So, in this post I’m going to briefly go over three challenges to producing effective, influential children. First, choose a better spouse. Second, Christian classical schools. Third, socialist countries make homeschooling and private Christian schools effectively illegal.

1. Choose a better spouse

So let’s start with the first one. Christian parents and pastors need to educate young people to choose spouses who are equipped educate to produce effective and influential children.

So in the case of choosing a man who will be involved in producing effective, influential children, here are some tips:

• don’t choose a man based on attraction to his appearance or displayed wealth
• whether homeschooling or private Christian schools, the man should have chosen a major and a career that allows him to pay to avoid public schools
• it’s better to choose a man whose career allows him to work from home, so that he is available to supervise the education, and discipline the children as they grow
• he should demonstrate his ability to move people in his circle of influence to greater effectiveness and influence, for example making them try harder at school and work, or get better at defending the Christian worldview, especially on controversial issues

So in the case of choosing a woman who will be involved in producing effective, influential children, here are some tips:

• don’t choose a woman based on attraction to her appearance or sexual availability
• children need their their mothers at home from birth to age 5, so if a woman has a career, then she needs to put it on hold during that time. If a woman wants to do a career to benefit the Christian community as a whole, e.g. – Supreme Court justice, then she should probably not have children between those ages
• it’s better to choose a woman who has demonstrated the ability to do hard things, so that she has the ability to take responsibility and be accountable for producing results, e.g. – a degree in computer science, and two years of private sector coding experience
• she should demonstrate her ability to move people in her circle of influence to greater effectiveness and influence, for example making them try harder at school and work, or get better at defending the Christian worldview, especially on controversial issues

It’s no good to complain when the children arrive that your spouse isn’t involved in spiritual and moral education. The time to settle that was when you were training to evaluate and choose your spouse. And Christian parents and pastors have a role to play in equipping young people to make better choices.

2. Classical Christian schools

I’ve looked over the curricula of a number of these classical Christian schools, and I am not convinced that they are useful for producing effective, influential Christians.

Suppose I were trying to educate my child to be the next Jay Richards or the next Stephen C. Meyer or the next Kristen Waggoner or the next Clarence Thomas. Are classical Christian schools useful for producing results like that?

Education has two goals. 1) educating the person in valuable skills, so that they can earn a lot of money without sacrificing family engagement, and without violating their conscience. 2) it should teach young people to resist the culture on the basis of reason and evidence. If we are talking about God’s existence or origins, then we are dealing with mainstream science. If we are talking about gospel reliability or the resurrection, then we are making historical arguments using mainstream evidence. If we’re talking about religious pluralism or the problem of evil, then we’re talking about mainstream philosophical theology and philosophy of religion. Etc.

I have yet to meet anyone involved with classical Christian schools who was steering young people into careers where they would make a lot of money, working from home, and not exposing themselves to cancel culture. You would think that these classical Christian schools would be focused on careers like developing software with open-source components, but they don’t have the skills. Secondly, apologetics is poorly handled in these curricula. If there is any, it’s presuppositional – an approach that is used by none of the most effective and influential Christian scholars. The ones who actually debate non-Christians and move the ball downfield in the culture.

3. Move to a conservative state in a conservative country

Many Christian men and women often pooh-pooh my seriousness about marriage and parenting planning. They say “I was born in Washington, and it’s a fine state. The public schools are great here. And I’m sure the government, although entirely Democrat, will respect my rights as a parent and as a Christian. After all, I pay their salaries.” But this is just laziness and ignorance. The people who say this don’t want the burden of having to make plans, and execute plans in order to produce effective, influential children.

Consider this article from Daily Wire, about Germany – a secular socialist state:

Home education has been outlawed in Germany for more than a century; four years ago, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against a family from Darmstadt, Germany, which had asserted the right to homeschool their children. Private religious schools, although legal, must follow state-mandated curricula from the area in which they are located.

