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The Bible Says To Train Your Kids. Here's How · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  We don't have a problem with training in other arenas, right? You send your kid off to sports and you expect the coach to have some kind of training process. You have your first day at work and you expect to begin a training process. You send your kids to school and you expect there to be some training. But when you come home, there's like no training. God designed families to be a team to actually accomplish things together. And the greatest way to discover whether or not you actually believe the family is a team is to see if you actually train your kids.
• 0:31
  All right, welcome back to the Family Teams podcast. I'm Blake Allsmith, and we've got Jeff Bethke, Jeremy Pryor, and April Pryor here today. And today we are going to be talking about the biblical mandate to train your children. I think we've all heard these promises, whether it's in Proverbs or in Psalms or throughout Scripture. It talks about train up your child in the way he should go, and when he is older, he will not turn from it, right? And so it's this kind of proactive stance of the biblical mandate.
• 0:56
  that I think that we hear all the time in scripture, where it seems like there's this action that we're supposed to be doing. It's almost the primary lens through which we interact with our kids. But now in 2026, modern America, it's kind of being deemed archaic, or it seems a little bit risky to even talk about something like this. So just to jump into it, Jeff, let me hand it over to you. When do you think parenting quietly shifted from maybe training-centric to more like managing kids' behaviors-centric?
• 1:24
  Yeah, I think it's been a slow burn the last, you know, 100, 200 years, industrialization, individualization. But one thing that is really, really key is you don't train for things when you don't have a mission to train for. And so it's clear that the place we're at today is alluding and showing by the fact that we don't care about it or value it, that we don't even believe that there is a mission at stake with our children. But the truth of the gospel and the
• 1:50
  And so parents out there listening and watching realize what is at stake. And you might ask, what is at stake? I would say the kingdom of God, the very kingdom of light bursting forth on earth as it is in heaven against the kingdom of darkness. And your kids, your family, you and your household are a pivotal, absolutely crucial variable in that war. And so what's at stake? Everything.
• 2:17
  Everything is at stake, and that's why we train our kids. And so understand it starts with the first domino, which is there is a mission at play. And when you understand the true mission, you recapture the true mission, you saturate in the true mission, then I think training becomes a little bit of a natural byproduct because you see how necessary it is when you're actually in a war over the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light.
• 2:42
  That's super interesting. So really what you're saying is that the reason we don't train our kids is because there's no game or competition or mission that we need to train them for. And so absent of that, we're just going to try to optimize our kids' behavior to maybe make themselves the most enjoyable for us to be around for the short period of time that we're around them.
• 3:01
  Right. But yeah, I mean, I think, yes, I think, I think the thing we have to realize and ask ourselves is a family for sharpening arrows or is a family for giving ourselves peace and comfort. Those are two very, very different things. And you're going to optimize your behavior and probably train in one of those and not train in the other. Hmm. Yeah. So if you're not into training your kids or you're like pushing back on this, you might ask your question of like, well, what are you trying to accomplish with your family? Because that that's probably where the
• 3:27
  That's really good. Okay, real fast to the person who's listening here. If you're like me, even just bringing up the topic of training, I think I at least something goes on. I'm like, oh, that's right. I need to be more proactive about this. My wife and I call it. We need to start tightening the screws around the household of like we need to start training a little bit more. If you're starting to feel that already talking about this, go to familyteams.com slash train.
• 3:47
  And what you'll find there is we already have a couple of resources on a PDF that kind of lists out our top kind of 12 tips to talk about when it comes to training. So if you're like, oh, I want to put a bookmark here really fast right now. Pause. Go to familyteams.com slash train. And you kind of get that. And that'll at least kind of kick you down the path of like, that's right. We need to have a conversation about how to tighten the screws. OK, great. I found a great quote that I wanted to share with you guys. This is from William Feather. And it says, if we do not discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us.
• 4:17
  And I think there's this great idea of like training. Whenever you're training for something, you're preparing them for something. So the question is, what are we preparing them for? It's like, well, we're preparing for impact. We're preparing them to be able to flourish and leading a family. We're preparing them to contribute in society. We're preparing them to deal with difficulty and with ruling.
