Keep Your Kids by Doulas Wilson

The book is Keep Your Kids by Doulas Wilson. It was published by Canon press in 2025. I read the 2025 hardcover edition. I read it in March of 2025

The title is what caught my attention. I’m a huge fan of Wilson and read almost everything that he publishes. Keeping my kids is one of my biggest goals in life. I pray every day that God makes them his and keeps them. My biggest fear is that my kids abandon the Christian faith. If that happens then I have failed as a parent. It’s why we do almost everything we do. It’s why we homeschool and keep them out of sports and don’t do sleepovers and catechize them. Everything is geared around keeping them in Christ. We want to be the ones that shape their worldview. Their first impression and influence about everything will come from us. We’re doing all this not just to keep them for ourselves, but to keep them in Christ. This was a must read for me and it didn’t disappoint.

Wilson lays out how to keep your kids Christian. He highlights the dangers that are out there. We must raise our kids with the reality of the world in mind. There are predators out there and I don’t just mean sexual. People they encounter in the world whether it be at college or their first jobs, that will be more than happy to tell them how they think the world works. The world will not beat around the bush to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.

“You may not be interested in colliding with the culture, but the culture is certainly interested in colliding with you. The secularists know that capturing the children is key to their success. They know this and act accordingly. It is time that Christians gave a lot more thought to what it takes to keep your kids.” (xi)

As parents we don’t have the choice of sitting this one out. We cannot export all the indoctrination and influence to the world because they will end up hating you and your God.

There is no neutrality. Everything leads to a throne. It will either be the throne of Christ or the throne of self. Wilson emphasizes the importance of teaching our kids who man is and who God is. So much rides on the proper understanding of who God is who we are and the relationship between us. He is the Creator and we are the creature. Now, God has made promises to us and we must also understand that. But our kids have to know that nothing is owed to them by God apart from what he has promised. There will be pain and suffering and betrayal in their life and they have to be able to place all that in the right context of a sovereign and also benevolent God. Much of this will be modeled on their relationship with us. As fathers, we are a copy and a shadow of their heavenly father. How they think and feel about us can’t help but influence how they will think and feel about God. That’s just how it works. It’s a huge responsibility.

This book was convicting to say the least.

“discipline must be consistent. Whenever there’s an infraction, you need to deal with it. Too often, discipline is meted out based on the attention span of the parent or the annoyance threshold of the parent. An infraction slides by, then another, and for a couple of weeks, you’re disciplining for every third infraction. A week after that, you’re disciplining for every seventh infraction. But then, after you let things slip even more, you suddenly go back to disciplining for every third infraction. What are you teaching your children? It certainly isn’t virtue. You’re instilling in them a gambler’s hope. Every time they want to misbehave, they do a little cost-benefit analysis. What kind of mood is Mom in today? What kind of mood is Dad in today? What are my odds? Can I get off with just a little. Yelling?” (p46)

This happens too often in our house. I guess the inconsistency in discipline is mostly a result of laziness. But there have also been times where I feel like I’m never doing anything but spanking them. It’s really hard to decide beforehand what the rules are going to be and then sticking to them with consistent discipline. I feel like I’m figuring things our right alongside my kids. It’s like they’re wondering if they’re allowed to do something and at the same time so am I.

My main takeaway is that I need to do more. I can’t be lazy. This book brough the kind of conviction where it gets spooky. Like, does Doug Wilson have cameras in our house. He’s speaking to exactly what were’ experiencing. I guess it’s just that there is nothing new under the sun and humans and sin hasn’t really changed. It’s the same for all of us.

Doug Wilson is a reliable source. All his kids still love the Lord and serve him faithfully. They married Christians and have their own Christian families. He knows what he’s talking about. That’s my goal.

I want to learn. I’m aware of the dangers and pitfalls of parenting. I feel the weight of it. I know it’s not all on me but I need to at least be able to point my kids to God’s word a way that’s edifying for them.