Tobias Riemenschneider, a pastor at Evangelical Reformed Baptist Church in Frankfurt, Germany, said in an interview with The Daily Wire that the nation’s restrictive education laws present “great difficulty to parents who are convinced by their Christian faith that it is God’s will for them to raise their children themselves in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” He noted that parents who defy government sanctions against home education risk incurring considerable fines, prison sentences, and the possibility that authorities will take their children.

The same kind of stuff is happening now, in states like Washington and California.

It’s just like those Christian-owned business in SOGI states. SOGI states elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to be a protected category, like race. Christian businesses in those states think “well, I was born here, and my family is here, so I’m going to start a business here, and keep right out of politics. I’m sure God will make my laziness and ignorance work out”. They are taken by surprise by being persecuted by secular left tyrants. A much better plan is to be serious about moving to a state with low taxes, high liberty, and support for the plans of Christian parents. It’s better to spend your own money on educating your kids, rather than to spend it on legal defense.

Transgenderism is the hot topic of discussion between secular leftists and moral people these days. Every time I see a study about this issue, I’m blogging about it, so that I can find all the studies I need when I have to debate this. One thing you hear from the secular left is that parents must allow kids to transition, or they will suffer declines in mental health. But what does the data say?

Here’s the latest study, reported by Fox News:

Children taking anti-psychotic medication in the military health system for serious mental illness were later administered “gender-affirming pharmaceuticals,” according to Department of Defense health records, with one of its air base physicians claiming the gender drugs could “melt away” psychotic conditions such as a schizophrenia diagnosis.

A study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2021 entitled, “Mental Healthcare Utilization of Transgender Youth Before and After Affirming Treatment,” discussed internal DoD health records from 2010-2018.

The review showed that transgender kids in the DoD health system were being given heavy psychotropic medications such as anti-psychotics while being sent through a “gender-affirming” pipeline.

So, the authors of the study thought that transitioning children would cause their mental health problems to just disappear. But the study actually found the opposite:

The study yielded unflattering results on the effects the gender treatments had on kids’ mental health. Not only did it find no significant psychological benefit, but many children had their psychotropic medication increased after gender-related drugs were administered.

“Among 963 [transgender] youth using gender-affirming pharmaceuticals, mental healthcare did not significantly change and psychotropic medications increased following gender-affirming pharmaceutical initiation,” the study said.

“The most pronounced increases in psychotropic medication were in… anti-psychotics and lithium,” a mood stabilizing medication commonly used to treat bipolar disorder.

The secular left likes to say that hormone therapy is a treatment for the mental illnesses that these young people have. But this study doesn’t show that, it shows that they were taking even more psychotropic medications after beginning their sex changes.

Here are some of the other studies I’ve blogged about before:

• New study: more than half of all female-to-male transgender teens attempt suicide
• Controversial study on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and transgenderism re-published
• Study: sex-reassignment surgery does not improve mental health of transgender people
• New study: “social contagion” is a major factor in teen and young adult gender dysphoria
• New study: there is no gay gene that causes homosexuality
• New study: 50% of biological males in women’s prisons convicted of sex crimes
• New study: psychotherapy improves mental health of autistic teens with gender dysphoria

I’ve been watching a bunch of episodes of the @whatever podcast, and really enjoying the fact that the Christians are allowed to say what they think about dating and relationships, and that the non-Christians are explaining in their own words what their view of relationships is. And it’s very interesting to see how modern women have a disconnect between “in the moment” and “some day”.

So, I have a couple of clips from a show to show you what I mean. In this clip, the men on the left of the room – Brian Atlas, the host, and Chase, the evangelical Christian – challenge the two non-Christian women on the right side of the room. They ask whether a boyfriend can expect his girlfriend to stop going to bars and night clubs. These are places where alcohol is served, women wear sexy clothes, and men flirt with drunk women and try to take them home for sex. All the non-Christian women on the panel call this demand that they not go to bars and clubs “controlling”. They don’t see why being in a relationship should cause them to have to give up any aspect of their pursuit of pleasure. If they want validation from hot guys, and maybe some extra sex, then they should be able to look for it in bars and night clubs.

Remember, this video has a lot of bad language. It’s not for kids.

