How to Raise Adults

Editor’s Note: The following article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Eikon.

When it comes to raising children, what is the goal? Admitting there are many things we should accomplish, are they all equally important?

To get at this question, let’s posit three bins representing the following categories: first-order, secondary,  and, tertiary objectives. In this essay we’ll just look at the first two, and whatever is left over can go in the last bin.

We could reasonably describe first-order objectives as “passing on the faith.” If we fail here, we fail utterly. But I think it’s a larger bin than generally believed, and it includes things often thrown into the second bin. (I’ll explain why in a moment.)

First-Order Objectives

By “passing on the faith,” I think we can include knowledge of God, attendance upon divine worship and the ordinary means of grace, obeying God’s law, pursuing holiness (e.g. developing habits of personal devotion such as Bible study, prayer, and even fasting), and finally, the catch-all, submitting to the Lordship of Christ in all things.

So far, so good. But is it mission accomplished if all the above describes junior, but he’s still single and living in his mother’s basement at 35? (Okay, that’s low-hanging fruit; let’s be more generous — is it mission accomplished if he’s earning six figures, drives a BMW, has a nice condo, but still single at 35?)

While it might make you wince to give a straight answer, be honest. Can you say this is ideal? Is junior in any position to pass the faith on to another generation by himself? Of course not.

Just last night, in a conversation with a high-end lawyer in my church (and when I say “high end,” I mean he’s on a first name basis with Supreme Court Justices) the subject of inheritance came up. He noted that we’ve downgraded the practice to mean passing on fungible assets, in other words, what can be converted to cash. An older view often included the care of assets received by inheritance, with the goal of someday passing them onto yet another generation. Examples would include the family farm or a business. When you inherit those things, you’re also inheriting a family calling — and liquidating them would in some sense be a tragedy, even if there were no other choice.

If this is the way we understand passing on the faith, it would call for turning secondary matters into first order ones. And when it comes to raising boys and girls, it would also mean our respective callings as men and women would take on a first-order significance.

Second-Order Objectives, Really?

So, Junior needs to grow up, but what does that look like? I think we can compile a list of virtues for young men that would have to include (at least) the following: a sense of his vocation, habits conducive to success — especially prudential judgment, financial management skills, and even physical exercise — but at the very top, right next to and connected to his calling, qualities that would help him win a wife and live harmoniously with her while leading a household. (A somewhat different, though complementary list could be made for daughters.)

I think that there are inhibitors to seeing things this way, one theological and another cultural.

First, when it comes to first-order objectives, at least in the Reformed tradition, we think in terms of “law and gospel,” law being what is nonnegotiable and required of everyone, and gospel, what God has done (and promised to do) in order to save us because we invariably fail to obey the law perfectly.

But law and gospel don’t exhaust the Scriptures. There’s another category, and we tend to overlook it because we think it’s optional, even adiaphora. What I’m thinking of is wisdom. And while you should be a fool for Christ, does that mean being a fool more generally is indifferent?

“Adulting”

Broadly speaking many young people believe they’re ill-equipped to live as adults, and as a result they’ve turned a noun into a verb to describe their sense of faking it. They call it “adulting.” I first learned about this from an editorial in the New York Post entitled, “‘Adulting’ classes prove millennials’ nitwit parents are to blame,” by Kyle Smith.^[1] It begins:

For a few years now, evidence has been accumulating that millennials contain within themselves a weird combination of grandiosity and an inability to leave the house — they’re self-absorbed and global thinking, smug and terrified.

I wish this didn’t describe some kids from Christian homes, but it sometimes does — even kids who’ve been classically educated, or homeschooled. Sometimes those kids even have the “change the world for Jesus” bug, but they struggle to remain gainfully employed. Sometimes they lack the basic aptitudes employers expect, like showing up for work on time. Other times they’re just plain soft, too sensitive to receive direct criticism, or they wilt under pressure. Entrepreneurs I know tell me they won’t hire kids from Christian families without vetting them first. They’d like to hire more, but they’ve gotten cautious because they’ve been disappointed too often.

I think the reason we’re not raising adults is because we’re not trying to. Instead, we want our kids to be happy, and when it comes to that we defer to them. “Do what makes you happy,” the belief being that happiness is subjective and no one can get it wrong.

But this definition of happiness doesn’t comport with Aristotle. (He believed you could get it wrong). It isn’t even what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he penned the Declaration of Independence. It has more in common with Oprah Winfrey than either of those men. The classical understanding made happiness a byproduct of virtue, which implies only virtuous people are truly happy. Since that takes us halfway to the goal, let’s go full-Aristotle and single out a virtue for consideration. The virtue I’m thinking of is duty.

In principle, most people are not against someone doing his duty, so long as it makes him happy. And that’s the problem. Even the Christian faith can be framed this way, and it is often sold this way.

Piety and Duty

Getting kids to grow up requires flipping the order of happiness and duty. Duty must come first, and happiness must find a way to follow. While this might be a hard-sell in some settings, I suspect that young people are more open to it than we might expect.

And recovering this older approach will take us back to an older understanding of piety. In the old view, piety was a social virtue, not something that took you out of circulation. Today, if the word is used at all, it brings old ladies and worn family Bibles to mind. But in antiquity, it was gratitude for your benefactors. “Pius” — the Latin word ours is based on — consisted in paying your debts.

But it didn’t end with feelings of gratitude. Feeling grateful wasn’t even necessary. Instead, making a return of some sort was. And this could mean anything from caring for aged parents, to offering sacrifices to the gods. It could even mean having children so that your ancestors would not be forgotten, and the supply of worshippers serving the gods continued to grow.

In the first century, the personification of piety was the Trojan hero Aeneas, so much so his appellation was, “Pius Aeneas.” The image used to convey his piety was that of him with his crippled father on his back, leading his son with one hand, and holding a sword in the other as he fought his way out of Troy as it burned down around them.

Would we describe this as a happy moment? It doesn’t matter; he was a grown man shouldering his responsibilities.

In antiquity, piety looked different for men and women because performing your duty had a lot to do with your sex and practically nothing to do with your desires. Aeneas was depicted on coins as an image of masculine piety, while other coins depicting a woman with a baby to her breast was an image of feminine piety. On both coins the inscription read, “pius.”

Returning to the distinction between first- and second-order priorities, are you beginning to see how they can — and even should — overlap? Beginning a household of your own cannot be reduced to a formula for happiness. And it isn’t something you can opt out of on a whim. Instead, we need to recover the obligatory character of forming new households. While there are circumstances and conditions that can justify opting out, they’re exceptional, they’re not the norm. The norm is passing on the faith to the next generation. And it includes raising sons to become fathers, and daughters to become mothers, and, of course, this means marriage, and living as husbands and wives.

^[1] Kyle Smith, “‘Adulting’ classes prove millennials’ nitwit parents are to blame,” New York Post, March 17, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/03/17/helpless-millennials-are-seriously-taking-adulting-classes/ (accessed March 19, 2025).