Book Review: Shepherding a Child's Heart

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, Shepherd Press, 1995. 215 pp. including scripture index.

Who should read this book
--Christian parents who like being told what to do and the 90s era culture wars.
--Thinking Christian parents willing to sift for nuggets of wisdom while dumping the junk

About the Book
This book comes in two parts. The first part is Foundations for Biblical Childbearing which is covered in 12 chapters with a summary chapter. The foundational principles cover topics like a child's spiritual development, the role of parents, the goals parents may have, and biblical methods including communication, "the rod", and an appeal to the conscience. The second part is Shepherding Through the Stages of Childhood which is six chapters covering three developmental stages: infancy, childhood, and teenagers. For each stage there is a chapter on training objectives and then one on training procedures.

There is an introduction that precedes all of this that seems very important to Tripp's ideas. As someone who frequently skims or skips introductions, it would have made sense to me for that material to be put in an actual chapter.

Chapters are typically not very long and have a half to full page of application questions at the end. The writing style of the book drove me bonkers having a tone of certainty and moral imperative that I find overbearing and misplaced. Words and phrases like "must", "hand-to-hand combat [for]...the child's heart," "The result is obvious," act like fingernails down blackboards for me.

Thoughts: The good
There are some principles in the book that I agreed with. The first is the premise on which the title is built, that is that the issue is the heart over behavior. The annoying, dangerous, correction-inviting behavior I witness in my children is an outflow of what is in their hearts.

Second, loving parents will discipline their children. We see that in Hebrews 12 and I agree with Tripp on this.

Third, listening to our children is equally important to speaking to them.

Thoughts: The ugly
I don't think there are overtly bad ideas in this book, but I do feel a lot of ideas are really awkwardly or weirdly presented. For example, on the one hand, Tripp writes that parents shouldn't think deterministically that anything we do produces automatic guaranteed results. However, a lot of his rhetoric implies that our children's lives are at stake vis-a-vis precisely what we as parents are doing. There's an underlying theme of fear in the book that I object to, an implication that if we do not raise our children the way Tripp recommends that the very souls of our children are at stake. And that's just not true. As parents, I believe we do have responsibilities that God holds us accountable for, but children have their own responsibilities and choices to make. And I think Tripp would agree, but he is unclear and inconsistent about this in the book.

Perhaps as a conversation analyst I am overly sensitive to this, but the dialogues in the book are really awkward to my ear. They are weird structurally but also in content. Here's the central example that bugs me:

-You didn't obey Daddy, did you?
-No.
-Do you remember what God says Daddy must do if you disobey?
-Spank me?
-That's right. I must spank you. If I don't, then I would be disobeying God. You and I would both be wrong. That would not be good for you or for me, would it?
-No.

To my ear, this sounds coercive, like God is coercing Daddy to spank and Daddy has no choice in the matter. As a kid, I would either hate God or my dad.

Putting aside the dialogue, spanking gets a lot of air time in this book. I am not an opponent to spanking although I did think that my parents' version of time out was extremely memorable and formative. (We had to stand in the corner holding our ears and squatting as if sitting on an invisible chair.) But Tripp sees spanking as rescuing our children from danger. So parenting isn't deterministic, but spanking rescues our children? Sigh.

Conclusion
Obviously, I really struggled with this book. I read it because a number of people recommended it and there are definite take away principles worth remembering. However, it was written in the early 90s and it has that vibe of fear and war with the surrounding culture. I would personally recommend reading something else unless you like wading through that stuff.