In Australia, where I live, school has just gone back for another year. The memories of the Summer holidays are fading fast, and we’re busy stocking our children’s backpacks with empty folders and notebooks. By the end of the year, those folders and books—and with them our children—will come home full of learning.

As the term begins, I’ve been reflecting on the respective roles that parents and schools play in the education of our children.

In our modern era, we are in the habit of outsourcing our children’s education to others. We see learning as an impersonal transaction—we engage schools, tutors and programs to teach our children then send them home. Home has become a place purely for relaxation and recreation; a place to recover from all of the learning done elsewhere.

But the more I read the Bible, the more convinced I am that the one image that captures the role of a parent better than any other is that of the teacher. It is parents, not schools, who bear the primary responsibility for their children’s education. Every home is a school. Every parent is a teacher.

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“If we want our children to thrive in the modern world, let’s ground them in a better story. In a world that gives children no firm foundation for meaning, morality or community, let’s give them some solid ground to stand on. Let’s not imprison them in the miserable “Kingdom of You,” but help them to discover the joy and freedom of finding their place in the Kingdom of God.”

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“As parents, we bear the primary responsibility for encouraging our children to put their trust in Jesus. But we don’t have to do this alone. We have the privilege of including our children in a local family of faith—a whole community of people who can disciple them too.

At a time when many parents feel isolated and alone, a supportive church community can provide the kind of practical support and encouragement that modern families desperately need.”

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It is no secret that many parents today are struggling to cope. One of the reasons that parenting in our era is hard is that for the first time in history, we are trying to go it alone.

Many of us have moved away from our extended families and the places where we grew up. Even if our parents live nearby, many of them are busy working during the week. Our relationships with our neighbours are also more transient and superficial than in previous generations.

On a day-to-day basis it can feel like it’s just us—mum, dad and the kids—battling against the world.

But when we turn to the Bible, we see that from the very beginning, God has called individuals to be part of something bigger than themselves—to belong to his big family. The Bible is essentially the story of God’s relationship with one ancient family. If we have become children of God, it is our story too.

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A visitor to the modern West would have good reason to believe that the goal we are striving for in life is happiness. Our guiding principle seems to be: ‘Do whatever makes you happy; follow your heart’. We are on a constant quest to find our ‘happily ever after’ with the perfect partner, the perfect body, the perfect job, and the perfect house.

This filters down to our parenting, too. If you ask modern parents what we want for our children, we reply in unison: ‘We just want them to be happy!’ We end up doing everything we can to give our kids a perfect childhood of perpetual delight.

My first years of motherhood were like that—I was completely preoccupied with our son’s emotions.

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If observers are right, modern parenthood is in crisis. The titles of some recent books say it all: The Collapse of Parenting, Toxic Childhood, and Spoonfed Generation, to name a few. In spite of our all-consuming desire to give our children the perfect childhood, we seem to be raising a generation that is, in many respects, ill-equipped for life in the real world.

The problem isn’t that we lack information. No, the problem for parents today is that we’ve lost sight of the big picture. We could happily tell you our views on bottle-feeding, childcare, spanking, screen time, or sugar. But few of us could tell you exactly what we’re aiming for or how we plan to get there.

At a time when I was a particularly anxious, aimless parent, I turned to the Bible. Its ancient wisdom turned out to be the perfect antidote to the problems that plague modern parents like me. The Bible contains good news for parents, but it also confronts us with some hard truths.

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