My blog post Weak Men! Strong Women! gets hits nearly everyday. Though posted almost two months ago this particular post has shelf life. On my admin page for the blog, readers are “googling” various combinations of the terms weak men and strong women. It is curious, but encouraging search criteria.
You can click on the link above to read the original post as well as download three excellent sermons and get some very good book references that I trust will serve you as you think through the Egalitarian v. Complementarian argument. In this post I want to give you some tips that Lucia and I have implemented in our home, with the hope that we can train our kids, by the grace of God, to become biblical complementarians.
But first, here are three major caveats for you
Caveat #1 – What I’m about to say is not the Bible. Therefore, it is not authoritative. It is not a list for you to mimic with the expectation that your kids will turn out okay. Please don’t do this for that reason. However, I do hope you will think about the argument and seek God to contextualize a Complementarian worldview into your home. Don’t necessarily do what we do; but do something.
Caveat #2 – This is nowhere near all we do. This is merely a sampling to give you a snapshot of our approach. But with any snapshot, you can miss much. There is always a context surrounding a snapshot. There is a before and after that a freeze frame cannot communicate. Therefore, with these “tips” I’m aware there will be more unsaid than said.
Caveat #3 – These tips are not in any particular order and I would not want to communicate in any way that we have figured anything out. I’m the biggest knucklehead I know and my friends can vouch for this as they tend to agree there are few people who they know who has more faults. All I can say is that we are trying, but nowhere near perfect.
Our children as of this post are Girl (7), Boy (5) and Girl (3).
Tip #1 – The girls stay in one room that has three pink walls and the fourth wall with a mural of Belle, a white horse, castle and a big green tree with white birds flying around. My son’s room is camouflage on two walls and a two-wall mural of tanks, gunfire, soldiers, sandbags, helicopters and more. We’re trying to communicate a biblical distinction between male and female. Both genders are stoked with their rooms!
Tip #2 – My girls eat their cereal out of pink bowls. My son would not touch those bowls with a ten-foot pole. His is blue. They have dolls. He has tools. They wear pretty dresses. He wears camouflage or cargo pants. They are different by God’s design.
Tip #3 – We have tried to teach our kids to say, “We’re going to Grandpa and Grandma’s house” instead of saying “Grandma” first. Our desire is to teach them “order” in the family regarding headship, to honor the man as the head of the home. God made Adam first and then Eve.
Tip #4 – My girls typically come to me to show me what they are wearing to get my opinion prior to going out, e.g. to the church meeting. Our goal here is to teach them humility, submission, respect and a desire to seek counsel from the head of the home. We hope there will be a desire in them to honor their husbands similarly.
Tip #5 – I try to do the voice recording on the answering machine so that people who call hear a man’s voice. This is a leadership issue for us. We try to establish the home in a biblical order, which would look like (1) God; (2) Husband; (3) Wife; (4) Kids.
Tip #6 – Our email addresses point more to our marriage than our kids. Our addresses are “rickandlucia” rather than “momsthree” or “luciaplusthree” or something about the kids. We want our kids to know we love them, but we are not child-centered. Again, there is a biblical orientation in the home.
Tip #7 – My son knows he has “three wives” in that we are developing his marital-leadership gifting as a five-year old, thinking that how he treats his two sisters and his mother is a clue as to how he will treat his future wife. Therefore, he is taught to honor the girls in our home by serving them. For example, he holds the door for his “wives” when we go shopping.
Tip #8 – My son is never allowed to hit his sisters regardless of what they do to him. There has to be another way to respond to their sin than hitting them back or responding in anger. The wife is a delicate vase (1 Peter 3:7) to be cherished and nourished (Eph. 5:25ff). There is no place for harshness from the male to the female in the home.
Tip #9 – There is no negotiation (Read: no grace) when any of the kids sin in anger toward their mother. At that point they know they are not sinning against their mother anymore; but they are sinning against my wife. When their mother is no longer their mother, but my wife, then they know they have crossed a line. She is my wife before she is their mother. Being a mother is a secondary issue in our home. Eve was made for the man and then they had kids secondarily.
Tip #10 – Modeling must precede any teaching that I do. None of the above really matters if I am not setting the tone in the home by my example. It would be mostly useless to try to teach my kids anything if I am not living it. Biblically this is called hypocrisy. Therefore, I must be the leader in the home. If I am a lazy, weak, passive and non-communicative leader, then I’m wasting my time to try to get my kids to know their God-given, biblically defined roles. They must follow me as I follow Christ.
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The number one all-time marriage counseling issue that I have dealt with is passive husbands and non-complementing wives. It is so far ahead of number two in counseling issues that I’m not sure what number two would be.
