Four years ago in a sermon, I made a few critical comments about Ted Tripp’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart. Since then, I’ve gotten ongoing requests from a variety of Reformed Presbyterians across the country to amplify my thoughts. I’ve finally done that in this extended review. I hope that all our Witness readers, especially those involved in raising children themselves, will find it thought-provoking and useful.

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Tedd Tripp’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, continues to be used by Christian parents looking for guidance in raising their children. Is it a good guide?

I read Tripp’s book several years ago while our adult class was reviewing authors such as James Dobson, Gary and Anne Ezzo, and John MacArthur. I even went back and read Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the American standard for raising children after World War II.

Tripp won my approval at the very beginning by taking a clear stand rejecting any reliance on modern psychology. Good, I thought. He won’t look to Sigmund Freud for understanding, as Spock did. There will be no borrowing from the behaviorists. He won’t try to baptize Abraham Maslow or cite study after study to confirm some point he is making. He will work from the Bible alone. So I began reading Tripp’s book with high hopes that I could recommend it to Christians wanting help in child rearing.

For an hour I read uncritically, but with an unease that I tried to ignore. Then I came to Tripp’s discussion of wrong parental goals for their children: star athlete, music career, scholar, popularity, and so on. He correctly exposed the limitations of these goals. Then he proceeded with suggestions about how to reorient those interests. Sports, for example, he wrote, have value since we are stewards of God’s gifts. Sports moreover can help unify a family.

Finally, he said, “Strenuous activity is valid to keep the body in excellent health. You must be concerned with strength and stamina for a life of service to God” (pp. 70-71). That was it! No hint that a game is good because it is fun. Or that the joy of playing brings glory to God. The Presbyterian missionary Eric Liddel, portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, ran because running is good. He explained that when he ran he felt God’s pleasure. But for Tripp the arts, sport, and all of the graces of human life are portrayed as only instrumental goods, as means to proper spiritual and ethical goals, but not good in themselves. He will teach parents and children to ask of something beautiful or fun, “What is it good for?” rather than first to exclaim, “How good it is!”

I went back to the beginning and read more carefully. Early on, I came to this: “Picture the process this way: [your child] holds the claims of the Gospel at arm’s length, turning it in the hand and determining either to embrace it or to cast it away” (p. 16). No Calvinist, no believer in the covenant, no one who understands original sin, ever portrayed a child as Tripp does. The picture he invites you to hold of your child places him outside the covenant. But the Bible teaches that our children are “holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). In the quotation cited, Tripp also pictures your child as a neutral observer who will evaluate the gospel, deciding for himself whether he will embrace or cast away Jesus Christ. But no sinner is ever neutral about Jesus Christ (Luke 9:50, 11:23). All men are either dead in sin or regenerated in Christ.

Finally, consistent with his view that children are born outside the covenant, Tripp gives the church, not to mention grandparents, virtually no role in raising children. How ironic! Even Benjamin Spock in the midst of the Freudian advice that bore such bad fruit advises parents more than once that if they need help they can ask their minister.

What advice does Tripp have for dealing with quarreling children? “Deal with their hearts,” he writes. He gives an example. Two children quarrel over a toy. A parent must intervene. How?

“The classic response is, ‘Who had it first?’ This response misses heart issues. ‘Who had it first?’ is an issue of justice” (p.21).

Tripp will have you declare both children guilty at the heart level, the one for selfishness (not sharing), the other for taking what the other one has, and both for trying to please themselves. The trouble with Tripp’s approach is that the possessor of the toy is as guilty as the taker of the toy. He dismisses “justice” as merely a surface issue. In that family, a child can never appeal to his father for justice. He’ll always be told, “You’re wrong too.” There goes the eighth commandment!

Imagine that someone is taking your car and you call 911. A policeman comes. He deals with your hearts. “You are both wrong, you for not sharing, he for taking what’s not his.” How wrong-headed! When one child is breaking the law (stealing), the wronged child should expect that he can appeal to authority (parents) and be defended, not told that his heart is guilty.

What is Tripp’s advice for children who are being bullied at school? Parents, he notes, tell children to ignore the bully. “Or worse, parents tell them to hit others when they are hit first” (p. 16). This advice, he writes, is “nonbiblical.” Is it always? A pacifist ethic crops up more than once in Tripp’s book, but the Bible does not teach pacifism. I am glad that when I was six years old in the Bronx, I was allowed to defend myself. It was necessary. This is not the place for a discussion of pacifism, except to note that our Confession of Faith rejects it (WCF, 23.2). Even children may defend themselves.

Finally, I began wondering, Does the Bible compare parents to shepherds? Do we shepherd children’s hearts? Maybe trying to shepherd their hearts is overreaching. Yes, out of the heart comes sin (Mark 7:21). Yes, we are each to forgive from the heart (Matt. 18:35). Yes, it is a weakness of man that he looks on the outward appearance, and not as God does, on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7). But can finite man overcome that weakness? Only the Lord sees the heart. Indeed, only He understands it (Jer. 17:10). “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?” (1 Cor. 2:11) Only when someone reveals himself to us can we know what is in his heart. God can discern hypocrites; we cannot. That is why our church admits people to membership on the basis of a credible profession of faith, not on the basis that we can discern who are truly saved.

A parent trying to shepherd his child’s heart may well end up being spiritually oppressive, bearing in on his child’s heart motives with question after question. The questions may or may not be on the mark; often they will be leading questions. Will they get to the heart of the matter? Often not, because even an honest and willing child will not always know what specifically in his heart led him to sin. We adults don’t always understand our own behavior. “For what I am doing, I do not understand,” Paul wrote concerning his own sin (Rom. 7:15). A child of a shepherding parent had better learn early to say the right words and mouth the right platitudes, or he may be in for a long question-and-answer session. Constantly probing our children with questions, even when their hearts are repentant, will lead to frustration and rebellion. How can we know how repentant they are? After requiring repentance and restitution, parents should only proceed further when the child seems especially teachable.

Instead of trying to uncover your child’s heart, let the Spirit of God working through His Word in family worship and in church do His work. “I, the Lord, search the heart” (Jer. 17:10). “For the word of God is living and powerful, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). It is better to be just and consistent in disciplining our children, answering their questions, and loving them wholeheartedly while instructing them in God’s ways, than to try to shepherd their hearts. We can’t see that deeply. Only God can deal with the heart. Such an approach will set you free as a parent to be who you are with integrity before God and your children, rather than trying to be a shepherd of what you can neither see nor fully fathom: someone else’s heart.

Tripp achieves his goal of writing a book without obviously borrowing ideas from unbelieving psychology. But there are other and older errors than those of Freud or the behaviorists, such as the error of excluding children from the covenant, or the world-denying error of holding life’s pleasures and joys at arm’s length while esteeming them only for their utilitarian value, or the error of attempting to do more than one truly can: dealing with a child’s heart rather than simply with the child.

Despite some good things in Tripp’s book, I regretfully find that I cannot recommend it. Its advice will not bear good fruit over the long run and may well provoke rebellion.

Of the books that we reviewed in our adult class, I liked John MacArthur’s book, Successful Christian Parenting. But what I recommend most is this: Pray for your children, love them, teach them the Bible, love them, include them in the church from their baptism on, love them, live your faith before them, love them, hope in God’s Word: “For the promise is to you and to your children” (Acts 2:39). If you need help with specific issues, go for help to older people in the church whose children you admire. Study the book of Proverbs. Ask your pastor. Pray. Fear not. Your child’s heart is in the hand of the Lord.