• 4:47
  It's not like what's going to end up happening is the world is going to train them and it's going to be much less kind than maybe we are in doing it. And so maybe, Jeremy, if you want to weigh in here, how do you think parents should be thinking about training?
• 5:02
  Yeah, I think that there's a real disconnect about whether or not we, what kind of family we're building. Like, I think that if you, we don't have a problem with training in other arenas, right? You send your kid off to sports and you expect the coach to have some kind of training process. You have your first day at work and you expect to begin a training process. You send your kids to school and you expect there to be some training, especially at the beginning of the school year. But when you come home, there's like,
• 5:31
  No training. We just have this understanding that no, kids are just individuals. And so, and to Jeff's point, we need to understand that God designed families to be a team, to actually accomplish things together. And probably the greatest way to discover whether or not you actually believe the family is a team.
• 5:48
  is to see if you actually train your kids, right? Is this just a regular part of what it means? I remember watching this one time, you know, one of my friends lives across the street. He came over to our house. We just put this little pond in, you know, and some people are rightfully very scared of water features around kids. And so he was like, hey, kids, everybody come over here. So he got all of his kids in a row. And he just like said,
• 6:11
  What is that? Whoa, it's a pond. He just trained them exactly how to interact with the water, exactly what he wanted them to do, how to be safe around it, this new feature that had made its way into our neighborhood. That's just like a really tiny snapshot of what it just means to be a normal dad, which is that you see some kind of skill, you see some kind of thing that your kids need, and then you proactively train them to do it. And if we are a team on mission,
• 6:40
  then this would be an automatic part of what it means to be a father, to be a mother, to lead a family.
• 6:46
  Yeah, I feel like somewhere along the way, we've kind of lost confidence that it's okay for us to be the ones to do that. There's all this abdication going on with like abdicating things to the children's ministry at church, abdicating things to the school system, abdicating things to even like movies and social media or something like that, TV shows. And so yeah.
• 7:13
  remembering that this is in scripture like we as parents are supposed to be the ones to train our children um in these things and that we need to be more proactive about that and i really love what jeff said about where what are we training them for what is the purpose of training um if you're in a sport it's very easy to think of this analogy like of course you're training and you're in um
• 7:38
  like going to practice and things like that because you have a meet that you have to go to or you have a game that you need to win or a match or whatever. And so for us, what does it look like in the home to have training? What are we training them for? So, you know, you might think of it as simple things like personal hygiene, like we're training them to brush their teeth and we're training them to take a shower and things like that. But then there's also like...
• 8:04
  what calling does the Lord have on your family? And what is the mission that He has your specific family on? So if He wants you to do some traveling, then you need to teach your children how to sit still on a plane for two hours and occupy themselves with activities, that kind of thing. So if there's maybe you're just a very social, outgoing family and you're very hospitable, you're going to teach your children how to greet someone at the door.
• 8:32
  and how to welcome them and what to offer them when they come in and things like that, that we need to gain confidence that we know the mission that we're on. And it's our job to pass that on to our children in a way that is setting them up for success. So that's another thing. We can't just expect these things of our children without having actually trained them for the thing. Absolutely.
• 8:56
  Yeah. Jeff, you and I are both in the weeds. We've got almost teens, tweens all the way down to a one-year-old. What do you think are the biggest obstacles, even for you and Alyssa and for your peers, that you've kind of noticed that kind of stand in the way of getting you to actually start training?
• 9:14
  Yeah, I've kind of noticed three things with training that are kind of like the pegs on a stool, where if all three of these are doing well, then the triangle kind of supports the stool, and if one of these are missing, it tends to kind of be a leaky bucket. The number one is staying consistent. Consistency is so big with training.
• 9:31
  That if we're going to train for something as small as a toddler being able to sit there for 10 minutes versus something more philosophical and serious for a teenager, whatever it is, kind of understanding that I need to stay consistent and not fall off the wagon two days in. Really important. Number two is being equally high support as high expectation. That's when we talk about a lot of family teams, but high support and high expectations are enormously important that I expect a lot of you, but I'm also going to encourage and be gentle and be kind and cheer you on.
