When my husband and I were in our 40s, shortly after the births of our two children, we became believers in Christ. Living under the weight and responsibility of this indescribable gift altered every aspect of our lives, including our parenting. We recognized and agreed that, in obedience to God’s command, we would do all we could to make Him known to our children.
Christ became the center of our parenting.

We followed the parenting examples of our friends who attended church regularly with their children and who lived upstanding and devout lives. We raised our children together. We prayed for one another. We loved one another’s children.

Then, as the children matured and went away to college, we noticed that some fell away. Their apostasy devastated us. We grieved together, prayed together, and loved these wayward children with a desperate love. In our grief we wondered what had gone wrong.

The link between parenting practices and children’s faith became a consuming interest and drew me to doctoral study of the Christian education and spiritual formation of children. While salvation is the mysterious gift of our mysterious God, His word is clear – parents are called to raise their children to know Him.

Background: Stuff I Noticed

By early adulthood, many children will abandon their family faith. These are adult children who were raised in Christian homes, who attended Bible-believing churches, and who were nurtured in Christian community. Davis and Graham (2023) explain that more people have left the church in the last quarter century than were converted to Christianity in the First Great
Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and the Billy Graham Crusades combined. The most recent Religious Landscape Study conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates “that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians. That is a decline of 9 percentage points since 2014 and a 16-point drop since 2007” (Smith et al., 2025).

My observation as a parent and as a teacher is that children believe what we teach them; question what they do not understand; are curious about the natural and spiritual worlds; and trust that their parents and teachers will tell them the truth. Furthermore, children love what their parents and teachers love and imitate what their parents and teachers model. So, if parents and teachers teach their children about Jesus, if parents and teachers love and model true faith in Jesus, why do children leave the faith? What happens in the lives of children to disrupt their whole-hearted faith in the God that their parents and teachers labored to share?

To reframe the question, of those children who did remain in the church into early adulthood, to what did they credit their perseverance in the faith? Or, why do children stay?

Why Some Persist

Research indicates those children who persist in their family faith tradition through early adulthood credit three influences within the family ecosystem for powerfully shaping their faith formation (Allen & Santos, 2020; Davis, 2021; Dudley & Wisbey, 2000; Smith & Adamczyk, 2021). These young adults mention parents who nurtured them in homes where biblical values were of primary importance. They mention parents who endeavored for their children to know and become followers of Christ. They mention parents who modeled spiritual disciplines, who immersed them in Christian fellowship, and who regularly took them to church. In sum, these parents demonstrated the ABCs of Religious Transmission – authoritative parenting practices, bidirectional conversations and experiences, and community reinforcement.

What is authoritative parenting? This is parental caregiving that combines high levels of warmth with high levels of reason-based control that facilitates the development of autonomy in children. A key aspect of authoritative parenting is allowing children to express their doubts by listening and speaking with equanimity. The following excerpts taken from interviews of moms whose children are enrolled in classical Christian collaborative schools demonstrate authoritative parenting practices:

• One mom stated that she draws her children’s attention to their behaviors by asking them, “Is this honoring your father and your mother?” and by establishing consistent and “clear consequences for sinful behaviors or disobedience.” She went on to relate a time she overheard her son telling “a friend to do something disobedient,” and she “got to talk with him about how the Bible tells us not to help a brother stumble.”
• One mom expressed gratitude for the “touchpoints” collaborative homeschooling provides throughout the day; she said her older children love “being home, but they’re trying to figure out what it looks like to be our children, and to be under our care, and then also exert some independence.” Moms who engage authoritative parenting practices nurture their children toward independence.
• In a letter to her child, one mom expressed concern for the teenager’s academic self- perceptions; the mom wrote, “I am in battle for you . . . I pray [God] softens your heart . . . and opens your eyes to the gifts and talents He has given you” (Downing, 2025). What are bidirectional conversations and experiences? Bidirectionality within parent-child relationships means that parents’ attitudes and behaviors influence a child’s development and behaviors, and conversely, a child’s behaviors and needs shape the way parents respond and adapt their parenting styles. The following excerpts taken from interviews of moms whose children are enrolled in classical Christian collaborative schools demonstrate bidirectional conversations and experiences:
• One mom said, “I do see so much of my sin reflected back to me in my children.” She added that, “The Lord has taught me, mercifully, that the challenges of discipling them and walking alongside them are His mercy to me.”
• One mom shared that her son initiated a dinnertime conversation about Reformation history; she said, “My son was convincing my husband [to become Baptist] and we went to visit [a Baptist church] and we’ve been loving it.”
• One mom expressed how the bidirectional nature of the classical materials affected their family’s spiritual growth. “Those topics and those conversations they allow us to have at home give us a chance to bond as a family and not just to have random conversations but help us open our Bible together and spiritually grow together” (Downing, 2025). What is community reinforcement? It is the intentional effort made within the family ecosystem to cultivate Christ-centered, interpersonal connections with those who are like- minded. Parents committed to community reinforcement design their lives around cultivating a distinctly Christian community for their families, wherein what is taught at home is supported at school and amplified at church. The following excerpts taken from interviews of moms whose children are enrolled in classical Christian collaborative schools demonstrate their devotion to cultivating a distinctly Christian community for their families:
• One mom said, “I am so immensely grateful for our teachers and our faculty who do all the legwork so that I can just disciple my kids” at home.
• One mom said, “I truly, with 100% confidence, believe that [this classical Christian collaborative school] has changed the spiritual course of my children’s lives.” She and her husband are grateful for the way the head of school safeguards the community by carefully screening new families. She observed that the head of school “has protected this little group of parents that are like-minded and who want to link arms to partner for the good of our kids, for their education, and for their heart formation.”
• One mom wrote in a letter to her child, “I so appreciate that you spend [your days at school] surrounded by other believers — people who point you to Christ in everything from how numbers are ordered, to the events of history and the laws of science. Your peers, your teachers show you how and where they see Christ and encourage you to look for Him, to come to know Him more yourself. I am so grateful for . . . the community of like-minded believers we have through your school. I hope and pray you appreciate this time, this school, these people the way Dad and I do” (Downing, 2025). Those children who were raised in Christian homes and who persisted in their family faith tradition into adulthood credit particular aspects of their steadfastness to the intentional efforts of their parents. These ABCs of religious transmission – authoritative parenting, bidirectional conversations and experiences, and community reinforcement – favorably marked their childhoods and strengthened them to persevere in their faith. What else can be done to influence the faith formation of our children? Research suggests the way children are educated impacts their faith formation (Downing, 2025).

Does Schooling Matter?

The broad-scale distance learning model established during the pandemic revealed the current state of public education. Parents gained a firsthand view into the weaknesses of the local school system; many parents of faith exited the public schools and entered the classical Christian world of private education (Hernholm, 2025). A reasonable question for Christian parents to consider is whether there is a model of education that best supports the ABCs of Religious Transmission.

While fulltime homeschooling enables parents to enculturate their children in their family faith traditions, fulltime homeschooling lacks both an external accountability for day-to-day academic progress and an external perspective on student wholeness” (Downing, 2025).

Classical Christian schools, both collaborative and fulltime, combine authoritative relationships and the bidirectional nature of the classical education material with like-minded community support. As parents are required to partner with teachers in the spiritual formation and Christian education of their children, there is an externally imposed accountability that reinforces parental duty. A classical Christian education provided by local classical Christian schools, both collaborative and fulltime, offer rich resources for parents intent on raising their children to know their Lord.