Trinitas Blog

The term “helicopter parents” has been used to describe parents who for the past three decades, give or take a few years, have been over-protective, micro-managing, and sometimes just plain suffocating to their children. It seems helicopter parents don’t want their children to experience hardship or danger or difficulty or failure, and that motivates them to intervene in all aspects of their children’s lives, rushing in at every opportunity to preserve a perfect day.

 We parents are often tempted to idolize our children’s happiness. From the time they are born, we tolerate nothing that makes them cry—not hunger, not boredom, not loneliness. We react immediately to their cries with whatever remedy is necessary. Of course, it is our job to provide for their needs, and babies express those needs by crying; however, babies will eventually grow up. A baby who has never been allowed to experience a moment or two of unhappiness—probably more like an inconvenience—can become an older child, then a teenager, then an adult who has no tolerance for anything that makes him unhappy or inconveniences him. Such a person is impossible to live with, for he acts as if he is sovereign of the world and tramples everyone around him to get what he wants.

Summer break provides an opportunity for parents to rest from the routines of the school year and give fresh consideration to the joys of parenting. In this summer series, Mr. Gilley draws upon his experience as a father of two grown sons and grandfather of four to share with us Five Perfect Gifts for Children. Whether this is your first time to enjoy the series or you have enjoyed it before, be encouraged and drink deeply of the wisdom contained within and share it freely with anyone blessed with a "heritage from the Lord." 

We'll begin with a preview of all five gifts and then unpack each individually over the next five weeks. 

This week we celebrated the retirement of one of Trinitas’s most beloved teachers of all time. After twenty years of teaching in the Grammar School, Mrs. Wendy Phillips is retiring from that role. Many alumni, parents of alumni, students, and faculty members gathered for a time of remembering, gift-giving, and neck-hugging to send Mrs. Phillips out in style.

Last time out, we ended our discussion with a list of questions. We established the fact that there is no magic in those questions. They are merely questions that leave space for your child to tell his story in a way that he hasn’t even thought of yet. You can think of other questions like these that will help peel back the layers, and you can change them to fit the moment. The point is to get to the sin that motivated the action. For example, striking someone in anger is a sinful behavior, but oftentimes, there is something else motivating that anger and violence, whether pride or envy or covetousness or something else. If we don’t work to get at that sin that is rooted down in the heart, it is going to continue to manifest itself on the surface somehow—this time it was anger and violence, but next time, it could be something different.  

Picking up the thread from a couple of weeks back, I want to discuss correction a little further. We have talked about what correction is, why we must correct, and why our children don’t always love correction. Now, we’ll examine correction that addresses patterns of sin or even besetting sins in our children's lives.

Sometimes, our children have a bigger problem putting off sin than we had hoped. Perhaps it begins with a single event. We correct and move on. Then the very next week, here we are again in the same situation. Coincidence? Maybe. You correct again and move on. But oh, no! In a matter of days, here we are again. Now, to be fair, there are so many variables here that it’s hard to reduce this to a few brief words. For example, the type of sin dictates how we address it. Is it forgetfulness, gossip, disobedience, disrespect, unkindness, laziness? And there are plenty of other variables, as well, that have a bearing on how we proceed. We can’t get into all those methods here, so we’ll stick to a conversation about principles.  

Any organization that is serious about building and then guarding a particular culture is going to have a certain rubric for what kind of folks it invites to join the organization. Trinitas is that kind of organization. If Trinitas were a university, the admissions process would be labeled “highly selective” by the agencies that report on such things. Trinitas’s selectivity, though, is not based on GPA, test scores, or even IQ tests. Nor is it based on tax bracket, neighborhood, or make and model of the family’s transportation. Now, to be fair, students must be able to succeed academically, and families must be able to pay tuition in order to be enrolled at Trinitas, but those aren’t the first determiners for who is admitted and who isn’t. The first determiner is like-mindedness with the school, and this is assessed in the Trinitas Family Conference.

Over the past couple of posts, I have attempted to define biblical correction and to show that God requires it of us. Not only does he require adults to correct ourselves with His word as the standard, but also, He requires us to correct our children, “to put them right,” according to the standard found only in God’s word. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Well, maybe not exactly.

If your children sometimes bristle at correction, or they listen attentively and then go on doing what they were doing, or they give you a thousand excuses for why their behavior was justified and never want to own up to any wrongdoing, or they are compliant when you are near but behave like the devil when you are away, then read on.