So, watch this clip from 1:05:21 to 1:28:45: (23 min and 24 seconds)

So, these young women want to focus on having fun in their early 20s, because that’s what they want to do. And then later on, when they get much older, then they might be ready for a man to marry them and give them children.

A marriage-minded man is looking for a woman who is willing to control her behavior so that she becomes safe to marry. So that she can focus on her husband. So that she can spend time nurturing and raising her children. She can’t spend money on frivolous things. She can’t spend money on vacations and entertainment and alcohol. She can’t smoke while she’s pregnant. She can’t buy expensive hand bags and get cosmetic surgery. But these young women aren’t willing to give up any of these things. They want to have fun. And marriage is seen as “boring”, until they decide in their late 30s that they finally want it. Men who want to focus on marriage early are “controlling”. Men who want women to focus on preparing to build a home and a family are “controlling” men.

The problem with this, as one of the men points out, is that those bar and night club experiences do not make the woman attractive or stable for marriage. Marriage is an enormous financial and legal risk for men. They can be thrown into jail for inability to pay alimony and child support. They can lose custody of their kids in family courts. They can have their parental rights nullified by feminist judges. Women are actually more likely to commit non-reciprocal domestic violence than men, according to this recent study:

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.

Men have to be extremely careful about marriage. And when young women are taught to be self-centered from 18-35, this is not good preparation for being a wife and mother. “Hoe phases” and “party stages” doesn’t look good on a resume. I would not hire a college grad to write software, if their entire resume was playing video games and memorizing movie scripts. If you want the job, you have to be able to show that you can do the job. Jobs are not meant to entertain you. There is work to do, and results are expected. The same thing is true of marriage. Men are making the hiring decisions, there, and we do look at women’s resumes.

Men are the keepers of commitment. If a woman wants commitment, she has to apply for commitment, and prove she is worth being committed to. Men are looking for marriage-related behaviors and capabilities. Chastity. Sobriety. Conservative political views. Accurate theology. Apologetics. Experience building others up to be useful for God. Spending restraint. Saving and investing. STEM degrees. Cooking ability. The ability to be content at home. Willingness to learn what husbands like, and to play with husbands. Fitness. Nutrition. Respect for male leadership. Etc.

Consider this clip from 2:32:54 to 2:43:24: (10 min, 30 seconds)

Here the Christian co-host Chase explains to the women that if they pick a Christian man, he will be able to lead them to focus on the most important things in life early on. The single mother is excited that some men would want to help to avoid mistakes with bad boys. But again, the two blondes who insisted on hedonism rebel against the leadership of good men. They want to be free to pursue pleasure, and not listen to the leadership of Christian men. They don’t want to focus on marriage. They don’t want to prepare their character for marriage. They don’t want to control their desires, so they can get a long-term result. They want to SAY that they want marriage and children “some day”, but they want to choose what feels good “in the moment”. And they definitely prefer hot bad boys who are permissive. They don’t want good men who want to lead them to get into shape for marriage.

I think the older generation of Christian women has NO IDEA that this is what younger women are like. 70 years ago, women would jump into the arms of men who wanted to step in and lead on moral and spiritual issues. They were not interested in “tingles” caused by physical attraction. They were interested in men who could step in and make marriage and parenting easy for them. Men who were serious about earning. Men who were serious about fighting evil. Men who were involved in the home, and effective at leading the children to have accurate beliefs and good moral character. But those days are long gone.

Today, young women are choosing men based on the feelings they get from being validated by those men. They like men who “don’t judge”. They like men with attractive appearances who are having a lot of sex with other women. They like men who spend their money on displayed wealth, rather than save for a downpayment on a home. Good men are ignored until these women realize that their plan isn’t working, and suddenly they want to “settle down”. But good men know that a woman who makes a good man her “last resort” in her late 30s will never respect him as a leader in the home.

Men don’t HAVE to get married and have kids in order to be happy. We can just work hard, stack our cash high, retire early, and work on our ministry goals. Working for God on evangelism and apologetics is enormously fulfilling for a man. Just ask Paul.