What qualities does God want us to develop in our children? No need to guess. Scripture tells us specifically: “And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to have mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). These three requirements are a basis for evaluating our children’s character development:

My wife and I (cough, cough) homeschool our four children—and we love it. I mean, it’s incredibly demanding and at times exacerbating, but every year we keep returning to this educational method. As you should know by now, I don’t believe homeschooling is the only way. I don’t even think it’s always the best way for every parent to school every one of their kids.

It seems inconsistent to say that an inheritance should be left because the Bible says so but then to turn around and do it very differently than the Bible explains. A better approach is to understand the reasons for inheritance, then see these not as rules to be legalistically obeyed but as underlying principles that we should weigh.

If you’re the mother of a teenage son, you may think that he needs you less now than he did when he was younger. But the teen years are a crucial time for you to influence your son. As your son moves from boyhood to manhood, he’ll experience many challenges that can be tough to navigate, and he’ll look to you to help him figure out how to become the man that God wants him to become. Here’s how you can use your powerful influence as a mom to help your teenage son become a good man:

We all know there’s nothing magical about the ‘January 1st’ date. And yet, as the year comes to a close, I always like to reflect on the past 12 months. What did I do well? What aspect of my life/schedule am I frustrated by? What do I want to change?

Because of our busy schedules we can usually only manage to guarantee one meal all together each day. When we eat this meal, we try to make sure that it has relational value, not just nutritional value. It is here that we are able to slow down and just talk as a family.

Sin is the true and obvious answer. That said, there are peculiar sins that teenagers, at least in our day, are somewhat prone to. Just as with adults, however, I’m afraid we mass our defenses in all the wrong places. The sins of our youth are just like the sins of our dotage, though they may present themselves in somewhat different ways. The key sin I am on the lookout for with my teenagers is the one I’m on the lookout for in me—pride.

“If anything, adoption exposes evangelicals’ weaknesses as well as strengths,” said Russell Moore, who is white and adopted two white children from Russia. “In any given month, I’m dealing with a couple adopting a child of another race dealing with relatives who object, sometimes in nakedly racist terms.” Adoption has forced evangelicals to reconsider all manner of issues, from poverty to race to health and international relations, Moore said.

For all sorts of reasons right now, some you can’t name or even understand; your child is far away. There is distance, or silence, or separation between you both, and it’s not what you wanted. It’s not the dream you built in your mind for them when they were born. It’s not the script you had written for your child when their hands were small.

We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.