• 10:01
  And if I'm only one or the other, then that tends to not go well. And then number three is know what a win looks like. Before you start the training, it's really helpful to say, hey, how do we know when we've crossed the line of success? And if you don't know what that is, and again, it can be as small as, hey, when they can sit at the dinner table for 30 minutes and ask me to leave and put their dish in the sink.
• 10:21
  Well, okay, that's very measurable. And you can work towards that. And then you know what a win looks like and why that's really important is training also has to include that. Training has to include not just a clear line that you've crossed over, but for the culture of the family and for the hearts of the kids, actually celebrating and knowing what a win is so that you can move on to the next one.
• 10:39
  Jeremy, we're at peak interest. Like, okay, let's say that the mom or dad is sitting here. Maybe they're driving. Maybe they're working out in the garage or cleaning their garage like I do on Friday. So I listen to podcasts and clean the garage. Maybe they're peak motivated. Yes, I want to do this. How? Like, give me some practical steps that I can kind of take as a parent.
• 10:59
  Yeah, I think for so many Christian parents, this starts by trying to differentiate training from discipline. So oftentimes in the Christian world, we're like, oh, I know what that is. That's when we spank our kids or put them in timeout or, you know, we do, we flick or whatever, whatever your, you know, your preferred method of discipline is. But it's important to understand that training comes before discipline. In other words, imagine going to a job and, you know, you didn't know what to do. Nobody trained you. But if you do anything wrong, you know,
• 11:29
  by your desk every hour and takes a hundred bucks off your paycheck for everything you're doing right now you eventually get trained like that's better than no training like eventually you'd be like oh i i kind of learned not to do that i keep getting docked but wouldn't it be better if somebody just sat you down you know kind of like fatherly or you know just hey here's how you succeed at how to have an amazing day at work this is how you do that thing right now there does come a time where you do need discipline let's say you've been well trained you've
• 11:57
  You're you're rocking and just decide I just don't want to do it their way. You know, I'm just going to do it my way. OK, that's that's the time where discipline can be really important. And but it always is in the context of training. So that's the first thing is keep discipline in the context of training and make sure you're proactive about it.
• 12:14
  The second thing is that you take what works for you at work and point it at your family. So a lot of people actually do this in different arenas of their life. They just have never thought about doing this in their own family. Like there's a lot of times people are onboarding people at work. They know what it's like to train people. They're leading meetings really well. And in the meetings, they're pausing to do training. And there's lots of those things happening. There's professional training environments and people engaging in those things. They've never thought about taking any of those elements and actually doing them in the home.
• 12:43
  They advocate all of that to the church, to the school. They don't think about actually doing that at home. So figuring out if there are those arenas, those ways. And the third thing I love to see is sometimes we just need to build an arena in the home that actually matches the need to train. So that would be an example of that is...
• 13:04
  maybe get involved in a team sport with your kids where you're the coach, right? That's a real easy win. You know, there's all kinds of places where you can actually enjoy training your kids. We did a podcast once with a dad who had six boys and he decided to start a whole family kickball league so that he could be coaching his kids right there.
• 13:23
  And it worked amazingly well. And it was a really cool, we've seen lots of families try things like that. So get involved in some kind of arena because a lot of times we think about this way too intensely. Like, oh, this is only for when kids misbehave in the home. But training involves all of the skills necessary to have a flourishing life, like teamwork, right? Like all the things that April mentioned, like trying to be hospitable.
• 13:46
  Um, it there, you're trained toward that mission that Jeff mentioned. So it's, if you're going to do those things proactively, sometimes just to get in that mode to kind of shift into this kind of coach mode that I think dads are really good at. You sometimes need to enter into an arena where that's very natural for you and then take what's big, what you're feeling really natural in that arena into all the other arenas of the family's life.
• 14:11
  Well, I think there's also, it's also important to remember there's the culture of your home and there's the tone setting in your home. So there's the things like, you know, like the noise level in your home or the clutter or cleanliness in your home. Or there's the...
• 14:32
  just the way you handle decor and things like that in your home, that you can be training your kids about those things. Like, I think you need to be intentional about those things and not just reactional. Like if you are reacting to, Oh, everyone's just being so loud and this is so crazy and I feel so chaotic.