I recently read a book called Counseling the Hard Cases. It’s about biblical counseling for severe cases like bipolar and homosexuality and suicidal people. I thought a lot about my kids and how I need to be more ready instruct them in God’s word because that’s where the power comes from. If I’m going to use the Bible for counseling or for parenting, I need to know it. I need to have more scripture memorized. I need to understand the Bible enough to effectively point my kids to it in a way that actually helps them. I know I do not have the power to change their hearts for Christ, but I need to know how to deliver God’s word to them accurately and effectively.

I feel like we’re on a good track, we just need to keep it on the rails as the kids get older. I actually can’t wait for them to start asking the hard questions like what is the meaning of life? What happens when we die? They already know a lot just from the discipleship and catechizing that we’ve been doing their whole life. We’ve already talked about death. We visit their little sister at the cemetery. I don’t think they’ll have a problem with issues of mortality.

We’ve decided to be brutally honest with our kids about everything. When one of the chicks died after we first got them, we didn’t say he’s sleeping and then replace it real quick. We buried in the backyard. They faced it. We even don’t lie to them about things like Santa Claus. They know he’s not real. And they don’t really care as long as they still get presents. And it’s not like Santa is forbidden. We still watch Rudolph and the Santa Clause movie. It’s fun. It’s like Mickey Mouse or Star Wars. The enjoy it but they know it’s not real. 

I’m calling our approach “contextualization over prohibition.” One big problem with my generation of young Christians growing up is that a lot of things were just forbidden. Secular music and movies were just prohibited without much explanation of why. And they didn’t even tell us about things like other worldviews or religions like Islam and the differences between Protestant and Catholic. We were just told “they’re wrong.” Granted, this was mostly because parents didn’t know the differences of religions or worldviews themselves. 

I want to be able to introduce to kids to everything in the world in the right context, because there is a right context for everything in the world. Sexuality, violence, drugs, rock n roll. All these things can be done in a way that glorifies God. It’s our job as parents to teach our kids how.

Wilson knocked it out of the park with this book. There was convicting instruction but also grace. Parenting is hard and no one has ever done it perfectly. We do the best we can. The most important thing we can do is center our parenting around discipleship and lead them to God’s word.

I highly recommend this book to Christian parents. It will have things you’ve never read before. Wilson does not give the typical evangelical church world advice. But it is based in scripture. I’ll keep this book handy on the shelf for frequent reference.

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Notable Quotables

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You may not be interested in colliding with the culture, but the culture is certainly interested in colliding with you. The secularists know that capturing the children is key to their success. They know this and act accordingly. It is time that Christians gave a lot more thought to what it takes to keep your kids. (xi)

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Biblical child-rearing begins with answering one question accurately: “What is man?” The answer is that we were created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and then we were estranged from our Creator through the rebellion of our first parents (Gen. 3:6). (p5)

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You’re going to be conformed to something. You’re going to be conformed to the world’s way of thinking or to God’s way of thinking either the world will shape you, or God will. (p13)

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So what do we do? Is the situation hopeless? At this point, it’d be easy to throw up our hands in mock despair and lament the fact that this parenting thing is just too hard to figure out. But perhaps the problem is not that parenting is too hard to figure out, but rather that we are too hard-hearted to want to figure it out. (p17)

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Truth is your friend. Lies are not your friend. Even if you’ve gotten the rest of your family to go along with the lies, lies are still not your friend. They’re going to catch up with you at some point. You might think, “Well, the kids still gather around the dinner table. We’re still together.” But that’s because the oldest is ten, right? That’s because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. When he’s eighteen, he can join the Navy. When he’s eighteen, he can be on the other side of the world if he wants. You can’t measure how things are going now just because everybody’s hunkered down and has agreed to continue with the sham. (p23)

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Say a man is drowning in the river, and as he floats by, you throw him a rope. That is sympathy. He’s drowning; your heart goes out to him; so you help him while remaining firmly on the bank yourself. But if a man is drowning in the river, and as he floats by, you take a header in alongside him so you can drown together, that is empathy. (p31)

