Paul David Tripp’s Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family spends most of its energy on the parent rather than the child. That is the whole move, and it is why the book is worth your time or not, depending on what you came for.
Get the right edition
Crossway published the original in 2016. The edition linked here is the later paperback marked “with Study Questions,” which adds a set of questions for every chapter. If you are going to work through this with your wife or in a men’s group, this is the edition you want. The 2016 hardcover under a different ISBN does not have them. It is an easy mistake to make when you shop used, and the covers look similar.
What Tripp is arguing
The fourteen principles are not techniques. Tripp’s claim is that how you think about your role determines everything you do in it, and that most Christian parenting advice skips straight to behavior without fixing the thinking underneath. He keeps returning to the idea that a parent is an instrument in God’s hands rather than the one doing the changing, and that a father who forgets this will start managing his children instead of shepherding them.
He is also honest about the parent’s own sin in a way that stings. A fair amount of the book is about what your anger at your kids reveals about you. Men who want tactics will find this frustrating. Men who suspect the problem is partly upstream of the kids will find it worth the discomfort.
The book has sold well over 100,000 copies, which is unusual for a parenting book that refuses to hand out steps.
What we corrected
An earlier version of this page described reflection prompts and family discussion questions in each chapter, and included a section of quoted reader experiences. The chapter study questions are real and are confirmed by the publisher. The “family discussion questions” were not, and those quotes were invented. Both have been removed. The questions in this edition are for the reader to work through, not scripts for the dinner table.
Bottom line
A strong book for a dad willing to be examined before he examines his kids. Buy the study questions edition. Read it slowly, because reading it fast defeats the point.
View Parenting (study questions edition) on Amazon