Foundation Father
I won’t bury the lede. Reading to your kids every night is one of the best habits to have. Start immediately after they are born, before they can hold their head up, before they can crawl, before they can read. The earlier the better. Always be reading above their own reading level. The dividends are […]
You can start the financial education of your children early. And the earlier the better. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Some parents make things so complicated that they get intimidated by their own plans. They can’t keep up with their own ambitions. But doing a little is better than pretending to do a lot. […]
Your children should understand delegated authority. If you homeschool, you might have to be more intentional about teaching them this concept. They should always obey their teachers. But you should help them understand why they need to obey their teachers, and for this case, “because I said so” is actually a legitimate reason. In fact, […]
Our culture does a terrible job teaching our children history. Even before our attempts to change it or erase the achievements of our heroes, we left children adrift, scrambling for some land they could stand on to view the big picture. Sometimes we have done well with particular eras or moments. But even then, these […]
Death is an inevitable part of life. In the present day, we tend to shy away from it and avoid talking about it with our children. The old trope about Rover going to “live on a farm” betrays our fear and timidity. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go […]
Ever since the Enlightenment, we have fetishized education. It has been touted as the solution to all problems, from poverty to crime to war. For education to be effective, however, it has to be received properly, and in order to be received properly, the student must be virtuous. The fool exists. Scoffers will scoff. The […]
In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Socrates is getting a farming lesson from Ischomachus, an estate manager held in high regard. Socrates says that if you don’t know what the soil is capable of growing, how do you know what to plant or sow? Ischomachus gives a straightforward answer. …you can tell by looking at the crops and […]
Judge Judy was on both TVs. For the second time in a week, the kids and I were subjected to the muted melodrama of courtroom television. We would never watch by choice. For some reason, however, this was the second restaurant to have it showing. My oldest, after finishing her food, decided she wanted to […]
There is no greater improv practice than playing with kids. They have abounding joy and imagination and they expect you to be swept up in their schemes. If you don’t want to slow down their pace and temper their mood, you have to roll with the punches and think fast. The good news is that […]
What does it mean to be a man? When does a boy know that he has become a man? These are important questions that our modern culture fails to answer. Even inside the church, answers are sparse. We have done a terrible job directing boys toward manhood. Is it any wonder that they wander? Is […]