be Responsible!
As parents, one of our most important jobs is training our children to become responsible adults someday. Besides the obvious societal implications of this (you know, stuff like self-sufficiency, good citizens who pay their taxes, staying out of prison and all that jazz), there are plenty of selfish ones as well. Although we love having them around while they’re small and cute, the last thing we want is some 35 year-old living in our basement playing video games and mooching all our food. (Now … [Read more...]
Withhold not the rod – Nine principles for parents who spank
Given today’s twisted, anti-Christian, topsy-turvy notions of right and wrong, especially in child-rearing, where it’s supposedly "wrong" to spank your children because it could make them "violent," yet seemingly a higher percentage of kids than ever before are growing up dysfunctional, rebellious, uncontrollable, drug-addicted, violent and, in some cases, downright murderous, Christian parents who Biblically discipline their children are quickly becoming outside the norm. All too real is the … [Read more...]
Achieving Household Harmony (in sports!)
Certainly, these days, sports are a higher priority to many than they should be. The ‘bread and circuses’ that so kept the Romans ambivalent and even acquiescent to tyranny are just as alive today as they were then. The same guys who look at you funny when you make the mistake of using words like ‘devaluation,’ ‘debt crisis,’ ‘sequester,’ ‘quantitative easing,’ and ‘Federal Reserve’ could probably rattle off what team won the last 10 Super Bowls and BCS Championships, as well as how far along … [Read more...]
Moments that take my breath away
Being the parents of four small children, we often get advice from unexpected places. Sometimes that advice is welcome, other times not so much, but we (usually…) appreciate the sentiment nonetheless. Perhaps the most common word of advice we hear, always from parents who are older than us, is to cherish the moment, because it won’t last forever. Now I can’t speak for my more sentimental wife, but I will admit that when people said that to me in the early days of our parenthood I would just … [Read more...]
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