Today, while feeling especially heavy, I picked up Dr. Paul D. Meier’s Christian Child-Rearing and Personality Development. I hesitated to open it, fearing I would find lots of things that I had done wrong as a parent. Instead, I found a word of encouragement at both the beginning and at the ending of the book, one that reinforces the truth of Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Dr. Meier stresses the importance of a child’s early years, saying in his preface: “It is my firm belief that approximately 85 percent of one’s adult personality is formed by the time he is six years old. Those first six years, therefore, are obviously the most critical.”22.
I recalled how my wife, Katrina, and I sought to provide our children with love, nurturing, and the truth of the Lord during those early years.
At the very end of Meier’s book, I found some words I badly needed:
I sometimes recommend that teenagers who have graduated from high school go several hundred miles away—out of the nest—to develop their God-given talents (preferably but not necessarily at a Christian college), and learn the hard lessons of life by making the necessary mistakes—and then correcting them. If the parents reared the child by God’s standards during those crucial first six years of life, when about 85 percent of his personality was formed, he’ll do just fine. Trust him. And if the parents haven’t reared their child by God’s principles, most attempts to teach an eighteen-year-old something he should have learned when he was three years old will be utterly futile. Let him move out to learn from life’s hard knocks, and pray that God will mature him.23.