Shepherding a Child's Heart

Mistakes in Understanding Shaping Influences
Two mistakes are made in interacting with the shaping influences
of life. The first is seeing shaping influences deterministically. It is
the error of assuming that the child is a helpless victim of the
circumstances in which he was raised. The second mistake is denial.
It is the mistake of saying the child is unaffected by his early
childhood experience. Passages such as Proverbs 29:21 illustrate the
importance of childhood experience. Here we see that the servant
pampered from youth is affected in a manner that brings grief in the
end.
Neither denial nor determinism is correct. You need to understand

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these shaping influences biblically. Such understanding will aid you
in your task as parents.
You make a grave mistake if you conclude that childrearing is
nothing more than providing the best possible shaping influences for
your children. Many Christian parents adopt this “Christian
determinism.” They figure that if they can protect and shelter him
well enough, if they can always be positive with him, if they can send
him to Christian schools or if they can home school, if they can
provide the best possible childhood experience, then their child will
turn out okay.
These parents are sure that a proper environment will produce a
proper child. They respond almost as if the child were inert. Such a
posture is simply determinism dressed in Christian clothes.
I have a friend who is a potter. He told me that he can only create
the type of pot the clay he is working with will allow him to create.
The clay is not merely passive in his hands. The clay responds to him.
Some clay is elastic and supple. Some clay is crumbly and hard to
shape.
His observation provides a good analogy: You must be concerned
with providing the most stable shaping influences, but you may never
suppose that you are merely molding passive clay. The clay responds
to shaping; it either accepts or rejects molding. Children are never
passive receivers of shaping. Rather, they are active responders.
Your son or daughter responds according to the Godward focus of
his or her life. If your child knows and loves God, if your child has
embraced the fact that knowing God can enable him to know peace in
any circumstance, then he will respond constructively to your shaping
efforts. If your child does not know and love God, but tries to satisfy
his soul’s thirst by drinking from a “cistern that cannot hold
water….” (Jeremiah 2:13), your child may rebel against your best
efforts. You must do all that God has called you to do but the outcome
is more complex than whether you have done the right things in the

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right way. Your children are responsible for the way they respond to
your parenting.
Determinism makes parents conclude that good shaping
influences will automatically produce good children. This often bears
bitter fruit later in life. Parents who have an unruly and troublesome
teenager or young adult conclude that the problem is the shaping
influences they provided. They think if they had made a little better
home, things would have turned out okay. They forget that the child is
never determined solely by the shaping influences of life. Remember
that Proverbs 4:23 instructs you that the heart is the fountain from
which life flows. Your child’s heart determines how he responds to
your parenting.
Mr. and Mrs. Everett had a rebellious 15-year-old son. They could
see that they had made many mistakes in childrearing. Their
mistakes, however, blinded them to his needs. When they saw their
son, they saw their failures. As a result, they never saw him as a boy
who was choosing to sin. They failed to see that he was choosing not
to believe and obey God. They had not been perfect parents, it was
true. Their son, however, had not been a good son. That part was true
too.
Their view failed to consider the fact that human beings are
creatures who are directed by the orientation of their hearts. The child
is not inert during childhood. Your children interact with life. This
leads us to our next chapter and our next chart.