What Shall We Say About A Child's Heart?

How theological and biblical illiteracy hijacks parental capacity to love well.

Book research this week has me examining a parenting resource I haven’t read before: Tedd Tripp’s popular book Shepherding a Child’s Heart. The titular thesis tells parents that their responsibility goes deeper than shaping behaviors and into the realm of a child’s heart. The book, riddled with stowaway anthropological and theological claims, contains a primary and ever-present theme: people are sinners.

This hyperfocus on sin (which, please note, is a term that remains undefined for readers) combines with an impoverished portrayal of children as essentially sinful adults in little bodies. So when Tripp eventually gets around to giving examples of how this shepherding might look, children’s hearts are parsed almost exclusively in terms of adult behaviors using vocabulary borrowed from nouthetic counseling. For instance, Tripp describes 1st grader Harold as a “relationship junkie” with “sexually loaded” thoughts¹; well-behaved 2nd grader George as “wicked,” like “one whose cup is washed and clean on the outside, but is filthy on the inside”²; “overbearing” Genny who chooses games at recess and needs to be “rescued from a life of finding comfort and meaning in controlling others.”³ Tripp’s antidote for these things is scrupulous religiosity: Harold “must understand that only God can slake the thirst of his soul for relationship;”⁴ George needs to learn that “even his good behavior require[s] repentance, because…it reflected pride and self-righteousness;”⁵ and Genny will be taught to regularly pray to counteract her teacher-identified overbearing behavior.⁶