I’ve come to the conclusion that Aileen and I parent weirdly. But I’ve also come to the conclusion that so does everyone else. When each of us looks at other parents, there are almost invariably some components of their parenting we would love to imitate, but others that strike us as, well, a little bit weird. This is why it is rare, or perhaps even impossible, to find a parenting book that we would follow completely rather than only partially. And that’s well and good—every family is different, every set of parents unique, every context distinct from every other. While the Bible gives us the broad outline of parenting, it leaves us to fill in the details in ways we believe are most faithful.

John and Cindy Raquet parent as weirdly as any of us, but their weirdnesses generally overlap with my own, and it’s for that reason that I so enjoyed reading their book Purposeful and Persistent Parenting. Thirty-one brief chapters form a good-sized book that offers a helpful combination of theory and practice.

The Raquets begin in just the right place—with a look at grace-filled parenting, by which they mean a kind of parenting in


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