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What sets the tone in your home? Is it the Scripture and the fruit that grows naturally out of the soil of Scripture? Or is it a battery of emotional states that range from bitterness to hurt feelings, from goopy sentimentalism to anger and envy? (p32)

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Everything comes down to how you handle the showdown over your child’s distraught unwillingness to eat her lunch. Her feelings are quite petulant and demanding. And so what do you do? Well, you fight for her salvation. It looks like you’re having a fight over a sandwich, but you’re actually having a battle over whether, in your home, Jesus is Lord or feelings are.

And you have to insist that your children’s feelings are not in charge. (p38)

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Negative discipline is like repotting a plant; it corrects something in your children. Positive discipline, on the other hand, is like caring for a plant; it helps your children actually develop. Both aspects of discipline are aiming at the same goal, which is maturity.

This means that sensible discipline addresses immaturity as well as misbehavior. Immaturity isn’t the same thing as disobedience. (p42)

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Third, discipline must be consistent. Whenever there’s an infraction, you need to deal with it. Too often, discipline is meted out based on the attention span of the parent or the annoyance threshold of the parent. An infraction slides by, then another, and for a couple of weeks, you’re disciplining for every third infraction. A week after that, you’re disciplining for every seventh infraction. But then, after you let things slip even more, you suddenly go back to disciplining for every third infraction. What are you teaching your children? It certainly isn’t virtue. You’re instilling in them a gambler’s hope. Every time they want to misbehave, they do a little cost-benefit analysis. What kind of mood is Mom in today? What kind of mood is Dad in today? What are my odds? Can I get off with just a little. yelling? (p46)

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If you want your sons to grow up to be valiant in battle, you better not mollycoddle them when they complain about how much math hurts their feelings. (p51)

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Many Christians are troubled in the wrong way when they sin. Our sin should trouble us, but many Christians take it too far by saying, “Oh, I sinned again. I must not be a Christian. My conscience is bothering me terribly.” When your conscience bothers you terribly, that should be an assurance of salvation, not the opposite. God doesn’t spank the neighbor kids. God deals with His own. (p59)

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If you plonk your children down in front of the screen because it’s a convenient babysitter without giving a second thought to the gunk that’s going into their heads, that’s going to be a problem. Some Christians don’t believe in catechisms, but the secular world absolutely does. (p78-79)

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“Give to God the things that are God’s.” So what belongs to God? That which has His image on it. And our kids have God’s image. This is why we may not render our children to the state. They belong to God. (p80)

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When your children are very little, they need to live in a totalitarian police state. You should be very strict, disciplining lovingly and consistently. And then, as your children grow, you can start taking restrictions off. Don’t indulge your little ones and then panic when they move into secondary school with a decade of little or no discipline under their belt. (p90)

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Worries are tomorrow. Duties are today. And duties, lived out by grace, are going to be the connection point between your concerns about the future and your responsibilities now. (p94)

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Your task as parents is not to get your kids to merely conform to the standard, which when they’re young is fairly simple to do—but rather to get them to love the standard, which can be a challenging uphill climb. (p111)

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our children must grow up in an environment dominated by the Word of God— but more than that, they must grow up in an environment dominated by the lived-out Word of God. This is not accomplished by decoupage verses on the dining room wall or inspirational magnets on the fridge. Of course, that sort of thing is fine: “You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (v. 9, NKV). There’s nothing wrong with a bumper sticker. There’s nothing wrong with a T-shirt. It’s lawful to be out-loud about your allegiance. But that doesn’t settle the matter. The matter is settled when these commandments are bound to yourself (v. 8). Once they’ve been taken into your heart, they can be given to your kids. (p113)

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The principle here is that you export what you manufacture. Whatever your fields are growing, that is what gets loaded onto the ships. Whatever your life and heart are cultivating, that is what you’re going to give to your kids. You can’t give anything else. (p114)