I was 22 years old, wide eyed and earnest in the pew, when I first heard my pastor commission all the parents in the church to teach their children to obey “quickly, cheerfully, and completely.” In doing so, he avowed, they would position their children to be more likely to obey God into adulthood. I wasn’t yet a parent myself, but I hoped to be one someday and was taking careful notes.

By the time I became a mother years later, I had encountered this philosophy, whether spoken or unspoken, in nearly all the Christian parenting resources I had scoured. Like all new parents, I was looking for a formula that would guarantee my child’s happiness, holiness, and health. Overwhelmed by the power of the love I had for my son, I desperately grasped at anything that could fool me into thinking I controlled what might happen to him. After all, the Bible verse quoted by these pastors and teachers says, “Train up a child in the way [they] should go. And when [they are] old [they] will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6, NJKV). All the books and seminars told me that meant I had to train my son to obey me. The thing was, he wasn’t having it.

I don’t think we were an anomaly. My guess is that whether their child is 2 or 22, most families have to reconcile with the fact that good parenting doesn’t ensure a perfect outcome. This is because children are actual human beings—complex and dynamic—not robots that, if programmed correctly, will become adults guaranteed to behave a certain way. We all know parents who are religiously faithful and still have children who struggle painfully in adulthood. As much as we would like there to be a formula, one simply does not exist. So is the pursuit of this parenting goal actually working? Or is it possible that training a child to be obedient is more about convenience for the adult than best practice for the child?

Examining obedience-based parenting models begs the question: Is the apex of our hopes for our children really that they would blindly obey authority figures? That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a very healthy or safe society.

Since the day I was first presented with an obedience model as “Christian parenting,” I have adopted one child and given birth to four. After years of finding my own way as a mother, I now know that what I want for my kids is not the ability to obey me or anyone else blindly; it is to learn to discern God’s movement in themselves in a way that equips them to make choices that are rooted in empathy, connectivity, care, and a posture of learning. I want them to notice when their conscience says those in authority are missing the mark and to have the problem-solving skills to decide what to do about it. I have to wonder, what if this is actually what it means to “train up a child in the way [they] should go”? To teach them to discern their own conscience?