• 14:49
  and you're just like upset about it, then stop and think about a way to intentionally approach the culture that you want in your home because you can set that tone as a parent. It's hard work. It's not like just waving a magic wand and like all of a sudden, everyone's getting along great and your house is clean all the time. But it does take work. But it's something for a way that you can aim your training at something. We want all of our children to...
• 15:17
  be able to sit at the table and be able to have a guest over. And so we're going to train our kids in that way. And so we're going to talk about how to ask good questions and how to politely ask for more instead of just reach over and grab it. Or, you know...
• 15:35
  how long we want them to sit at the table or all of those things. We can teach our kids to use their indoor voices. It is hard and it does take time and effort, but it's something that we can do intentionally instead of just always reacting and feeling like we are reacting to life instead of grabbing a hold and saying, no, we're going to work towards life.
• 15:59
  having a peaceful environment in our home, a clutter-free environment. We've put some thought and intention into decor and things like that, that we can train our children towards those things.
• 16:12
  That's super good. The way you're describing it, April, it almost feels like training is more of a mode that we can go into as a parent, less of like this specific thing that we have to accomplish and put on our calendar of like, okay, now we're going to do from these 15 minutes, we're going to be doing some training. It almost feels more of like, as you go about your life with the goals that you have in your life and the needs that you have within your household, you enter into training mode where you say, okay, as I accomplish this, I'm going to make sure that I'm always training someone beside me as I do it.
• 16:40
  I think about my two daughters and I were in the airport today. And as soon as we off the plane, I said, OK, how do we get to, you know, mama is waiting to pick us up. How do I get there? And I said, we're looking for baggage claim or something like that. And I was like, lead the way. I'm not going to tell you what to do. And I kind of let them kind of figure it out and try to read the signs and that sort of thing. It's like.
• 17:02
  That was just more of a moat. We needed to get out there, but I had a little bit of space and we didn't have all seven of our kids with us. So I was like, I can use this as an opportunity to train. And so that's really helpful to kind of describe that. All this is so, this is golden. I don't know if you know this, if you're listening right now, that we actually have this thing called the Family Teams Accelerator.
• 17:20
  And in the family teams accelerator, we take a theme per month and we go deep in it. We bring in experts from within our community to have them talk on that. So the theme, if you can't tell the theme for March, for all of March, we're going to be covering the topic of training. And specifically, we bringing in Grant and Kelly Stein. This was the most popular accelerator session from last year that we did. And so we're bringing them back together.
• 17:45
  to talk about ways to train for them. They've got a larger family and they've really operationalized and made it easy to kind of take those first steps into proactively training your kids. So go to familyteams.com slash accelerator and check it out. You can get obviously the 12 tips that we have as a PDF, but I mean, for the cost of a Chipotle meal, you get a month's worth of training. You get a call with them. You get a call with the priors. Highly recommend checking it out. If you're thinking about it around the edge, this is the month to jump in. You're gonna get a ton of value for your family in here.
• 18:15
  Um, Jeremy, anything else to highlight about that? Yeah, we'd love for you guys to jump in there. Um, this is something that for so many people really starts to make, uh, their whole journey into becoming a family team actionable. And I think oftentimes husbands and wives are not on the same page. One of the things I love about Grant and Kelly is they, they are, they've really worked this out as a couple. Uh, and they've thought about like how to, how to communicate with each other and take a, take advantage of.
• 18:42
  the mom's strengths and the father's strengths. So yeah, I would definitely recommend you guys check that out. We'll be talking about this topic on the podcast, you know, throughout this month of February, but March is kicking off all of just an entire month inside the accelerator where we're going to, you know, get our hands dirty and figure out how to, and one of the things you'll learn from Grant and Kelly as well is they have a system that's amazing. That really has like, it's, they took some of the things that we had been advocating for in terms of creating a training system and just took it to the next level.
• 19:12
  That's excellent. Well, that actually is related. We're wrapping up here now, but next week, same time, same place, we'll be doing an episode further on training, specifically about how to build a training system for your family. So if that sounds interesting to you, I'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.
• 19:29
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.