The Lord corrects errors in character development. In His Word, God gives us objective principles for behavior that He expects us to follow. Academic success has to do with the ability to remember objective facts: character development has to do with applying objective Biblical principles properly in order to live in the way that God has ordained. Character development allows us to know whether or not it is proper to do that which we desire to do.

Infants and toddlers intuitively find it distressing to have their care relegated to an institutional day-care center, even one run in the most benevolent fashion possible. Children younger than school age are simply not emotionally prepared to participate in an institutional setting; the design of God is that a child be raised by a hands-on parent that can devote his or her, generally her, primary attention to the child when attention is needed. That is why mothers have attached breasts to feed infants and comfort children.

The intellectual fallacy that the parental input of men is not needed can be traced to the fact that children need an intuitive parental interaction during their infant and toddler years. Before children have the intellectual capacity for structured verbal communication, their majority of the interaction that they have require an intuitive focus by their caregiver. Women, created by God to mother children, are uniquely gifted by God to perform this intuitive task.

Let us look at our children as Jesus looked at His disciples, and emulate Jesus’ example by living lives of character before them, and then by taking every opportunity to build up our children, not in self-esteem, but using discipline to develop character to build respect for the authority of God’s Word in them.

In the book of Proverbs, Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, endeavors to instruct his son in the proper way to live. Instructing our children, both verbally and by example, as to specifically how they should live is, in my opinion, the most important thing that we can do to insure that they appropriately handle their academic goals and life pursuits.